The Student-Farmworker Alliance and the Meaning of Solidarity
What does a farmworker-led movement look like — and how can student allies support it?
This past January, I had the opportunity to attend the annual Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA) Encuentro, where young people affiliated with SFA gather together to build relationships, reflect, strategize, and work to better understand how students can work in solidarity with farmworkers in the struggle for justice in the American food supply chain. The SFA is a partner of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a Florida-based farmworker-led organization which fights for farm laborer rights. The CIW’s innovative worker-driven approach has been extraordinarily successful in improving wages and working conditions for farmworkers.
The CIW was established in 1993 by farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida. Immokalee is home to a large community of migrant workers from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti that pick tomatoes and other vegetables on a seasonal work cycle. These workers, like many migrant agricultural laborers, faced exploitation, wage theft, physical and verbal abuse, and sexual harassment while receiving wages far below poverty level; research has found that more than 80% of female farmworkers have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the fields. In response to these conditions, the Coalition formed and began organizing boycotts, hunger strikes, and marches to demand dialogue with growers and owners. The CIW agitated for worker representation in decision-making processes (now called the worker-driven social responsibility model) in order to ensure that the needs and rights of workers are prioritized in supply chains.
By 2001, the CIW had won some wage increases for workers and prosecuted several modern-day slavery cases. They started to look at the systemic causes of farmworker exploitation and realized that corporations like supermarkets, fast food chains, and dining services purchased a huge amount of fruits and vegetables. According to the CIW, the corporate food industry “[leverages its] buying power to demand the lowest possible prices from its suppliers, in turn exerting a powerful downward pressure on wages and working conditions in these suppliers’ operations.” This analysis created a turning point in their organizing strategy.
The ‘Power Sandwich’
The CIW’s work evolved to tackle the purchasing power of corporations. The CIW conceptualizes relationships in the food systems in what I like to call a “power sandwich:”
Farmworkers → Growers — Corporations ← Consumers
When pursuing this new strategy, it was clear to the CIW that young people as students and consumers are powerful actors. Because fast food marketing largely targets youth and food service companies supply many campus dining halls, a boycott led by such a major customer base would significantly affect profits. Students constituted a politically sympathetic and economically powerful constituency that had the power to help amplify the voices of farmworkers in the supply chain. This is where the Student-Farmworker Alliance began.
Through boycotts, protests, and more, the SFA played a major role in persuading dining companies, like Sodexo and Aramark, and huge fast food chains, like Taco Bell, McDonalds, and Walmart, to only purchase from farms that ensure improved wages and working conditions for their workers.
The CIW’s success in guaranteeing ethical purchasing practices for a few companies led to the creation of formalized Fair Food Program (FFP) in 2011, a partnership among farmers, farmworkers, and corporations that guarantees humane wages and working conditions for the workers who pick fruits and vegetables on participating farms. One key feature of the FFP is the Fair Food Premium, a pay increase for farmworkers paid by participating buyers. Through the Fair Food Premium, over $15 million has been directly paid to farmworkers. The FFP also mandates zero tolerance for sexual harassment & violence, education for farmworkers, and mandatory water & shade breaks. By putting an economic incentive on anti-sexual harassment policies, the FFP is a unique and impactful solution to empower workers.
Why were these campaigns so successful? The unique organizing philosophy of the SFA can provide some clues — and inspiration for students aspiring to support other movements.
- We work with — not for — farmworkers.
Only farmworkers can speak for themselves. We need to take leadership from farmworkers and the work of the SFA is centered around the voice and goals of the CIW.
2. We have a powerful voice in working with farmworkers for systemic change.
Young people have a meaningful voice in our communities. As consumers and students, we are directly impacted by unethical corporations and we have a stake in ending worker exploitation.
3. We organize to build long-term movements for collective liberation.
Even though our struggles are not the same, they converge. We are not free if we are not all free.
Sacrifice and Solidarity
On the last day of the Encuentro, the participants talked about what solidarity means. Leo, a representative from the CIW, said solidarity means the commitment to a movement and standing up for a cause by sacrificing something. Sacrifice and solidarity are inseparable from each other. Sacrifice can come in different forms: recognizing one’s compliancy in oppressive systems, being humble, spending time and resources to show up to an action, and more. Leo shared the following equation:
Consciousness + Commitment = Change
How can we create a movement for “just food” at Yale? In the greater New Haven community? I believe we need to start by recognizing the injustices in the New Haven food environment. To become real allies, we need to take conscious steps to build coalitions and support the work of existing social justice organizations, understand our power as consumers and students to make conscious purchases, and place our local struggles in the context of larger injustices. Many Yale students enter college looking for community. Organizing around food, something so central to life, might be one way to build this community.
Lauren Kim SM `20 is an Environmental Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration Major.
If you’re interested in joining the SFA’s Core Organizing team, please email lauren.kim@yale.edu.
