Coalition of Immokalee Workers

An on-the-clock, worker-to-worker education session trains farmworkers on the FFP’s protections, including its heat stress standards The Packer: “By pairing electrolyte access with shade and rest, the upgraded rules give agricultural workers critical defense against chronic heat-related health risks.” Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount! in Florida Trib: “We think the model pioneered by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is capable of doing what government can’t do right now, which is guaranteeing life-saving protections for workers.”

Last week, we shared how the Fair Food Program’s new rule mandating the year-round provision of electrolytes across all participating farms is generating a wave of national news. Today, we want to share three more stories that dive deeper into the new rule — highlighting both its urgent importance in protecting farmworkers from the growing dangers of extreme heat and the power of the FFP model to inspire workers in other industries to build enforceable protections of their own.

The stories underscore two distinct aspects of an increasingly stark reality: The dangers facing workers in a rapidly warming world are growing every day, but workers are also increasingly building proven solutions capable of meeting those dangers head-on. And as the Fair Food Program continues to expand, the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model pioneered by the CIW is providing a roadmap toward enforceable protections for workers far beyond the fields where it was born.

This week, we’d like to share a few more news stories that dive deeper into the FFP’s new rule and explore its impact beyond just the fields where it is being implemented. To start, here is the produce industry’s leading outlet, The Packer, providing an overview of the new rule, its reach, and the unique enforcement mechanisms underlying the FFP:

Fair Food Program Rolls Out Year-Round Electrolytes to Protect Farmworkers From Heat Illness By pairing electrolyte access with shade and rest, the upgraded rules give agricultural workers critical defense against chronic heat-related health risks.

Fair Food Program (FFP) has instituted a new rule requiring all participating agricultural growers to provide electrolyte beverages or supplements to workers year-round, effective Aug. 1.

The mandate expands the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ existing Heat Illness Standards, which already mandate shade, cool drinking water, paid rest breaks, and heat safety training, to combat both acute heat illness and chronic conditions like long-term kidney damage.

“Sweating in the heat pulls electrolytes out of the body faster than water alone can replace them,” Roxana Chicas, associate professor at Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, says. “Making electrolytes available year-round, alongside shade, rest, and water, is a practical way to help keep workers safe from heat illness and to guard against kidney damage. Many growers already work hard to protect their crews in the heat, and this is one straightforward step that growers and workers can build into the daily work routine together,” she adds.

Unlike voluntary government guidelines, FFP standards carry binding market enforcement. Supported by agreements with 14 major retailers, including Walmart, McDonald’s, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, participating buyers must suspend purchases from growers who fail to comply. The Fair Food Standards Council handles independent monitoring and enforcement through farm audits and a 24-hour complaint hotline.

Workers attend an education session as part of the FFP in New Jersey

“The health and safety of our employees is non-negotiable. It is incumbent on all employers to do everything possible to ensure that responsibility,” says Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands and a founding member of the FFP’s Working Group. “The formalization of what has been a best practice for some time is a singular action that is one of many to fulfill that responsibility. Here at Sunripe, and the Fair Food Program, we are always honored to lead the way.”

The Fair Food Program protects tens of thousands of farmworkers harvesting dozens of crops across 23 states and three countries, including the United States, Chile, and South Africa.

The importance of those protections becomes even clearer when viewed against the human toll of rising temperatures. More than 550 workers die from heat every year in the United States, according to La Jornada in its own coverage of the FFP’s new electrolyte rule. And for farmworkers — who labor for hours under the sun performing some of the most physically demanding work this country has to offer — the danger is especially acute.

But the FFP demonstrates that those dangers are not inevitable. Workers, growers, and buyers have built a system capable of identifying emerging threats, developing practical solutions, and, critically, ensuring that those solutions are actually implemented in the fields.

And just a few hours east of Immokalee, workers in Homestead’s massive plant nursery industry face many of the same dangers farmworkers confronted when the CIW began organizing more than three decades ago: extreme heat, wage theft, harassment, and retaliation. Inspired by the FFP’s example, those workers are now attempting to build enforceable protections of their own. 

To read about that effort, check out excerpts of The Florida Trib’s article below. To read the full article, click here, and to read more about how the CIW is working with WeCount! to help replicate the FFP’s protections in the plant nursery industry, read our post about that initiative here.

Weakened federal heat protection rules leave Florida workers sweating

…“There’s no way to talk about the ongoing fight for heat protections nationally without talking about what’s happening in Florida, both on side of the problem and more importantly on the side of the solution,” said Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount!, a human rights group pushing for heat safety protections in the plant nursery industry.

