Episode #282
Coalition of Immokalee Workers: Why The Fair Food Program Works

Greg Asbed and Gerardo Reyes Chávez return to explain why the Fair Food Program has succeeded where so many labor protections and corporate audits have failed. Drawing on decades of organizing by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, they describe how farmworkers moved from strikes and boycotts to a worker-driven model that protects against retaliation, prevents abuse before it escalates, and uses the power of major buyers to enforce real consequences across the supply chain.

Our interview with Gerardo Reyes Chavez and Greg Asbed has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Gerardo Reyes Chavez and Greg Asbed in Immokalee, Florida in January, 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today to two old friends, and I will let them introduce themselves, because I’ve tried for years to get Gerardo’s name right, but I haven’t. These are two of the leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Gerardo, how would you say your name?

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 0:18
I think that you did a fairly good job compared to many people that have a really hard time. I think you’re almost there. A pleasure to be here with you today. My name is pronounced Gerardo Reyes Chavez. I’m part of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for the past 26 years.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 0:43
I got involved because I met some workers that were part of the second case of modern-day slavery that the CIW helped to prosecute by connecting workers with the different agencies that help with the resolution of this case and the legal process and everything.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:05
There was a quail case and since then, when I met the coalition, I got involved, participated in the march that we did as an attempt to try to convince the agricultural industry in our area around Immokalee and in the state of Florida to have dialogue with us.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:26
Then from there, we started that Campaign for Fair Food
as a response… The negative response we received for dialogue pushed us to then start to consider, “What kind of power can help us to change the conditions that we are facing every day?” That’s how my story began.

Dave Chapman 1:52
Okay, we’ll go more. Greg.

Greg Asbed 1:54
I’m Greg Asbed, one of the many, many, many co-founders of the CIW back in the early 1990s and of the Fair Food Program in the early 2000s, and now of what we call the worker-driven social responsibility model that the Fair Food Program was the first version ever, preexisting of it. That’s the model that is expanding across the globe at this point, but that is what we do and spend all our time doing. It’s exciting work.

Dave Chapman 2:26
Okay. In the United States, there are about a million farm workers. Is that about right?

Greg Asbed 2:35
It’s about 1 million to 1.5 million.

Dave Chapman 2:37
Yeah, 1 to 1.5 million people who work to plant, tend, and harvest the food that we eat. In the case of grains, it doesn’t take very many people to grow corn and wheat. It’s mostly done with machinery. Of course, people drive the machines, but they’re very big machines. But in the case of fruits and vegetables, there is a lot of human labor still involved. That labor has been, for generations, treated very badly, ignored, and underpaid in order to keep the cost of food cheap.

Dave Chapman 3:18
That’s the problem that you’re trying to address, that people should be well cared for who are doing brutally hard work – very hard work – and often dangerous work. Lots of chemicals out there in those fields.

Greg Asbed 3:35
There are lots of chemicals, and it’s getting hotter every day.

Dave Chapman 3:37
And getting hotter.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 3:38
And chemicals and heat interact in more dangerous ways than previously thought.

Dave Chapman 3:46
Yeah, that’s right. I was listening to our first interview this morning. It’s very good. Everybody should go back and listen to it. Excellent. But we’ll just revie w a little bit for people who are too busy to go back and listen. When the Coalition of Immokalee Workers started, the strategy was, “We’re going to work with the farm owners to try and get better treatment for the farm workers.”

Dave Chapman 4:20
That was hurling yourself against a wall. It just didn’t get the results that you were looking for. After you went, “This isn’t working,” you came up with a new way of thinking about it. What was the new way?

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 4:41
The new way was basically, as a community, trying to have dialogue. There were many different actions that took place in the 90s, and I’m sure Greg can elaborate more on that. But what brought the community to that understanding was that, in the early 90s – in 1987 to 1998 – there was a hunger strike of six workers, who went 30 days without food, asking for dialogue.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 5:10
Asking for a place at the table to talk about how to eliminate wage theft, situations of sexual harassment that impacted most women, violence that happened constantly every season, seven to 10 cases of workers having to deal with that and living under a climate of fear and intimidation. Extreme situations of modern-day slavery were arising, which were being investigated and had been resolved at that point also. They were asking for dialogue.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 5:44
Back then, a big grower was asked by another mid-size grower, “Why not sit at the table with these workers? They have gone without food for about a month. Some of them have gone to the hospital even. Don’t you think that it is time to at least hear them out? You don’t have to concede to their demands, but at least give them that.” The answer back then was, I’m going to put it to you this way, “a tractor doesn’t tell a farmer how to run his farm.”

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 6:16
The worker was viewed as a tool, something disposable. The battle was not only to address the issues that were obvious, in your face, and horrible, violent at times. The issue was for the basic recognition of the humanity of workers. That helped our community, I would say, to get to the understanding of the fact that there was a wall and that we needed to think outside the normal way of thinking when trying to change the conditions at the level of the farm.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 6:59
Our universe ended at the farm gate, and that kind of pushed us to start thinking beyond that. Then there was a moment in which a publication came out in a magazine, The Packer. This magazine is a business magazine that growers read, as well as people from the retail food industry. We saw that Taco Bell was talking about a connection they had with the growers in our area.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 7:35
We thought, “They’re going to want to talk, to learn what’s going on in their own supply chain, and for sure, they’re going to want to work with us.” We went there after analyzing the whole market, the connection, influence, and power they exercise over the agricultural industry, and the impact that pressure has on the lives of all workers. Because when you think about the retail food industry, the retail food industry has grown to represent an incredible power.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 8:12
The power of their purchasing orders pushes down with an invisible hand, an industry that is forced to, in order to be able to maintain those contracts, to consolidate first, to be able to supply the ever-increasing numbers of pounds that the retail food industry is requiring. Then on the growth, they have to also decrease profit.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 8:40
So to sustain, the agricultural industry has to do those two things: decrease the price – they just take the price that comes from the top – and then cut costs of production. They’re not going to go to Bayer-Monsanto; they’re going to always turn to the worker. That’s the only place where they can save on cost.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 9:02
That’s why there’s a direct connection between the payment of a bucket that was 40 to 45 cents since 1978, and for the next three decades, without any increase, because that was, in a way, what was required for the industry to keep afloat with the way the market was always being used.

