Fair Food Program eliminated agricultural migrant worker abuses

OLATHE — Alejandro Soria knows he has it good here.

For eight years, the Mexican native has been coming to Colorado’s Western Slope, picking and sorting produce for the Tuxedo Corn Company.

The difference in working conditions between the United States and his home country is stark, he said: Laborers get regular breaks. Workers have water readily accessible whenever they’re thirsty.

Unenforced Labor

In this three-part report, The Denver Post details abuses of foreign workers in Colorado’s agricultural supply chain — and a lack of action from state and federal regulators.

Click here to read more from this series.

“We developed a family here,” Soria said in November as he sorted onions destined for grocery stores across the state. “It changed my life.”

The workers at Tuxedo Corn come to the United States every year as part of a federal agricultural work program. The H-2A visa allows American growers to hire seasonal employees from outside the country for work in which they cannot get domestic laborers.

Working conditions in this program are notoriously spotty and ripe for abuse. An investigation by The Denver Post found the state and federal government rarely bar problematic employers from bringing foreign workers — even when they have violated labor laws. Colorado’s sheepherding industry is one of the worst human rights offenders, The Post found, while wage theft remains a problem on farms throughout the state.

Tuxedo Corn’s employees, though, are part of a growing movement in Colorado called the Fair Food Program, designed to increase accountability and worker protections throughout the food supply chain.

David Harold, who runs Tuxedo Corn with his father, joined the program last year following a divisive agriculture bill passed by the state legislature in 2021. He and other Colorado growers said they felt advocates and lawmakers cast farmers in a negative light during the bill process, when many say they’re treating their workers well.

“I needed to have a program that backs up my labor practices, where workers could endorse me as a good boss,” Harold said. “I’m trying to do a good job by my labor, my consumer and my community.”

A harvest crew with the Tuxedo Corn Company rips ears of sweet corn from a field off Falcon Road southwest of Olathe, at sunrise on Monday, July 22, 2024. (Photo by William Woody/Special to The Denver Post)

In the final installment of a three-part series on seasonal migrant workers, The Post outlines how the Fair Food Program, harnessing the power of consumer demand, has effectively eliminated workplace abuses in agricultural fields.

Here’s how it works: All players in the food supply chain enter legally binding agreements to adhere to certain working conditions for laborers. Participating buyers are required to stop purchasing from growers who fail to comply with the code of conduct.

Growers who take part in the program receive purchasing preference from participating buyers. Buyers pay an extra premium that goes to workers.

Workers, in turn, benefit from better working conditions, including a 24/7 complaint resolution hotline, regular Fair Food auditing and know-your-rights education.

“It should be the government taking care of this,” said Derek Brinks, associate director with the Fair Food Standards Council. “The reality is they don’t.”

History of the Fair Food Program

The Fair Food Program was birthed in the pits of the Florida tomato industry.

Workers there had spent decades toiling under what a U.S. Department of Justice official once called “ground zero for modern slavery.”

Laborers, mainly from the Caribbean and Central and South America, worked under involuntary servitude: Their housing sat miles from civilization. Employers stole wages and provided no shade or water. Sexual harassment ran rampant.

In 1993, a small group of workers met in a local church. Those meetings turned into a nationwide worker revolution spurred by a monthlong hunger strike and a 234-mile march across the state.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, as the organization became known, earned workers massive wage increases — some up to 25% — and a slew of new protections.

Importantly, their fight put pressure on major buyers of Florida tomatoes, including Taco Bell and McDonald’s, to only purchase from reputable growers who respected human rights. They paid a penny extra per pound of tomatoes to bring farmworkers closer to a living wage.

Soon Burger King and Walmart joined the program. As did other major buyers, including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Chipotle Mexican Grill. All agree to a code of conduct covering wages and hours, retaliation protections, and health and safety standards.

The Fair Food Program has expanded rapidly since its founding in 2011, counting growers in 23 states and five countries as members.

The organization has also earned extensive accolades. Harvard Business Review in 2017 called it one of the “most important social-impact success stories of the past century.”

Susan Marquis, a Princeton University visiting professor who authored a book about Fair Food’s origins, called the initiative “the most effective human rights program in existence right now.”

“In Fair Food Program fields, abuse long endemic to our nation’s large-scale agricultural operations is now effectively eliminated,” she wrote.

Farmworker Brayan Fabian Hernandez Yevismea searches a peach tree for ripe fruit to pick at dawn at the Rancho Durazno farm east of Palisade, Colorado, on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. (Photo by William Woody/Special to The Denver Post)

Modern-day slavery, forced labor, physical violence and sexual assault are virtually nonexistent in these fields, Marquis found. Wage theft and verbal abuse are increasingly rare. Worker pay, meanwhile, increased between 60% and 100%, the author found.

By contrast, corporate social responsibility and multi-stakeholder initiatives — touted by companies as solutions to worker abuses in global supply chains — have been “ineffective at best and exacerbating at worst,” Marquis wrote in a 2023 report.

The only model that has proven effective: worker-driven social responsibility organizations like the Fair Food Program.

“It’s not handwaving, it’s not greenwashing,” Marquis said in an interview. “It actually works.”

The numbers back up the program’s impact on worker conditions.

Fair Food investigators have received nearly 4,000 complaints from workers at participating growers since the program started. None have resulted in U.S. Department of Labor cases or class-action lawsuits.