Dozens of American workers die from heat-related illnesses each year and thousands more are injured, according to federal statistics. Those numbers probably undercount heat’s true toll, since toiling under the sun gradually contributes to chronic illnesses such as kidney failure and raises the risk exhausted workers will have accidents like falls or crashes. In Florida, heat kills a worker almost every summer.

With few other options, workers are organizing protests and boycotts to pressure companies into giving them water and breaks, following the example of farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida, who won some of America’s strongest heat protections.

In Homestead, WeCount! is organizing plant nursery workers like Sandra along with plant buyers and community members to demand stronger labor protections as part of a campaign called Planting Justice.

“We think the model pioneered by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is capable of doing what government can’t do right now, which is guaranteeing life-saving protections for workers,” said Londoño.

A laboratory for change

In the absence of government regulations, Florida has become the national epicenter of workers organizing for heat protections.

Immokalee farmworkers created the most successful model. Starting in the ‘90s, tomato pickers organized protests against abusive employers. In 2001, they launched the Campaign for Fair Food and fanned across the country, visiting churches and college campuses to tell Americans about the dangerous labor conditions under which their food is grown.

The workers drafted a code of conduct that included protections from violence, wage theft and sexual harassment. They demanded Florida tomato growers agree to follow the rules, and they also called on fast food companies and grocery stores to buy tomatoes whenever possible from participating farms. Then they asked Americans to protest and boycott companies, starting with Taco Bell, until they agreed to join the program.

The pressure campaign worked. Nearly all Florida tomato growers agreed to follow the workers’ rules and submit to regular audits and inspections to guarantee compliance. The Fair Food Program (FFP) now covers more than 25,000 farmworkers in 23 states and three countries who grow more than a dozen crops. Fourteen retailers including Walmart, Trader Joe’s and Burger King have agreed to not buy produce from farms that break the rules.

Nely Rodriguez (speaking) and Lupe Gonzalo (to Nely’s right) of the CIW join plant nursery workers with WeCount! at a press conference on the Planting Justice initiative in Miami earlier this year.

Five years ago, the FFP added mandatory heat protections to its code of conduct. Participating farms have to give workers access to cold water, shaded rest areas and 10-minute breaks every two hours on hot days. Starting this month, they must also offer workers electrolyte drinks or supplements such as Gatorade year round.

“While the hope for federal heat rules now wanes, the FFP is strengthening its protections with mandatory, year-round electrolytes even as it expands to more farms across the country,” Coalition for Immokalee Workers co-founder Lucas Benitez said in an emailed statement.

Workers on South Florida tropical plant nurseries hope to follow suit. This year, they launched the Planting Justice campaign, which would build a similar program around houseplants. Organizers are calling on Costa Farms — the country’s biggest plant nursery, headquartered in Homestead, Florida — to become the first grower to join the program. As part of a national letter writing campaign, more than 2,000 people have written to Costa Farms to urge them to join…

That’s all for today, but stay tuned for more updates on the Fair Food Program!

Workers take a rest break under shade as part of the Fair Food Program Fast Company: The Fair Food Program is “A Win-Win-Win for Farmworkers, Growers, Buyers.” FFSC Co-executive director Lilian Sepúlveda on NPR/PBS/WGCU: “Providing electrolytes year-round reflects the Fair Food Program’s commitment to continue to improve standards as new science emerges.”

We recently shared news of the Fair Food Program’s newest heat protection: a first-of-its-kind rule requiring participating growers to provide electrolytes for workers on FFP farms year-round.

The new rule responds to a crisis that only grows more urgent each summer, as record-high temperatures are set year after year and just last month set the mark for the hottest July on record. Farmworkers already face some of the highest risks from extreme heat of any workforce in the country — they are 35 times more likely to die from heat-related stress than workers in other industries. And as temperatures continue to rise, the dangers of both acute heat illness and the chronic effects of repeated heat exposure are growing with them.

The new electrolyte requirement builds on the FFP’s comprehensive heat stress protections — standards the Washington Post called “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” in a front-page feature article in 2024 — which mandate the provision of shade and drinking water, regular rest breaks, heat-stress training, and the right to stop work and seek medical attention when necessary without fear of retaliation. Developed through the Program’s collaborative process with growers, these protections show how the FFP can identify emerging threats, develop practical solutions that benefit all parties to the FFP, and then enforce them across a rapidly growing network of participating farms.

Now, two new stories take an in-depth look at the FFP’s new electrolyte rule and what it tells us about the Program’s approach to protecting workers in an increasingly sweltering world.

First up, we have award-winning journalist Eileen Kelley of NPR/PBS member station WGCU, in a video segment aired across Florida. We are excited to share that clip in full with you below.

Next, we have excerpts from a report on the rule courtesy of Fast Company, one of the country’s leading news outlets focused on innovation and the market. To read the full article from Fast Company, click here.