Dave Chapman 9:26
I just want to call that out. For 30 years, there was no increase in the piece rate. I’m not talking about adjusted for inflation. We’re talking about just what was paid. That would be like getting paid exactly the same amount of money for work doing whatever in 1960 as in 1990. Of course, it started in 1960 at a very low rate.

Greg Asbed 9:57
They were not living large in 1960.

Dave Chapman 9:59
No. It wasn’t like, “Oh darn, no yacht this year.” It was like, “No dinner this year.” That’s kind of amazing. 30 years on the same piece rate. I’ve worked piece rate. I know you break your back. When I was young in the orchards, when I broke my back, I could do okay. Vegetables, not so much, but the tree fruits, you could do a little better. But if I hadn’t raised that price in 30 years and every cost went up, then no, that becomes impossible again.

Greg Asbed 10:41
Yep. What you can buy over 30 years with the same $10 just virtually disappears over that time. That’s what people were facing. That’s why the community broke out in strikes throughout the 1990s – three different massive general strikes. But, as you were saying, as we said, that grower focus, that inside-the-farm-gates universe, just didn’t get the community where the community wanted to get.

Greg Asbed 11:12
They wanted to get to a place where they were at the table, basically involved in decisions affecting their lives. You could not get there through the normal means of organizing work. First of all, farm workers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act. So in Florida – and it sounds like in California – you don’t have the right to organize, which means they can fire you for organizing. They can fire you with no consequence.

Greg Asbed 11:40
That’s the national reality. There are a few states that have changed. That’s the national reality, because the protections for workers to organize and to collectively bargain without fear of retaliation are in the National Labor Relations Act. That law exempted, from the beginning, farm workers and domestic workers.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 11:59
That’s one thing. Then the other is that when you’re really as poor as this community was at the time, if you try to withhold your labor and stay home from work, there’s only a limited number of days you can do that before you have to get back to work to pay the rent, put food on the table, and do the things you have to do. So there’s this sort of leash. You have a leash around your neck, and we kept running into that leash in those years, in the 90s, where it was about five days. After five days, people would start going back to work, understandably so.

Dave Chapman 12:30
They had no choice.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 12:32
We did win some changes, including a 25% increase in the piece rate at the time, but the place at the table, with a sustained voice that the community was looking for, was impossible under those conditions.

Dave Chapman 12:46
Because they were still looking at you as a tractor.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 12:48
Yeah, that’s why we needed a break.

Greg Asbed 12:51
Basically, as Gerardo was saying, the breakthrough came, and we realized that the agricultural industry, as big as it seems and as powerful as the people who run it seem, is a small subset of the food industry. When you think about it, it fits fully within the food industry, and there is still a whole lot left outside it. When that’s the case, anytime you have two parties with orders-of-magnitude difference in terms of size negotiating, what Gerardo described happens.

Greg Asbed 13:22
The winner is the one who’s been able to drive the price down, and then that same thing replicates on the farm, because you have farm workers and farm owners negotiating. They drive the wage down to keep that margin. That was what was driving poverty. But that’s why, in 2001, after we came to see this new understanding, we went to the country with a campaign called the Campaign for Fair Food, and our war cry was, “Taco Bell makes farm workers poor.”

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 13:56
The initial response from most people was just a big question mark, like, “What?” We had to break it down. This conversation repeated itself for like thousands of times across different spaces and settings to help people understand that there was a connection between the extreme wealth at the top of the retail food industry and the extreme poverty and the conditions workers have to face every day.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 14:25
That in the middle, the consumers were also part of the solution or the problem. The solution if they were to stand with us and stand together, knowing that at the end, consumers and farm workers are being taken advantage of by corporations at the top that are not doing the right thing when it comes to protecting workers’ rights, and that they wanted to reap the benefit of being able to sell a product while obscuring the realities behind that product that had to do with abuses, and in some cases, when we talk about violence, and all of that. People didn’t know.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 15:10
We helped them make that connection in the Campaign for Fair Food, and then they joined our war cry. Did you call it that?

Greg Asbed 15:21
Yeah.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 15:23
That Taco Bell makes farm workers poor. We had more and more people talking about it. This became a central conversation in universities across the country, and among different congregations at the national level as well. Little by little, we were able to connect with so many people that the National Council of Churches endorsed the boycott of Taco Bell.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 15:52
Thirty-two different denominations knew about us, and they opened their doors when we went from Immokalee with one hundred workers in two buses across the country to Irvine, California, to the headquarters of Taco Bell, to basically say, “We are here. We want to have dialogue with you, and these are our demands.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 16:13
Zero tolerance for modern-day slavery, which means we’re demanding that you cut your purchases whenever there is a case where workers are being threatened to be killed, a debt is imposed on them, and all the markers that bring a case to be named a modern-day slavery case, the definition of it.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 16:36
We brought the demand of the need to create a code of conduct that would be created by us as workers, and that needed to be implemented with us, with input at the table, which is what we were fighting for since the beginning of this struggle.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 16:55
Then the third one was a penny more per pound, which is now a premium that every corporation that joins needs to pay. It’s a small premium that goes directly to workers in the form of a bonus. Those were the beginnings of the Campaign for Fair Food that ultimately brought 300 universities and a couple of high schools to be also organizing in solidarity with a community of workers that, back then, literally didn’t even appear on the maps.

