Hey Trader Joe’s: respect the people who harvest the food you sell. Photo: Scott Robertson

The secret to its dazzling success? Fortune magazine describes the retailer as “an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience.”

Equally important, Trader Joe’s business model is based on offering a limited selection of high-quality products at very low prices. By restricting its inventory, it’s able to effectively wield its purchasing power and demand deep discounts from its suppliers.

Unfortunately for farmworkers, it is precisely this type of high-volume, low-cost purchasing that has created strong downward pressure on wages and working conditions as suppliers look to cut costs in order to maintain profit margins. Supermarket chains may not have created farmworker poverty, but they continue to play an active, and profitable, role in perpetuating it.

Since 2007, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an internationally recognized workers’ organization based in southwest Florida, and its allies have called on Trader Joe’s to support the emerging solution to the human rights crisis in Florida’s fields. Yet Trader Joe’s still refuses to join the Fair Food program, and its tomato supply chain — especially the provenance of its private-label produce — remains shrouded in secrecy. It is increasingly clear that Trader Joe’s, like other supermarket industry leaders, is attempting to shirk its responsibility to pay into the system, short workers of its portion of the pay increase, and refuse to tie its purchases to the Fair Food principles. Florida’s tomato industry is responsible for nearly all fresh tomatoes grown in the U.S. between November and June.

Until this untenable position changes, Trader Joe’s can expect growing discontent from farmworkers and consumers alike.

While Trader Joe’s execs ignore the situation in Florida’s tomato fields, the situation is changing rapidly in tomato country. Last November, the previously unthinkable happened — farmworkers and representatives of the $620 million Florida tomato industry announced an end to their decade-long labor conflict with a symbolic handshake and signed accord.

The landmark agreement between the CIW, and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE) will cover over 90 percent of the state’s tomato farms and improve pay and conditions for 30,000 farmworkers.

“This is a watershed moment in the history of Florida agriculture,” said Lucas Benitez of the CIW. “With this agreement, the Florida tomato industry — workers and growers alike — is coming together in partnership to turn the page on the conflict and stagnation of the past and instead forge a new and stronger industry.”

“This is the beginning, not the end, of a very long journey,” continued Benitez. “But with this agreement, the pieces are now in place for us to get to work on making the Florida tomato industry a model of social accountability for the 21st century.”

Hope is indeed on the horizon, thanks to the efforts of farmworkers, consumer activists, Florida tomato growers, and nine multinational fast-food and food service corporations who have joined in support of the CIW’s Fair Food principles.

People are pissed at you, Joe.Photo: Phil RoederThese principles include a wage increase, a strict code of conduct, a cooperative complaint resolution system, a participatory health and safety program, and a worker-to-worker education process. This unfolding process marks a sea change in Florida, and even U.S., agriculture.

With the honorable exception of Whole Foods Market, however, the supermarket industry is refusing to do its part. While resistance is perhaps to be expected from grocery goliaths such as Kroger’s and Walmart, the indifference of Trader Joe’s — considered by some analysts to be one of the “world’s most ethical companies” — is quite baffling.

Yet that is exactly the position of the quirky cheap-chic retailer, and, along with the rest of the supermarket industry, the effect may be to significantly diminish farmworkers’ brightest hopes for change in several decades.

When consumers browse through the produce aisles at their local supermarkets, they are often unaware of the hidden exploitation behind the displays of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Sub-poverty wages, the denial of basic labor rights, sexual harassment, health and safety risks, and wage theft are commonplace for U.S. agricultural workers. The Department of Labor describes farmworkers as a “workforce in significant economic distress,” citing annual earnings of less then $12,500 to support its conclusions.

In extreme cases, workers have been held against their will and forced to work for little or no pay with threats or the actual use of violence. Since 1997, a total of nine farm labor slavery operations have been uncovered in Florida. The CIW has been involved in the discovery, investigation, and prosecution of seven of those operations, helping to liberate well over 1,000 workers.

The CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food seeks to improve wages and working conditions for Florida tomato pickers by calling on major buyers of tomatoes to pay a premium of one penny more per pound for their tomatoes, ensure that this penny is passed down directly to farmworkers, and work together with the CIW to implement a code of conduct in their supply chains.

Since the breakthrough with the FTGE, many changes are already evident on some of the state’s largest farms. For the first time ever, many farmworkers now have a reliable mechanism to ensure proper payment for hours worked, as well as a grievance procedure to address abuses or violations of the code of conduct.