Over the past six years, no growers have been suspended from the program. And over the previous five years, no growers have been put on probation for serious offenses.

Eighty-three percent of participating farms reported no incidents of sexual harassment, according to Fair Food’s most recent annual report. Studies have shown as many as 80% of farm-working women reported experiencing sexual harassment on the job.

“It leads to happier workers”

Gwen Cameron wanted to put it to a vote.

The co-owner of Rancho Durazno, a farm in Palisade, liked the idea of a worker-driven social responsibility program. But if the decision would impact her workers, she wanted them to have a say.

After learning more about Fair Food in the summer of 2022, Cameron’s seasonal laborers voted unanimously to join the cause. In doing so, Rancho Durazno became the first Colorado company to sign on to Fair Foods’ stringent code of conduct.

“It does add an administrative burden, but to me, it’s worth it,” Cameron said. “Both for the support it provides workers and for market access.”

LEFT — Farmworkers Martin Aldair Valle Espinoza, left, and Angel Antonio Garay Lopez use ladders to carefully pick peaches from an orchard at dawn at the Rancho Durazno farm east of Palisade, Colorado, on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. RIGHT — Crew foreman Adolfo Yevismea Jupa, left, and Emmanuel Enrique Aguamea Gutierrez sort harvested peaches at the Rancho Durazno farm. (Photos by William Woody/Special to The Denver Post)

Her business already had a longstanding relationship with Whole Foods. But after Cameron entered the Fair Food Program, the national supermarket chain significantly increased its purchase of organic peaches, apricots and melons from the Palisade farm.

As part of the program, Whole Foods pays a premium on top of each pound — 5 cents for peaches and 2 cents for melons. Eighty-five percent of that extra money goes to workers.

Harold, the Tuxedo Corn owner, said joining the Fair Food Program is akin to hiring a human resources department.

“You have to pay them for audits, pay them to do training, pay them to comply,” he said. “But it leads to happier workers.”

Soria, the seasonal worker who spoke to The Post away from his bosses, said he’s never had an issue with pay in his eight years on the job.

The program “enables us to communicate better about our needs,” he said in Spanish through an interpreter. “It helps our well-being on the job.”

Since Rancho Durazno joined in 2022, nine other Colorado farms have followed suit, covering onion, sweet corn, peach and melon pickers. By 2025, the organization expects at least 16 Centennial State growers to be signed up — the most of any state.

Brinks, the Fair Food Standards Council worker, said they weren’t targeting Colorado specifically, but saw an opportunity. States and the federal government simply have too many gaps in enforcing worker protections, he said.

“The promise of rights without backing it up is worse than no rights in the first place,” Brinks said.

With robust protection, workers feel more comfortable speaking up about problems on the job.

“People assume that if you complain, you get fired,” he said. “That’s the norm in American agriculture.”

Fear of retaliation is a common belief among workers in the H-2A program. Many have good reason to fear retribution — it could mean losing their ability to come back to the farm the next year. These employees, unlike their American counterparts, can only work for one employer on their visa, meaning they cannot hop to a better farm if the working conditions lag.

“My workers can complain about the water, but with Fair Food, they’re not getting fired,” Harold said. “It’s not like the all-powerful white landlord will axe me.”

A harvest crew with the Tuxedo Corn Company rip ears of sweet corn from the ground and into a mechanical harvester southwest of Olathe, Colorado, at sunrise on Monday, July 22, 2024. (Photo by William Woody/Special to The Denver Post)

Other Colorado farmers eye the program with skepticism.

Bruce Talbott, co-owner of Talbott’s Mountain Gold farm in Palisade, said he doesn’t “think we have an issue” on worker treatment. He elected not to join the Fair Food Program due to a lack of confidence that customers would pay the premium up-charge on his produce.

“The Colorado fruit industry is very good as to how we treat people,” Talbott said.

The U.S. Department of Labor in 2011 found violations of federal labor laws at Talbott’s farm, including not paying workers the prevailing wage and failing to pay for workers’ visa appointments. Talbott attributed the violations to recent H-2A rule changes that he didn’t know about.

“The purpose of the audits was: ‘We don’t want you using this (H-2A) program,’ ” he said. “That was made pretty obvious to us.”

For Rosa Culbertson, a grower outside Delta, the program adds another layer of red tape to an already long list of demands.

“Unless it’s required, I won’t voluntarily sign up for another requirement,” she said, adding that her farm already follows many of the worker protections included in the program.

Rancho Durazno’s Cameron, for her part, hopes more Colorado growers will join the charge. Farmers are old-school in how they make decisions, she said: They talk to their neighbors to see what they’re doing. If she can be the guinea pig, maybe others will follow suit.

“Ideally that kind of market incentive is significant enough that farms who may not be treating workers well are pressured to join the Fair Food Program because of that requirement,” Cameron said. “We’re a ways away from that, but if they’re able to do that within the tomato industry in Florida, it’s certainly possible in other sectors of agriculture.”

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Farmworkers Brayan Fabian Hernandez Yevismea and Jorge David Alvarez Ibarra walk through a peach orchard to find ripe fruit to pick at the Rancho Durazno farm east of Palisade, Colorado, at dawn on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. (Photo by William Woody/Special to The Denver Post)