Dave Chapman 17:32
Okay. Yesterday, I told people I was going to Immokalee. They live an hour and a half away. They have never heard of Immokalee. For me, Immokalee is a very famous place. I want to go on, but I want to go back, because I’m sure that most of the people who will listen to this, and there will be thousands of people listening, have never been to a farm field, a big field where there are workers harvesting, and they don’t know about wage theft, and they don’t know about sexual harassment and rape.

Dave Chapman 18:08
They hear it, but they don’t know about it. That could be my sister. They don’t know. They come from worlds in which they don’t know anybody as a farm worker. They don’t know about modern-day slavery. Now, people hear about that, and it’s actually mostly about sex slavery. Now it’s being widely talked about.

Greg Asbed 18:30
That gets headlines more than than labor…

Dave Chapman 18:32
That’s right, but there is still labor slavery too. You all have done an amazing job of ending a lot of that on the farms that work with you – that sign the contract. What about the farms that don’t sign the contract? There are still many that do not?

Greg Asbed 18:50
Yeah. Let me just take you back a little bit before we got the program running, because it’ll give you a sense of before and after. Because we’ve gone from prosecution to prevention. Believe me, if you’ve ever done both of those things – prosecution and prevention – prevention is infinitely preferable, because it’s a world without victims. It’s a world where people don’t suffer the crime.

Dave Chapman 19:15
A world without victims. I like that. Okay, great.

Greg Asbed 19:18
Literally, the Fair Food Program is that world. But so beforehand, we were there at the beginning of what is considered the modern anti-slavery movement in the United States in the early 1990s.

Greg Asbed 19:30
Out of this town, that nobody knows, Immokalee, and LaBelle, which is even less known, north of Immokalee, and that was the citrus capital of Florida, and this is the tomato capital of Florida, Came Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez, who were farm labor contractors back in the 90s, who were terrorists to the workers who they brought to the United States. They would bring workers in the hundreds to work here in tomato and orange fields.

Greg Asbed 20:02
They would sexually assault, they would steal the workers’ wages, they would threaten the workers with debt, and they would actually beat the workers over the years that they were running these crews as a way of terrorizing, so they would work against their will and essentially work for all their wages to go to debt until they were able to be free.

Greg Asbed 20:27
There were literally bodies washing up in the Caloosahatchee River, which runs through LaBelle. There were bodies that nobody could identify because they were not people who had identification, and they couldn’t tie them to anything, but they knew what was happening. They knew there was something that was attached to them, but they didn’t know how.

Greg Asbed 20:46
We ended up finding that case and discovering it. We discovered it after some workers escaped a farm, or after a worker was shot in the stomach for the crime of telling the other workers that “This is the United States. You don’t have to work like a slave here. You can work wherever you want,” and that’s what got him killed.

Greg Asbed 21:05
That case, we eventually, after five long years of working with the Department of Justice, which didn’t even have the laws at that time to prosecute modern-day slavery cases. Those laws came after.

Dave Chapman 21:15
They didn’t have laws.

Greg Asbed 21:16
They had to go back right after the Civil War to be able to find laws they could use against peonage and that sort of thing. So they used those laws after we gave them all this evidence and continued working with the people who are victims to build the case. It became U.S. v. Miguel Flores, and it became one of the seminal cases in the modern anti-slavery movement. We did that year after year after year in the 90s.

Greg Asbed 21:40
In the beginning, it felt good. In the beginning, it felt like, “We’re putting people behind bars for long sentences for doing things to workers that shouldn’t even be contemplated, much less done.” We’re finding justice for these people who have been beaten, raped, and robbed by their employers at work. But over time, you began to feel like these cases never stop.

Greg Asbed 22:05
It’s a classic sort of whack-a-mole. You nail it here, and it pops up over here. You nail it over here, and it pops up. So we realized that was not the solution we were looking for, because people were still getting beaten, raped, and robbed by their bosses all the time. We wanted that to stop. That was part of what we were organizing for from the beginning.

Greg Asbed 22:29
When we were able to launch the Fair Food Program, the theory was, if you create consequences for bad actors, consequences being what Gerardo mentioned, which is the loss of ability to sell to now 14 of the biggest buyers in the industry they have. If you create consequences for bad actions like holding people against their will or sexual assault, then those actions ultimately will stop, because the first people who test it will get caught.

Greg Asbed 22:58
Those consequences will be applied, and they will be out of the industry, or the farm itself will be out of the industry. Then the other workers and the other farm employers who see that will realize, after a while, they’ll realize there’s no profit in doing this. In fact, there’s a great loss if you do this. All it is is changing the incentives around people. That’s all it is. We’re all rational economic actors, all of us.