Many workers are also receiving a wage increase from the penny per pound, combined with an end to the over-filling of buckets, a standard practice in the industry that can reduce a worker’s piece rate wages by as much as 10 percent.

“For this new model to achieve its full potential, however, retail food industry leaders must also step up and support the higher standards,” explains Gerardo Reyes, also of the CIW. “Key players in the fast-food and food service industries have already committed their support. It is time now for supermarket industry leaders to seize this historic opportunity and help make the promise of fresh — and fair — tomatoes from Florida a reality.”

Without Trader Joe’s — and the rest of the supermarket industry — paying into the penny-per-pound program and conditioning their purchases on the Fair Food principles, workers’ raises are shorted and the push to improve working conditions is undermined.

The situation draws little public attention, but nearly a century and a half after the end of the Civil War, slavery remains a lingering phenomenon in the U.S. Last week in Honolulu, federal prosecutors indicted six people for their role in a massive, multi-state labor trafficking ring. In total, more than 400 farmworkers from Thailand were brought into the U.S. on “guestworker” visas and then held in servitude on farms in 13 states from Hawaii to Florida. Workers’ passports were confiscated, and those who protested their abuse were threatened with deportation.

In July, a similar forced labor operation was uncovered in Florida when three farm labor supervisors were indicted for forcing dozens of Haitian nationals to live in wretched conditions and work for little pay. The abuses on the farm likely included sexual assault as one female worker claimed she was raped by her supervisor.

Incredibly, the Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted seven prior agricultural slavery cases in Florida’s fields since 1997. These cases have involved well over one thousand farmworkers and resulted in the conviction of 13 supervisors. The enslaved workers harvested tomatoes, oranges, potatoes, cabbage, peas, beans, and other crops for the state’s multi-billion dollar fruit and winter vegetable industry.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a Florida-based farmworker organization, is leading the movement to end modern-day agricultural slavery. They train local, state, and federal law enforcement to investigate, uncover, and prosecute existing slavery operations, in addition to working to eliminate the root causes of the problem: farmworkers’ structural powerlessness and grinding poverty. Since 2005, the organization has pioneered agreements with nine leading food retailers — from Whole Foods to Burger King — to improve farm labor conditions in corporate supply chains. By harnessing the purchasing power of large retail brands, these agreements provide market incentives for Florida tomato growers who respect their workers’ human rights and establish market consequences for those who do not. At both the farm and retail levels, the model ensures transparency, verification, and — crucially — farmworker participation.

This is where Chipotle Grill comes in. For four years, the company has refused to commit its market influence and symbolic weight to the emerging solution to the abuse and degradation in Florida’s agricultural fields. Chipotle has repeatedly spurned the invitation by the CIW to forge an equal partnership and has instead opted for a go-it-alone approach that eschews farmworker participation and transparent oversight. It reads as a public relations response to a human rights crisis.

Chipotle’s refusal to work with CIW is particularly puzzling, given the farm worker group’s reputation in global human rights circles. For years, this approach has received praise from the world’s leading human rights and anti-slavery groups. In June, upon the release of its tenth annual Trafficking in Persons Report, the U.S. State Department also weighed in on the group. In a standing room-only ceremony in Washington D.C., Secretary Hillary Clinton recognized the CIW for its persistence and innovations in the fight against human trafficking. It marked the first time a U.S.-based organization received this distinction.

As Clinton explained, ending slavery “is everyone’s responsibility.” She rebuked “businesses that knowingly profit or exhibit reckless disregard about their supply chains” and called on business leaders to “speak out and act forcefully.” The CIW welcomed Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on corporate accountability.

The burrito chain’s impressive growth has earned it the respect of both fast-food industry heavyweights and stock market analysts. Its “Food With Integrity” mission not only taps into an increasingly influential niche consumer market, but it also yields low-cost, high-profile publicity, including last year’s tie-in to the DVD release of the acclaimed documentary “Food, Inc.” and a starring role for CEO Steve Ells on the upcoming NBC reality series “America’s Next Great Restaurant.”