Farmworkers across 22 states will get free access to electrolytes to combat dangerous heat stress

The Fair Food Program, whose buyers include major retailers like Walmart, McDonald’s, and Trader Joe’s, will now mandate electrolytes for workers.

“On certain farms across 22 states, workers who harvest everything from tomatoes to tulips to blueberries will now have mandatory access to electrolytes, which can help them stay safe in dangerous extreme heat.

It’s the latest rule from the Fair Food Program, a partnership between farmworkers and food retailers (including Walmart, McDonald’s, Whole Foods Market, and Trader Joe’s) to improve working conditions on farms.

As extreme heat worsens, it’s a crucial step, the program says, to keeping workers healthy.

FARMWORKERS HAVE THE HIGHEST HEAT RISK

When a heat wave hits, farmworkers are among the most vulnerable. They’re 35 times as likely to die from heat-related stress as workers in any other industry. Farm work is physically grueling, and, particularly during harvest season, workers can be outside from sunup to sundown.

There are no federal standards to protect outdoor workers, including those on farms, from heat.

The Fair Food Program, however, has its own set of heat protections, including mandatory breaks, guaranteed access to shade and water, and training on how to spot symptoms of heat stress for both workers and supervisors.

Now it’s added a rule, which took effect August 1, requiring participating growers to provide electrolyte beverages or supplements to workers year-round.

Water can only rehydrate workers to a certain extent, particularly during extreme temperatures. Research is increasingly highlighting the importance of electrolyte replacement as a crucial way to prevent heat-related illness, and to protect organs including kidneys from heat stress.

“There have been many, many cases of farmworkers, who have worked for years in the field without adequate hydration, experiencing major organ failure, particularly kidney failure, at young ages,” says Laura Safer Espinoza, senior advisor to the Fair Food Program and founding executive director of the Fair Food Standards Council, the monitoring and auditing body that oversees the Fair Food Program’s implementation.

Electrolytes can preserve kidney function, studies have found; they also mitigate heat stress and help prevent dehydration, which can cause heat stroke…

A WIN-WIN-WIN FOR FARMWORKERS, GROWERS, BUYERS

Such protections, including the new rule about electrolytes, help workers stay safe and healthy in the heat. They also benefit both growers and buyers.

“If workers are healthier, then their employers are not having as many workers’ compensation claims, they are not losing production time by people becoming ill or sidelined and recuperating from serious symptoms,” [FFSC Co-executive director Judge] Safer Espinoza says. “It’s less disruptive, ultimately, for the food supply chain.”

Implementing the electrolyte rule took some time. Once the working group decides on a new standard, they have to publish it to the growers months in advance and set up educational efforts on the farms for both workers and supervisors. It normally takes a season or two, Safer Espinoza says, for a standard to become “fully assimilated” into a farm’s operating procedures—and for the workers to believe that it will actually be enforced.

There’s been little resistance to the addition of the electrolyte requirement, she adds: “There was very little argument about the fact that the body needs those replacements in order to function well in doing a lot of heavy, strenuous work for many hours at a time.”

Growers now see these safety standards as a good investment in their workforce… Extreme heat events are becoming both more frequent and intense; multiple back-to-back heat domes in July broke heat records across the U.S. Workers in other industries, including construction, are looking at the Fair Food Program as a model for heat-stress prevention…”

As summers grow hotter, millions of vulnerable workers across the country will continue to face life-threatening temperatures on the job. Yet the experience of the Fair Food Program demonstrates that those dangers are neither inevitable nor beyond our power to address.

When workers have a meaningful voice in designing the protections they need — and when those protections are backed by real monitoring, enforcement, and the market power of major buyers — new threats can be met with practical solutions that work for workers, growers, and buyers alike. That is the promise of the Fair Food Program and the broader Worker-driven Social Responsibility model.

Stay tuned for more coverage of the FFP’s groundbreaking new heat protections!

CIW signs an agreement with the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (2010), leading to the creation of the Fair Food Program ProPublica: “(T)he gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program”

Last week, we shared with you the news that the largest modern-day slavery prosecution in U.S. history, dubbed “Operation Blooming Onion,” had just wrapped up. In updating you with the latest developments in that case, which the CIW uncovered over a decade ago and helped federal authorities investigate, we also reflected on the importance of preventing the kind of abuses that occurred within the Blooming Onion operation — forced labor, sexual violence, wage theft, threats, and retaliation — before they ever have a chance to take root.

This week, for our final post in this year’s Sustainer Drive, we want to share a feature-length piece from ProPublica that approaches the problem from the perspective of prevention, and to let you know how you can help be a part of the solution.