Greg Asbed 23:25
If you have a field ahead of you that says you can rob, steal, do whatever you want to people, and there’s no consequence, you walk right through that. You’ll do everything you want to do. But if there are signs all over the place, “If you touch this person, if you steal that money, if you beat this person, you will go to prison, and this company where you’re working will be out of the market,” those things stop. That’s the prevention we’re talking about. We’ve achieved that with our program.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 23:51
Because that creates an incentive for the growers, the owners of all of these operations. Before, when there was a case of modern-day slavery, a comment you would often hear was like, “Well, that was just a bad apple,” referring to the crew leader that directly held people responsible.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 24:10
But when you have the market saying, “The condition of doing business has changed under the Fair Food Program; there’s zero tolerance. So I cannot buy from a farm if these farms are responsible or allow for a crew leader that’s liable to bring people under those conditions,” what that created was a shared responsibility of everybody in the chain to be able to do business in a way in which modern-day slavery has no space to enter.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 24:47
What we have seen is the prevention even of those cases, because you have huge contracts that are happening under the condition that the rights of the workers are respected, and the business can flow under those understandings.

Dave Chapman 25:09
I see that it’s possible to create a culture where certain things are simply not tolerated. Even if maybe somebody doesn’t sign the contract, that becomes less acceptable behavior. Is it true that there are laws, and the laws are more likely to be enforced because of the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers?

Greg Asbed 25:34
What you just said at the end is absolutely the case. We’ve eliminated for [inaudible 0:25:24] on Fair Food Program.

Dave Chapman 25:41
That’s gone.

Greg Asbed 25:43
Yes, it’s gone. Sexual assault is gone. Sexual harassment may happen at a certain low level, but if it happens, it’s caught immediately. Wage theft can happen at a very low level. If it happens, it’s caught. Everything that happens is caught. What it shows is, if there’s a system in place, be it private or public – in our case, private – of enforcement backed by real power…

Dave Chapman 26:10
Enforcement backed by real power.

Greg Asbed 26:13
In this case, the power Gerardo mentioned earlier is the power of the purchasing order. If the enforcement of those rights is backed by the power of the buyers’ purchase of it, then those rights will be respected because people can’t afford to violate them. It’s that simple. It’s really an economic context, and you just have to change the incentives.

Dave Chapman 26:38
Has Kroger’s and Publix signed?

Greg Asbed 26:41
Kroger’s and Publix has not signed an agreement. Wendy’s has not signed.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 26:46
They haven’t seen the light yet.

Greg Asbed 26:49
They call them future partners.

Dave Chapman 26:51
That’s right, future partners. The goal would be to create enough awareness amongst the people who choose, “Will I go to Kroger’s, or will I go to Albertsons, or somebody who has signed?” They go, “Well, I’ll choose them, because I think that they’re supporting the world I want to live in, and these people I believe are not.” That’s the goal here.

Greg Asbed 27:19
Gerardo mentioned it earlier: when we built a connection between this community and the consumers who would buy Taco Bell at the beginning, there was a common cause between those two communities – the worker community at the bottom, and at the very, very top of the food industries are consumers.

Greg Asbed 27:36
That’s something that we don’t understand as consumers. We think that the food industry stops at Walmart or whatever, the major brands that we all recognize: Kroger, Subway, Albertsons. It doesn’t. They do cascade down, for the most part, through the food system, because they have that economic power.

Greg Asbed 27:57
But just like everybody at every rung of that economic ladder and within the food industry, they have to pay attention to what the one above them tells them. That’s why the farms have to pay attention to what the buyers said. Who were the buyers? Who’s ultimately at the top? Consumers.

Greg Asbed 28:13
The reason we don’t realize that is because 99% of the time we act atomistically. We act as ourselves. We consume as ourselves. We don’t act together in a concerted way. But what we did with the Taco Bell boycott was to encourage consumers to act concertedly. When they did, lo and behold, what happened? Taco Bell heard them loud and clear and signed an agreement.

Greg Asbed 28:41
They said, “We can no longer tolerate these abuses in our supply chain.” It didn’t stop there. It went to McDonald’s, then it went to Burger King, then it went to Subway, then it went up the food service industry, then it went to supermarkets. Because consumers, when they act together, it’s not a theory, it’s not a hope, it’s not a dream.

Greg Asbed 28:59
When they act together, they have changed farm workers’ lives. We know this because we are at the point of the sphere of the program that protects workers every day, because we have the power of the purchasing order of all those big brands behind us, because consumers worked with us to get them.

Dave Chapman 29:16
I gotta say something. Do you guys know who Zephyr Teachout is? Have you ever heard of her? She’s spoken at our conference several years, and I’ve interviewed her several times. She wrote a book called “Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.”

Dave Chapman 29:29
It is a book about our economic system and how, as companies become bigger and bigger and more consolidated, they become less and less responsible and more and more destructive. She lays the case out very beautifully and strongly. One of the things she said that was interesting is that organizing to have a campaign to not buy or a boycott basically doesn’t work. She gives lots of examples of it.

Dave Chapman 30:08
I asked her, “Zephyr, I’m really curious, because it seems like it sure worked with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.” She went, “Oh, they’re different.” She said, “They’re fantastic.”

Greg Asbed 30:20
I don’t know about that. I think it’s the same system, we just don’t give up.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 30:24
We’re very focused and never took our foot off the pedal in terms of organizing, tirelessly going into cities, for example. Sometimes we had five different consecutive presentations, dividing all of us in the group, breaking the fear of each one of us to speak in public, because that was something that we were not accustomed to. It was something new, scary. All of those things we did for years, nonstop, and I think that was what inspired people also.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 31:14
Also, the fact that we were presenting an irony to the world that was so ridiculously small in terms of what we were demanding. Many people remember us for the penny per pound demand. When you think about it, that was a very important demand, because if all the buyers were to pay that, then the wages of every farm worker in the tomato industry would double overnight. That’s why we’re fighting.