Yet, where Chipotle’s thriving enterprise intersects with the lives of Florida farmworkers, the company’s inaction undermines its claim of integrity. By spurning the CIW, Chipotle Mexican Grill exhibits the exact “reckless disregard” for its supply chain that Clinton criticized in the fight against slavery. And that is a very risky proposition for a company whose fortunes are tied to selling consumers “ethically produced” burritos.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Editor’s note: Trace the history of the food on your plate, and you’re likely to find worker abuse. Creating a truly fair food system will be a massive challenge–and not without conflicts. In the spirit of airing those conflicts with the hope of moving forward, we present a piece critical of Chipotle Grill by Sean Sellers of Just Harvest USA. –Tom Philpott

———————-

“Of course I’m not in favor of slavery! But signing an agreement [with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers] does not actually change those conditions for farmworkers,” Steve Ells, CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, gibed in front of an audience of 250 at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business on November 19. “I mean, they just don’t see the bigger picture,” he continued. “To change the fast-food paradigm is huge. We’re trying to do the right thing.”

Ells’ defensive posture came in immediate response to a question posed by Marina Saenz-Luna, a staff member of Just Harvest USA, who works closely with the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). Since 2006, the grassroots farmworker organization has petitioned Chipotle – a leading fast-casual restaurant chain specializing in gourmet burritos – to enter into an agreement to improve wages and working conditions for Florida tomato pickers. Four years later, farmworkers’ and consumers’ stomachs have soured in light of Chipotle’s persistent hostility towards the workers’ organization.

It didn’t have to be this way. Ells founded Chipotle in 1993 with an $85,000 start-up loan from his father. The venture has since bloomed into one of Fortune’s 100 fastest-growing companies with over 800 restaurant nationwide. Along the way, Chipotle has emerged as a self-styled leader in the fields of sustainable agriculture and socially responsible supply chain management through its highly publicized commitment to “Food With Integrity.”

Chipotle explains on its website that, “‘Food With Integrity’ isn’t a marketing slogan.” Rather, it “means working back along the food chain. It means going beyond distributors to discover how the vegetables are grown, how the pigs, cows and chickens are raised, where the best spices come from.” For his part, Ells, the chef-cum-corporate executive, reflects, “Learning about this dark side of modern agriculture made me want to find out how we could do things differently.”

Yet Chipotle has responded to the human rights crisis in Florida’s fields–including seven federally prosecuted cases of modern-day slavery since 1997–with silence, evasion, and cynical spin. And Ells seemingly has no compunction about using his high-profile speaking engagements to spread misinformation about the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food and the impact of his company’s policies on farmworkers.

What is at stake is not mere public relations dividends or quarrels over the meaning of “integrity.” Chipotle apparently believes that farmworkers are incapable of developing mutually beneficial solutions to the problems they face within the agricultural industry. And though Chipotle is but a tiny player within a massive food industry landscape, their stance flies in the face of core principles painstakingly advanced by the Campaign for Fair Food over the past decade: farmworker participation in the protection of their own labor rights; supply chain transparency; and third-party verification and monitoring.

It’s easy to shut down debate and mock earnest criticism when one stands alone at the podium and holds the microphone. But a closer reading of the recent exchange between Ells and Saenz-Luna belies a festering insecurity within Ells and his company over its chosen course of action.

So here’s my challenge: Let’s have a real debate, Mr. Ells, at any public forum of your choosing. After all, if you can’t back up your position, then integrity demands that you change it.

“Chipotle Challenge” Background:

Human Rights Crisis in U.S. Agriculture

From pesticides to animal confinement operations, public interest in the “dark side of modern agriculture” has exploded over the past decade. This growing awareness – which has immeasurably benefited Chipotle – links our food system to issues of consumer health, ecology, animal welfare, and, occasionally, the livelihoods of small-scale farmers and producers. Broadly speaking, however, labor and human rights have been strictly segregated from the sustainability agenda. Thus it is possible for Chipotle to dream of “revolutionizing the way America grows, gathers, serves and eats its food,” without ever once mentioning the human beings who plant and handpick the majority of our fresh fruits and vegetables.

This is baffling given that three million farmworkers form the base of the trillion-dollar U.S. food industry. In exchange for their backbreaking stoop labor, they receive sub-poverty wages totaling around $10,000 per year. Farmworkers are also excluded from important workplace legal protections, including the right to collective bargaining and the right to overtime pay. Worse still are the brutal forms of abuse that flourish from such retrograde labor relations. In the extreme, workers are forced to toil against their will for little or no pay under the threat or actual use of violence.

In Florida, the human rights crisis engulfing farm labor is perhaps most starkly visible. Tomato pickers have received virtually the same harvesting piece rate since 1980: 40-50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they fill. At this rate, workers must pick and haul a staggering 2.5 tons of tomatoes in order to earn minimum wage for a typical 10-hour day. Decades of class-action lawsuits have exposed a pattern of systematic minimum wage violations, and supervisor violence in the fields is not unheard of.

