Labor & Employment Law

Landmark Deal Sets Standard in Tomato Industry

By James Parks

CIW’s Lucas Benitez announces the agreement with Pacific Tomato Growers. Pacific’s Jon Esformes, right, looks on.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), spearheading the Campaign for Fair Food, signed a landmark agreement this week with Pacific Tomato Growers (PTG), one of the country’s largest tomato producers. This new deal sets new standards for social responsibility and accountability in Florida’s tomato industry.

Not only is this the first formal agreement between the CIW and a major tomato grower, but the new accord establishes several practical steps to ensure the key principles of the Campaign for Fair Food?s code of conduct are followed. Those principles include a joint complaint resolution system, a health and safety program and a worker-to-worker education process.

The agreement also provides for third-party auditing of compliance with the code. Like CIW?s other agreements, it adds a penny more per pound payment for tomatoes picked. For more information on the deal, click here.

Jon Esformes, PTG?s operating partner, in a joint release with CIW, said it is time for employers to speak out publicly about working conditions in agriculture.

We, along with many other responsible agricultural firms, work daily to provide safe and fair working conditions, yet continued abuses within the industry demand that we speak out….now is the time to ask other similarly responsible agricultural companies to join in the effort to bring positive change to our industry for the benefit of farm employees. It is an absolute that farm workers must have the same protections as people working in the white collar world. 

Lucas Benitez of the CIW told reporters the agreement gives workers ?a realistic chance? to bring about the changes they have been working for.

This plan is designed precisely to address those unsustainable workplace conditions that have plagued Florida agriculture for so long, so that we can eliminate them and build a stronger foundation for the industry in the future. In other words, today, Pacific and the CIW are embarking together on a road toward real social responsibility. And if that road leads us where we think it will, it will be a model for generations of farm workers and farmers to come.

CIW is gearing up to expand its Campaign for Fair Food to the Publix, Ahold, Kroger and Trader Joe?s supermarket chains, which together have tremendous market power in the produce industry. So far, only the Whole Foods supermarket chain has signed an agreement with the CIW.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on October 15, 2010 (boomark / email).