Dave Chapman 31:44
There was that big a difference.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 31:45
When people saw that we were willing to leave everything behind, even risk being fired from the places where we work, they realized that what we’re asking is something so easy to do if there was a willingness on the other side. Some people would be mad as they learn – mad and wanting to be active with us. I think that was one thing that made a big difference.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 32:16
But also, there are two things. When you are boycotting a corporation, it has an economic impact, of course, but there’s some cost that you cannot quantify in the moment, but that you have to also take into account. The image of a corporation, when that image is associated with modern-day slavery, when the question that is posed is, “Can you, Taco Bell or any other corporation that was in the campaign, guarantee that the tomatoes or any vegetable, for that matter, that was harvested yesterday wasn’t harvested by a worker under conditions of modern-day slavery?”

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 33:06
The answer for any corporation that hasn’t done anything to guarantee or pay attention to what workers have to go through in their own supply chain is always going to be no. They cannot guarantee that because they have never paid attention. With the program, they are committing to work with a system that actually looks up and down and scans the entire supply chain to identify everything that is happening with the workers.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 33:45
When you are at this end, with this system, you have a voice. We’re able to receive complaints, investigate them, and resolve them in record time. That is a type of visibility that is necessary to be able to say, here or at the top of the supply chain for corporations that have joined the program, “Yes, we can actually guarantee,” because this system is designed to do that.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 34:15
That’s why it’s important. Kroger cannot say the same. Wendy’s cannot say the same, and that’s a shame, because they have an opportunity to be able to do things right, and they should take it. It’s good business in the end.

Greg Asbed 34:32
Yeah. I think he’s very right about the problem that when you get to the level of consolidation and the distance from that to the ground, the corporation says, “You can.” It’s very hard to actually know or care about what’s happening at the very bottom of your supply chain. You’re directly connected to what happens.

Greg Asbed 34:51
The only thing that saves you from all the reputational harm is that the media doesn’t really pursue the connection that much. If you have a powerful movement that is working with consumers to draw people’s attention to that connection, it’s there to be drawn.

Dave Chapman 35:08
One of the things that you did obviously very well, and I don’t think it was obvious before you did it, was you connected to the students and the parishioners of various churches, people of faith. Was that difficult? Later you go, “Yeah, it’s easy now, because we can just go to any college campus and maybe get a bunch of people to say, ‘Oh, we know them,’ but at the beginning, they don’t know you.

Dave Chapman 35:38
How did you do that? Would you find a couple of students who were engaged in this kind of issue and say, ‘We’d like to come and speak. Can you set us up in a room?'”

Greg Asbed 35:48
A combination of two things. One is highly analog, and the other is highly digital. We did cross-country tours. We called them Taco Bell Truth Tours at the time, and we did them throughout the campaign where we organized here in Immokalee, and whoever wanted to come on the tour could join us.

Greg Asbed 36:09
We took two buses full of people, one hundred people in the community, and we’d travel from stop to stop all the way across the country and back, stopping in towns and large cities, generally those that had universities.

Greg Asbed 36:22
Not always, largely; we’d go to Notre Dame, we’d go to places like that. We’d organize ahead of time, organizing events on campus. We did the person-to-person outreach. I guess we call it retail outreach, where you’re talking to individual people, and you’re having the conversation. You’re saying stuff like, “This is how Taco Bell is related to the poverty of farmers,” and that conversation is multiplied as much. That was the analog.

Greg Asbed 36:50
We invested as much time and effort as we could just talking to people at churches, on campus, at union halls, and anywhere we could find them. We made ourselves available. It was the community itself that mobilized quickly, which is also another thing that really touched me. But then we also were very fortunate, I will say that. This was in 2001 that we launched the campaign for Fair Food.

Greg Asbed 37:18
If you remember the history of the internet, that was a time when people started paying attention to it. We were as poor as this town, as peripheral and marginal as this town was. We had a website, the CIW website, in 1999, and we were putting video of these protests, actions, and meetings directly up online, directly onto the internet. We were doing that in 2000 to 2002, seven years before YouTube existed.

Greg Asbed 37:50
The advantage in that, the reason I say we were lucky, is because the internet today is such a crowded marketplace. You can’t get anyone’s attention. It’s a market of attention. A small organization like ours doesn’t have the bandwidth or the power to be able to actually attract attention like that. Back in that day, when we first started, it was a novelty.

Greg Asbed 38:14
Seeing this video online, fresh video of the latest protest, was exciting, especially to young people, because a lot of young people at that time were looking at the economic system of free trade and questioning that. It was just the time when people were questioning the one percent and the division in this country. This is a way that they were getting, sort of like, dispatches from the front line of this battle. They were looking at it every day.

Greg Asbed 38:41
We had the attention of quantities of people that was really astounding. It was those two things: it was the hard work of going person to person across this country, plus the early days of the internet that we just decided we needed to take advantage of. That allowed us to build awareness in a very short time.

Dave Chapman 39:04
It’s very interesting. We tried to understand how to build movements too. For me, what you’ve done is a real model of tremendous success, of changing people’s lives in a very significant way. One of the things that is an issue right now, I think I told you that I interviewed Omar Dieguez out in Watsonville, and he did a hunger strike too – a 30-day hunger strike – protesting Driscoll’s spraying pesticides close to schools, very close to schools, next door to schools.

Dave Chapman 39:48
Soil fumigants and insecticides. Most of that spraying was happening in low-income neighborhoods. That’s because people didn’t want to live next to fields that were being sprayed. So that’s where people with less resources would live, and that’s where their schools were, and that their kids went to. It wasn’t just him; he had other people joining in these rallies. Dolores Huerta came and spoke at one of his…

Greg Asbed 40:18
He’s always been very, very ready to support anybody who’s fight it.