In November 2007, three farmworkers in Immokalee – the heart of Florida’s winter tomato production – escaped from more than a year of bondage after punching through the ventilation hatch in a box truck where they were held captive by their employers. In total, a dozen workers were forced to pick tomatoes by day and then chained, beaten, and robbed of their pay at night in one of southwest Florida’s “biggest, ugliest slavery cases ever,” according to U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy.

The enslaved crew harvested for farms owned by two of Florida’s largest tomato growers. It was the seventh farm labor slavery case prosecuted by federal civil rights officials since 1997, now involving well over 1,000 workers. All of which brings us to a question posed by Eric Schlosser at last year’s Slow Food Nation conference: “Does it matter whether an heirloom tomato is local and organic if it was harvested with slave labor?”

Farmworkers Forge a Strategy for Change

Since 1993, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has spearheaded the fight for fair wages and dignified treatment for Florida farmworkers. By tragic necessity, the CIW has also become one of the most respected anti-slavery organizations in the U.S. It has assisted the FBI and Department of Justice in the investigation and prosecution of six of Florida’s seven recent slavery cases. The CIW also trains and writes curriculum for law enforcement on how to combat labor trafficking. For its efforts, the CIW has been recognized by Florida Governor Charlie Crist, FBI Director Robert Mueller, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Center, and London-based Anti-Slavery International.

Drawing from their experiences, farmworkers began organizing to eliminate the root causes of modern-day slavery through the Campaign for Fair Food. The market-based initiative seeks to improve the tomato harvesting wage floor and institutionalize a voice for farmworkers by requiring large food retailers to demand more humane labor standards from their Florida tomato suppliers, to pay a penny more per pound for more fairly produced tomatoes, and to buy only from growers who meet those higher standards.

The campaign began in 2001 with a boycott of Taco Bell. By mobilizing farmworkers, students, people of faith, and community groups nationwide, the CIW has since reached agreements with some of the largest food retailers in the world: fast-food giants Yum Brands (Taco Bell’s parent) McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway; foodservice providers Compass Group and Bon Appetít; and Whole Foods Market. These companies are now working directly with the CIW and leveraging their buying power to address the human rights crisis in their tomato supply chains.

Progress hit a snag in November 2007 when the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), a powerful industry lobby group, announced that its members would not pass the penny-per-pound bonus onto their harvesters as required by the Fair Food agreements. Without participating growers, the CIW and its buyer-partners agreed to temporarily place the accruing funds into an escrow account until willing growers stepped forward. Meanwhile, the CIW pressed ahead with the campaign in anticipation of the day when the growers’ unified resistance crumbled.

After extensive behind-the-scenes negotiations, three Florida tomato growers were onboard by September 2009, including East Coast Growers, the third-largest producer in the state. Presently the CIW is not only expanding the Campaign for Fair Food into the supermarket and foodservice industries but also implementing the worker-designed code of conduct and verification mechanisms called for by the campaign at these participating farms. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders heralded the breakthrough as “the beginning of the end of the harvest of shame that has existed for far too long in Florida’s tomato fields.”

Food With Integrity?

Given Chipotle’s vision of “Food With Integrity,” a partnership with an award-winning, internationally-recognized farmworker organization such as the CIW would seem to be a no-brainer. Yet Chipotle refuses to even meet face-to-face with the workers who harvest its tomatoes, much less commit itself to a partnership based on mutual respect. Below is a chronology of Chipotle’s responses to the Campaign for Fair Food:

• Silence: Chipotle buried its head in the sand in the aftermath of the widely publicized 1997 Miguel Flores slavery case – which made national headlines and was featured on the CBS news program 48 Hours – as well as the 2001 launch of the Campaign for Fair Food. The deafening silence continued even after the CIW wrote a letter to Chipotle in February 2006 requesting a meeting to discuss how the precedent-setting agreement with Yum Brands might be adapted to Chipotle’s supply chain.

• “SAFE”: After the Taco Bell/Yum victory in March 2005, farmworkers turned their focus to McDonald’s, who at the time held a majority stake in Chipotle. (“We’ve found the very rich uncle every restaurant wishes it had behind it,” said Ells of the relationship. McDonald’s divested from Chipotle in October 2006.) The CIW launched an “aggressive education campaign” in March 2006 to expose the poverty of farmworkers in the companies’ tomato supply chains.