After reporting extensively on Operation Blooming Onion and the workers who suffered under that sprawling criminal conspiracy, ProPublica reporter Max Blau set out to answer a deceptively simple question: How can any of us know whether the fruits and vegetables in our grocery carts were harvested by workers whose fundamental rights were protected?

His search led him to the Fair Food Program — a program that has demonstrated how the kinds of abuses in Blooming Onion can not only be remedied after the fact, but prevented in the first place. Below are some excerpts from the ProPublica story:

My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed

“Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America.

I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed.

As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented…

That case, which I wrote about at length, revealed that thousands of foreign farmworkers had been illegally charged fees by labor contractors to work in the U.S. Some were forced to pick crops for little to no pay in what prosecutors described as a form of modern-day slavery.

This wasn’t the first case of the abuse of farmworkers at the hands of labor contractors. Or the last. Many of these harms might have been prevented if the workers had received the protections they were promised by the U.S. government. And there have been no substantial reforms to address the abuses, either…

I spoke with experts to see if there are ways for consumers to know if the people picking their blueberries are being mistreated.

Those experts, who study farm labor conditions and food supply chains, said the gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program. Under the program, supermarkets and other corporate buyers commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, at a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices.

For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.

Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. The stickers give consumers like me a clear indication that the workers who picked that produce were treated fairly.

When I’ve found these tomatoes in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.

Dozens of farms have signed on to the Fair Food Program, and participation in it has been shown to prevent abuse in the fields.

But only a few small blueberry farms participate in the program.

Until that or something else changes, consumers will know virtually nothing about the farms their blueberries come from. And they won’t be able to make choices that could make a difference in the lives of the people who pick them.”

The question ProPublica leaves us with is the same one that has driven the CIW’s work since the launch of the Fair Food Program nearly two decades ago:

Now that we know how to prevent these abuses, how do we make those protections available to every worker who needs them?

The Fair Food Program has already demonstrated what prevention looks like in practice. But for true prevention to become a reality across U.S. agriculture, the Program must grow dramatically — reaching countless more farming operations, crops, and communities, and ultimately protecting hundreds of thousands more workers every year.

The need to scale is only becoming more urgent by the day. Outside the protections of the Fair Food Program, workers remain vulnerable to the very abuses documented in Operation Blooming Onion. To make matters worse, the growing pressure on the country’s existing immigrant worker community is driving more and more growers across the country to turn to the H-2A “guestworker” visa program to recruit farmworkers, a program with a long and documented history of labor abuse and the same program the Blooming Onion ringleaders exploited to control and mistreat thousands of workers over nearly a decade. As the risks facing workers multiply, the life-saving protections of the Fair Food Program — protections created by workers themselves and backed by real, enforceable consequences — will only become more essential.

And that is why your support matters so much.

Monthly gifts help ensure that the FFP’s protections can reach more workers, on more farms, in yet more distant corners of the agricultural industry from Florida to California.

Today, the Fair Food Program is like the earliest days of the electrical grid in this country. In those early days, the electric grid, in the rare community where it existed, worked beautifully and transformed everyone’s lives, from great industries to the smallest households. But it only covered a small percentage of the entire population, and great swaths of the country remained in the dark. With time, significant resources, and great effort, however, a mass electrification movement was mounted to bring the miracle of electric light to homes across the country, and a social and economic revolution ensued.

The Fair Food Program today covers tens of thousands of farmworkers in 23 states, which sounds great… until you realize that those tens of thousands are only a small part of a population estimated to be more than one million across the country. And, yes, just like electricity, where the FFP operates it transforms everyone’s lives — from the individual farmworker to the grower and even the billion-dollar retail food giant alike. Indeed, like the electrical grid, the Fair Food Program is a shared infrastructure that operates in the background to meet everyone’s needs, ending labor abuse for workers, eliminating regulatory and reputational risk for growers and buyers, and providing ethically grown and harvested produce for consumers. It is a true miracle, one that transformed fields that federal prosecutors famously dubbed “Ground Zero for Modern-day Slavery” into what human rights experts called “The best workplace environment in American agriculture” on the front page of the New York Times in the space of just three years.

But as it was with electricity in the early days of the last century, the challenge before us today isn’t inventing the FFP; it’s building its protections out so that its life-changing power can be experienced by everyone, on every farm, big or small, in every corner of the country. We stand on the doorstep of great change, but we are not there yet.

So, as we close this year’s Sustainer Drive, we are asking you to help us take the next step. If you are not yet a Sustainer, become one today. If you already give monthly, consider increasing your sustaining gift.

The solution to human rights abuse exists. Together, we can make sure it reaches the hundreds of thousands of workers who still need it.

Together, we can complete the human rights revolution in the fields that started in Immokalee 30 years ago this year.

Become a Sustainer today.