Dave Chapman 40:21
That’s right, it’s pretty great. Still a long way from winning even that battle.

Greg Asbed 40:32
It shouldn’t be a battle.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 40:35
That shouldn’t even be an argument. Kids are being exposed unnecessarily to chemicals. That shouldn’t even be a question. But unfortunately, corporations in general, as long as they don’t feel the pressure to do something and as long as they don’t find themselves liable, they always try to only consider what’s better for their business, regardless of the impact it can have on the community.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 41:11
That should change, and they should do everything to stop what they are doing. Exposing kids to chemicals, that’s just unacceptable no matter where that’s happening.

Greg Asbed 41:25
The cancer rates that we’re talking about…

Dave Chapman 41:27
Very high cancer rates in that county, much higher than the national average, and higher in those areas. They can now track those cancer clusters pretty accurately.

Greg Asbed 41:38
The idea that it didn’t require somebody to stop eating and potentially hurt their bodies by not eating for 30 days just to get them to pay attention to that reality – the minute that news comes across your desk, your answer should be, “Oh, my God. What can we do to stop this? Children are being hurt behind our business. That’s not the cost of doing business.”

Greg Asbed 42:03
This is an externality, as economists call it, but it’s not an externality that’s part of your business, so fix it. That just should be the automatic answer. The fact that somebody has to sit there and suffer for 30 days just so you pay attention to the report on your desk doesn’t make sense.

Greg Asbed 42:22
Unfortunately, it’s all too often the reality of large corporations that unless they are pressed to pay attention to these sorts of things, they won’t do anything. Here’s one thing, I’m guaranteed: if you ask any one of those people who makes those decisions, first of all, if their children were in that situation, what would they want to be done? Their answer would be clear, that they’d want it to be stopped immediately, fixed immediately. Then they’d be searching for attorneys to sue for whatever damages might have occurred.

Greg Asbed 42:56
But second of all, if you ask them as people, “How does the corporation that represents those people – what should be done?” they’d say the same thing. They’d say it should be stopped immediately. But it’s when you start to act within the context of a corporation that all these other considerations come in, and they seem like legitimate considerations, but they’re not.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 43:16
When it comes to kids, there’s no argument, moral or legal, or the existence of legal arguments even. It doesn’t matter; you just don’t harm kids. I hope that a lot of people in the community receive a lot of support to stand up against them and win, because they are wrong. Driscoll’s should know better.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 43:46
I think that’s a perfect example of what can happen when you have corporations that are not doing anything in order to truly embrace responsibility. All that they care about is business, and they don’t care about how that way of doing business harms people and harms poor communities. That needs to change.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 44:13
From my point of view, I think that all of us who understand this need to get more active. We are right now in a time in history in which it is especially important for poor communities to try to think outside the box. I feel that in our specific case, the Campaign for Fair Food gives us an opportunity to become active in universities, become active in our own communities.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 44:48
I hope that whoever hears this gets active if they are or have the possibility to be able to support the efforts of the community that is trying to provide change. That’s just unacceptable.

Dave Chapman 45:03
I don’t stop it at children. I think the adults working in those fields deserve the same kind of safety and long life.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 45:16
The thing is, it is attainable. We are seeing it every day at play. The reason why it is safer for workers, in the case of pesticide exposure, is that we have been able to first enforce the laws and many of the practices around farm work. The Fair Food Program guarantees that there is the following of what the label establishes, which is something that doesn’t happen in most scenarios.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 45:56
But it goes beyond that because it gives workers the right to stop working without consequence if there are situations that place their health or their life at risk, in regards to heat, for example. There are heat protocols. There are electrolytes that are provided, and growers are required to provide those because we have established that agreement with them.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 46:24
We have also, in the program, included specific protections and response plans in examples like if there’s a farm next to the farm that you are working on that is not part of the Fair Food Program. There’s a road right there, and the farm over that has not signed with the program is not following the same rules. If they start spraying chemicals, now you are in a Fair Food Program farm on the other side of the road, and the wind blows in your direction.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 47:13
Even in that scenario, workers have the right to stop right away and then get to a safe place with the collaboration of their immediate employer. The company knows that that’s the practice. We talk about those things in the education sessions. Workers have the right to also form committees on health and safety to talk about anything that they identify as a potential risk for accidents or risks to their health, short or long term, where they can speak freely and have a space that doesn’t exist in the majority of states in this country.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 47:59
From where I see it, that’s the solution when it comes to many of the dangers that are impacting farmworkers across the country. That’s why we are so excited about the expansion of the Fair Food Program on U.S. soil. Other workers across the globe are seeing this as the solution to the problems they have confronted, just like us, for decades, that have to do with many of the abuses that we have gone through in the U.S. and that sadly continue to happen outside of the program.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 48:38
Such is the example of the workers from Asotag in Ecuador. We are in conversations with them. We have had several exchanges. I think there’s going to be a visit soon. So there are many things that are happening.

Greg Asbed 48:56
They have come here.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 48:57
They have also visited some of the operations, talked to the growers that are part of the program, and the same is true with organizations from India that have been here. We’re communicating with them, with workers in really impoverished communities that see the Fair Food Program as the only thing that can protect them.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 49:22
They are so hopeful to be able to replicate this, and we are so excited to be able to help in that process, because if we are able to help with that replication, that’s going to represent a change for millions and millions of workers across the globe.

Dave Chapman 49:44
I have a friend, Annelise Orleck, who is a labor historian. She has taught me the history of textiles in this country. There’s a famous fire, 100 years ago, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It changed the world. It changed the world at a terrible price. A bunch of people died in this fire.