  Following McDonald’s lead, Chipotle announced its support for a grower-controlled monitoring agency called Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE). Devoid of worker participation and created to thwart the progress of the Campaign for Fair Food, SAFE has been thoroughly discredited in both principle and practice. In fact, the two tomato growers implicated in the 2007 Immokalee slavery case were certified by SAFE.

  All the while, Chipotle continued to reject dialogue with the CIW. “Just because an activist group doesn’t like what we’re doing, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with what we’re doing,” Chipotle spokesperson Chris Arnold explained in 2006.

• Suspend Florida tomato purchases: Chipotle clung to SAFE as the CIW paid its first visit to hometown Denver in September 2006. Realizing that the public relations storm was only intensifying, Chipotle opted for a new approach. It soon announced the suspension of Florida tomato purchases in order to investigate the CIW’s “claims.” The move was immediately decried as an evasive tactic by the Alliance for Fair Food and thirty-six leading labor law scholars. In an open letter, they wrote, “Chipotle’s current course will not result in the elimination of exploitative conditions in your company’s tomato supply chain. At best, it will only further delay long-needed reforms; at worst, it will result in Chipotle supporting even more exploitative conditions than those found in your Florida suppliers’ operations today.”

  Even as the CIW reached agreements with McDonald’s and Burger King in 2007 and 2008 respectively, Chipotle maintained this untenable position. In response, Denver Fair Food and the Student/Farmworker Alliance stepped up pressure with large demonstrations at Chipotle’s headquarters in the spring and summer of 2008.

• Go-it-alone: Again sensing the futility of its strategy, Chipotle deployed a more sophisticated response in October 2008. On the eve of the CIW’s cross-country “Chipocrisy Tour,” Chipotle announced its decision to “pay an additional penny per pound for all the tomatoes that it purchases from its Florida suppliers,” and to “pursue tomato suppliers who are not members of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange and who will pay… the additional penny per pound.” The CIW praised Chipotle’s acknowledgement of farmworker exploitation at long last, but blasted the non-binding solution.

  “As farmworkers – the human beings actually suffering the poverty wages and labor abuses every day in the fields – we have no role in Chipotle’s plan,” explained Gerardo Reyes of the CIW. “Under their plan, Chipotle will review its own code of conduct and decide if any changes are appropriate, Chipotle will oversee its own payments under its penny per pound plan, and Chipotle will verify its own compliance with the changes it is proposing. That’s just not credible. Transparency, verification, and participation are essential elements of the agreements we have reached with other fast-food leaders, and they are essential elements in any defensible definition of social responsibility.”

Dissecting Chipotle’s Latest Ploy

Predictably, Chipotle’s decree did not mollify critics. In June 2009, the burrito chain came under renewed scrutiny when more than 30 leading sustainable food advocates released on open letter describing, “the CIW’s struggle for dignity as a non-negotiable part of the struggle for a sustainable food system.” The signatories strongly urged Chipotle to enter into an agreement with the worker-led organization as soon as possible.

Then came the Food, Inc. fiasco. Underestimating the potential blowback, Chipotle moved forward with its high-profile marketing tie-in with the acclaimed documentary about the U.S. food system. (Robert Kenner, the film’s director, and Eric Schlosser, its co-producer, both signed the open letter to Chipotle a month earlier.) In turn, Fair Food activists held educational actions at dozens of Chipotle-sponsored Food, Inc. screenings across the country. What should have been a public relations coup backfired amidst yet another round of questions over Chipotle’s refusal to partner with the CIW.

In desperate need of favorable publicity, Chipotle then did something truly audacious: it claimed sole credit for the September 2009 breakthrough with East Coast Growers. On one level, this can be viewed as typical public relations gamesmanship. Robert McGoey of Denver Fair Food reasons, “While Chipotle may have been involved in a multi-party process that brought about the East Coast decision, there is no disputing the fact that Chipotle was – by far – the smallest piece of the puzzle. And yet, Chipotle was the only company to jump out alone and shout from the highest mountain, ‘Look what I did!’”

On a deeper level, there is a a cynical distortion of reality in the announcement that supposedly validates Chipotle’s “go-it-alone” approach. What allowed East Coast to break away from the FTGE and risk exile in its own industry was precisely the CIW’s signed agreements with other fast-food and foodservice companies. Those agreements require retail food giants to purchase from any grower who participates in the penny-per-pound program and complies with the CIW code of conduct. There is no disputing that the total market share of all the signed companies – over 65,000 restaurants compared to Chipotle’s 830 – was the deciding factor for East Coast.

Simply put, without those agreements, there would be no demand supporting the Fair Food principles and thus no incentive for East Coast to step up to the higher standards. In this sense, it is absolutely the signing of agreements with the CIW that makes change in Florida farm labor conditions possible. Chipotle, despite its claims to the contrary, is coasting on the hard work and market bulk of these companies.

The Chipotle Challenge

Which brings us back to Steve Ells’ quotation at the top of this story: “But signing an agreement [with the CIW] does not actually change those conditions for farmworkers.”

Like most everything else Ells has said about the CIW and the Campaign for Fair Food, this is entirely backwards, and so painfully wrong. But this time, his misinformation will not go unchallenged.

Mr. Ells, consider this my formal challenge to a public debate on the merits of the Campaign for Fair Food. Have the conviction of your beliefs and join me for a debate – you name the time and place, anytime, anywhere. The clock is ticking.

Instead, I found the same tired recipe of chefs, celebrity analysts, and pro forma discussions of family farms and urban food access. This simply makes no sense in light of the well-documented human rights crisis in our country’s fields. Over three million farmworkers toil at the base of our food system under abysmal conditions. As U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders explains, “The norm is a disaster; the extreme is slavery.” Yet despite this brutal reality in the fields where our fruits and vegetables are picked, workers were again absent in the discussion of our food system. Not one farmworker, or meatpacking worker for that matter, was given an opportunity to speak to the exploitation behind the food we eat.

And that’s a shame because those same workers are forging innovative solutions to the exploitation they face daily. For example, the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is spearheading a remarkably successful campaign to boost thousands of tomato pickers’ wages by promoting socially responsible purchasing in the retail food industry. These changes are putting millions of dollars back into one of the poorest worker communities in the U.S. and institutionalizing a voice for labor in an industry that has traditionally viewed its employees as disposable tools or worse.

This is certainly a story worth telling, and it is disappointing that The Nation missed a golden opportunity to do so.

The widely read recent Time cover story “Getting Real about the High Price of Cheap Food” is a useful complement to current discussions about our food system. It offers further evidence of the mainstreaming of ideas and practices that were considered radical or irrelevant a mere decade ago.

But the author errs by avoiding any mention of the three million farm laborers who pick our fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, this omission is not simply limited to one article. Rather the idea that farmworkers somehow exist apart from our food system routinely comes across as the conventional wisdom framing many discussions about sustainability.

The undeniable reality is that farmworkers form the base of the food industry, and their brutal exploitation dates back centuries. It is reasonable to point out that the U.S. has never fully grappled with the noxious legacies of racism, violence, and disenfranchisement that underwrote the growth of much large-scale agriculture: first in the form of chattel slavery; and later with convict labor, sharecropping, and debt peonage.

Today, migrant farmworkers are among the poorest, least-protected workers in the nation. The Department of Labor describes them as a workforce “in significant economic distress,” and leading social scientists corroborate these findings. Farmworkers toil on both conventional and organic farms, often in similarly degraded working conditions.

In Florida, the poverty and powerlessness at the heart of the agricultural industry have created fertile ground for modern-day slavery. In the last decade alone, federal prosecutors have uncovered seven cases of forced labor in Florida’s fields preying upon native-born and immigrant workers alike. These prosecuted cases are, as the U.S. Attorney’s office says, just the tip of the iceberg.

Yet there are hopeful signs amidst this dire human rights crisis, as well as important opportunities for sustainable agriculture advocates.

The Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is leading a strategic, broadly supported reform effort. To improve tomato harvesters’ wages and working conditions, the CIW has forged innovative accords with Whole Foods Market and Bon Apetit Management Company, as well as the world’s four largest fast-food companies (Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Subway). The agreements harness the purchasing power of large buyers to raise the harvesting wage floor, create a structural voice for workers in the industry, and establish market consequences for growers who use forced labor. These companies deserve credit for exhibiting leadership on an issue of pressing importance.

Foodie darling Chipotle, however, steadfastly refuses the historic opportunity to partner with the CIW. The company has instead opted for a go-it-alone approach to address farmworker exploitation. This deserves scrutiny. In an industry with such an overwhelming imbalance of power between employer and employee, farmworkers are uniquely situated to identify the root cause of the problems they face and advance practical solutions. Their participation at all levels is vital to any meaningful change.

Human rights are integral to real sustainability. It is past time to bring farmworkers in from the periphery of these discussions, particularly when the abuses in question are so flagrant and systemic. Any honest reckoning with our food system – from magazine articles to supply chain purchasing policies – must treat farmworkers as indispensable partners worthy of a seat at the table.