Dave Chapman 50:07
The fire was in Manhattan. That’s why it changed the world, because all these people walked by the street and saw the bodies lined up of these people who died in a factory fire. There was no way that they could leave. They jumped out of the window, they died that way, or they stayed in and died of that way.

Dave Chapman 50:27
Because of that, we got OSHA. Frances Perkins, who became the secretary of labor under Roosevelt, was one of those people who walked by and said, “Not on my time.” It truly got much safer, and the laws really started to protect the workers. What’s fascinating is that then what happened ultimately is those businesses got pushed…

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 50:57
We exported the fires…

Dave Chapman 50:58
That’s right. We exported the fires. The fires are still happening every day in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Greg Asbed 51:06
Twelve years ago was the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed 1,200 people in just a matter of moments. People who went to work knew the factory they were in was unsafe. They saw cracks in the walls and that sort of thing, but they couldn’t afford to complain, because they’d get fired. They decided to go to work, knowing that something terrible could happen. It could be a fire, but also, the building was in disrepair. It collapsed, destroying 1,200 people’s lives immediately, and all the children who were waiting for their parents to come home that night also had their lives destroyed.

Greg Asbed 51:45
But from that massive tragedy, there rose the Bangladesh Accord, which was a new set of rules for the textile industry in Bangladesh about factory fires, factory collapses, and protecting workers, who would be the frontline monitors of their own rights in those factories, able to point out when those problems exist without fear of retaliation.

Greg Asbed 52:13
Whose model did they turn to when they needed to build that Accord? The Fair Food Program, born and bred in this little town right here in Immokalee, Florida, and the fields around Immokalee, became the model for workers in Bangladesh.

Greg Asbed 52:30
When the factory fires and collapses that we exported, because we could no longer tolerate them here in the United States, were killing people by the thousands, they said, “We need a system like the Fair Food Program that has consequences, that has the backing of the purchasing power of the buyers, and if the sweatshops and the factories don’t comply and aren’t in compliance with the standards that we as workers demand in our workplaces, then these buyers who have signed on to the Bangladesh Accord will not buy from you as a producer.”

Greg Asbed 53:03
They created that model. They created the system. They created the model of monitoring and enforcement. It was largely based on the Fair Food Program, born here. What happens here didn’t just stop here in the fields or in U.S. fields. It’s now, as Gerardo was saying, going to India and the sugar fields, because in India, The New York Times did a series on the labor exploitation in the Indian sugar industry last year that revealed, for example, 100,000 women who were forced to have hysterectomies so they would be more productive.

Greg Asbed 53:40
They wouldn’t be bothered by periods and childbirth, so they would be productive for the industry. The sugar industry also supplies all the big names that you know that buy lots of sugar. They also have essentially a system of debt bondage that goes across the industry. It’s built into the system at this point, and at this point, it’s generational, and it’s impossible to get out of it.

Greg Asbed 54:04
Sexual assault, sexual harassment, and all kinds of sexual violence are endemic in the industry. Wage theft goes along with debt bondage. All of this would blow your mind to see what’s happening in the States. Those workers learned about the Fair Food Program, and Mike West said the people in Bangladesh told us, “We need this program here.” That’s what we’re working with them on now.

Greg Asbed 54:31
To us, it’s insanely cool that what came from this struggle is now considered the new paradigm for protecting human rights in global supply chains around the world, by workers and by people who care about workers – human rights organizations. It is a matter of time until it replaces the old paradigm, which is corporate social responsibility, which is based on an occasional annual audit, or one every couple of years.

Greg Asbed 55:02
There is absolutely no rational, logical, or objectively sensible way to say that an audit that takes place one day a year, or one day every couple of years, could stop the things that we’re talking about: sexual harassment, wage theft, or all the things we just discussed, because there’s no mechanism there to catch those things and no system to penalize people for them. That’s just an audit; that’s all it is.

Greg Asbed 55:31
All you can do with an audit is say what happened, what you saw on that day that you were there. It is a snapshot in time, but the crimes take place every day. So what do you have for us when we have crimes at our workplace?

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 55:45
Working workers reporting was the process of resolution. What are the results ….

Greg Asbed 55:51
How can you protect us if we stand up and denounce a complaint, because I’m going to get fired, or worse, if I do? When those protections, systems, and mechanisms aren’t there for 24/7 protection of workers, the single most important thing the Fair Food Program does is it protects workers from retaliation. Without that, it would never work, because what it does is essentially deputize every single worker in a workplace as a monitor of their own rights.

Greg Asbed 56:17
Who is present when workers’ rights are being violated? Workers. The monitor is right there 24/7. As long as they’re protected and they feel like, “If I make this complaint, not only will I not be retaliated against, but it will be investigated, acted on, and corrected within a couple of weeks,” everything changes.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 56:42
The irony here for corporations is this: CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility, is essentially dead, and it has never worked to protect workers because the reason for it is to protect the brand. It’s a way in which corporations can say, “Whenever there is an abuse that they can get away with, show this to say, ‘Oh, we care.'” We have auditing firms here that do not necessarily talk to workers, because that’s not the point.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 57:21
The point is to show that somehow they care, knowing that that’s not going to protect workers, because if they really wanted to know what’s going on, there would be a ton of problems and resolutions, but that does not happen. The Fair Food Program’s focus is to guarantee that workers are able to complain, and that there’s a resolution to the problem, to solve the problems.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 57:49
Now, the irony for corporations is that they pay a lot of money to auditing firms to pretend that they care so that they can escape responsibility. They can say, “You know what? I don’t need to do the Fair Food Program because I am already paying attention,” regardless of workers continuing to suffer every day.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 58:16
Until there is a crisis that explodes in the media that they cannot escape, they will move. Even then, they would not do anything to fix the problem. If they can, they will move their business somewhere else, as we’ve seen many, many times. That’s not the solution. They already pay a lot of money, and they are not achieving even what they want, which is to protect the brand.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 58:47
The Fair Food Program guarantees both. It guarantees both because our goal is to protect workers. That’s what the Fair Food Program does. The goal the corporation is trying to escape is never really truly achieved. They will never be free from the risk of something horrible happening in their own supply chain outside of the program. They will never be free until it stops.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 59:14
So when they join the program, they achieve both. I can assure you that they spend a lot of money on these bogus auditing firms that are now, more than ever in history, disqualified. There are so many studies that have come out talking about social auditing. You just need to Google social auditing failures, and you can read a ton of publications on it. You can realize that it is time to change course.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 59:54
This is an opportunity to achieve what they have always tried to pretend to do in the hope of escaping responsibility. Why not just embrace it? Embrace your responsibility, apply the Fair Food Program, and let’s stop playing games that at the end don’t help anyone. They do not help the rent, and certainly do not help any worker, and they don’t protect anyone. It is only a situation in which they are risking their own brand being tainted with something that can be prevented.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:00:37
This is actually an invitation for anyone who hears this, and is involved in these conversations around the economic side of things, to maybe talk to people in that world so that corporations that haven’t really looked at this in that way will start looking at it in that way.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:01:03
I feel that this is an investment worth doing. I think that that’s the only way in which we can truly achieve what – in public spaces, some corporations say – make it real. It’s not much more expensive. I wouldn’t say it’s much more expensive than what they are already paying for something that fails constantly.

Dave Chapman 1:01:33
I have to disagree with you guys that you were just persistent. You were persistent, but you genuinely came up with a different understanding of how to solve a tenacious problem, an evil problem, that was very hard to solve. You have a good solution, and hopefully it’s going to keep expanding, growing, and replicating into many situations where we need it. The idea that people are expendable tools is deeply rooted in our economy, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Greg Asbed 1:02:14
There’s at some of these protests, signs that say vaccines cause adults, because people don’t realize how many children’s lives we’ve saved by implementing vaccines across children’s lives. Vaccines have gotten a bad reputation among some people, but not me, and I don’t know about you.

Greg Asbed 1:02:45
My mother was a public health professional for part of her life, and I believe deeply in vaccines, as I believe deeply in fight. When you know that you have something that can cure something like measles or polio, the first thing you want to do is get it out to the rest of the world that suffers from polio.

Greg Asbed 1:03:03
If you’ve done this – you’ve done the lab, you’ve done the field testing – you’ve taken a community and you’ve eradicated polio in that community, what do you want to have happen tomorrow? You want to see it everywhere else because people are dying unnecessarily from polio.

Greg Asbed 1:03:18
That’s exactly how we feel. We feel like we’ve basically been able to stumble across a vaccine that is incredibly effective for stopping some of the things that have been ailing our food industry for generations. It’s proven – there are 15 years of just working.

Greg Asbed 1:03:39
All we want to do all the time is just to see it expand and grow and be where people we know are still suffering from those same things. The only problem is the existence of this other bird, CSR, corporate responsibility, which takes some space where they claim there’s a cure in place, but there isn’t.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:03:56
… in a world that needs clarity. I think that the Fair Food Program brings that clarity because it has everything measurable from the perspective of the workers themselves regarding solutions. That’s what’s needed. It’s possible. It’s a lot of work. There are a lot of auditing systems that, as I was saying, are bogus, working for corporations. Those would never work.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:04:36
They are taking the oxygen – they are derailing, many times, the attention from things that actually do work and need support. For us, I hope that more and more people get close to the Fair Food Program and get to understand it better. If they are able to also become part of it in any capacity, as growers, small farmers, people that can support with resources, or communities that also want to replicate it, to get close to us.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:05:18
For us, it’s always exciting to have these kinds of conversations because we know how it feels. For example, when I got involved, my wages were stolen. I lived on the street. I met the coalition because I happened, by coincidence, or I don’t know how, we ended up living in the same house, but my roommates back then were workers who were forced to work under this case of modern-day slavery – the second case I mentioned earlier, Quail case.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:05:57
It was just a really beautiful coincidence to see something horrible in their experience, like being bought and sold for $5,000 – that’s what they said they had to pay with work, living overcrowded, and threatened. One of them was run over by a truck when they were able to escape. A little bit later, the boss was trying to force him to get on the truckand told him that “I own you.” He told him that as he was on the ground.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:06:33
Somebody called the cops when they saw that, but he was about to take him back to that situation to force him to pay the $5,000. For me, there were so many beautiful coincidences out of very difficult situations, especially for them. To be here now talking about something that works, for me personally, is especially important for people who hear this to understand.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:07:10
We understand that world of suffering, the predicaments that workers have to go through, and it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s the beauty of this. We hope that we’re able to build more and more with more and more communities that see this as a way of being able to eliminate the circumstances that diminish their humanity and their dignity while they are simply trying to have a life to feed their family.

Dave Chapman 1:07:47
Gerardo and Greg, thank you. I so admire and respect your work. May it continue. I’ll come back in a couple years. We’ll talk again. There’s more to say.

Greg Asbed 1:07:59
That’s going to be in India. We’ll do that again.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez 1:08:04
Thank you. It’s always a really good idea.