Fair trade certifications impede worker organizing, according to new report

The U.S. imports produce from countries around the world, but labor laws vary by country and often aren’t consistent with ours. This inconsistency, coupled with the challenges of enforcement, is one discussion in the movement called conscious consumerism — a capitalist effort to effect positive social, environmental and economic change through purchasing. But how do we really know that what we buy has been ethically sourced?

Enter fair trade certifications. Certifying organizations determine a range of ethical standards spanning across pay, working conditions and environmental impact. They claim to monitor the adherence of the growers they certify, who, in turn, pay to display the organization’s label on their packaging. Most fair trade certifications carry out their work through what’s known as multi-stakeholder initiatives, collaborations between businesses, advocacy organizations, governments and other bodies that aim to address shared issues, like human rights and sustainability.

A new report argues that the two main fair trade certifiers operating in the San Quintín valley — Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) and Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) — fail at their main multi-stakeholder objective of protecting the Mexican farmworkers whose backbreaking labor produces the berries we enjoy.

In October, the Corporate Accountability Lab, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to combating corporate abuse, released “Certified Exploitation: How Equitable Food Initiative and Fair Trade USA Fail to Protect Farmworkers in the Mexican Produce Industry.” Written by James Daria, assistant professor of anthropology and co-director of the food studies program at Spelman College, and Anna Canning, director of communications for the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network, the report is the product of on-the-ground research and observation conducted in San Quintín since 2016, including more than 200 interviews with workers, labor contractors, community leaders, activists and union leaders.

What Daria and Canning ultimately found is that the workers who harvest the fruits that bear ETI and FTUSA certifications “often live and labor in conditions they call ‘twenty-first century slavery.’”

Image versus reality

With photos of smiling farmworkers splashed across its website, FTUSA claims to be building “an innovative model of responsible business, conscious consumerism, and shared value to eliminate poverty and enable sustainable development for farmers, workers, their families, and communities around the world.” The organization says that it has the ability to quantifiably measure its sweeping range of standards for community organization, individual empowerment, safe and secure workplaces, income stabilization and more.

EFI makes similarly bold claims: According to its website, the label means a grower has met more than “300 rigorous standards for labor practices, food safety and pest management.” But for a consumer, the breakdown of those standards — which claim to be some of the most rigorous in the U.S. — can be difficult to decipher.

The testimonies of the jornaleros (day laborers) featured in “Certified Exploitation” belies these certifiers’ claims. They assert that, far from bringing everyone to the table to ensure responsible business practices, the certifiers’ processes further marginalize and subjugate farmworkers.

The majority of San Quintín’s jornaleros are Indigenous. They often speak Indigenous dialects and travel thousands of miles from their families in southern states like Oaxaca and Chiapas to labor for an average pay of $100 pesos ($6 USD) a day. To keep up with demand from the north, what used to be seasonal work has become increasingly year-round and full-time work.

Whose voices are heard?

In Mexico, there are worker unions that represent workers and employer unions (also known as “protection unions” “company unions”) that represent the interests of the employers. Many of the growers in San Quintín have company unions that operate on employer protection contracts designed, in part, to deter worker organizing.

Ramirez Ruiz explains that, when the workers attempt to organize, the company unions step in to say that the workers are already represented by them. However, as the report outlines, these unions’ employer protection agreements are designed to benefit the growers, ultimately leaving the workers without actual representation or defense in the face of labor violations.

While the report covers the myriad critiques of these certification systems, the issues it raises boil down to a few central systemic failings. One is that the fair trade standards are often collectively set — a process intended to include jornaleros, though this is rarely the case in reality. Another is that certifiers (and the third-party auditors they use) often work with the same company unions that obfuscate actual worker representation, especially in the auditing process.

“There’s this concept that you get all the different stakeholders together to weigh in on what the standards should be. You have companies, suppliers, brands and nonprofits all weighing in, and that sounds really good in theory,” Canning says. “But what it means at the end of the day is that you’ve got all these voices weighing in on what standards of work and living should be for the workers, but the workers don’t have a voice in it.”

This lack of actual worker representation is one of the central issues the report raises with fair trade certifications. “Both FTUSA and EFI claim to protect workers’ rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining. However, in reality, they undermine these rights,” it reads. “While both certification schemes have explicit standards related to freedom of association and collective bargaining, these rights are routinely and systemically violated.”

After the standards are set, enforcement often relies on announced, scheduled audits from third-party auditors. While the auditing process stipulates that workers must be interviewed, this is often done in the presence of those in leadership positions, either in company unions or in roles created by the organization, like EFI’s Leadership Team, designed to bring together management, fieldworkers and labor in other functions to try to resolve conflicts. In these instances, workers may not speak freely for fear of retaliation from their supervisors, and their concerns may go unheard and unaddressed through the auditing process.

For Canning, the crux of the report is that “there’s a growing body of research saying that [the fair trade certification] model doesn’t live up to its promises. It isn’t making the change that people are being told it makes. What this report adds is showing how these certifications are actually undermining the organizing workers are doing to improve their conditions.” Instead, she says, these certifications help prop up the exploitation of labor by keeping consumer demands high and business lucrative without having to meet the needs of their workers.

Not everyone agrees that the workers’ voices are left out of the conversation. “I’ve spent a lot of time in San Quintín,” says Erik Nicholson, an EFI co-founder who went on to start a consulting company focused on worker-centered agriculture solutions. “There are over 100 farms in that valley, six of which are EFI certified. I’ve spent time talking to workers in their homes unaccompanied… and what I can tell you is that EFI has significantly moved the needle in improving conditions on those farms, unequivocally.”

Nicholson disagrees with the claim that certifications can impede organizing efforts. “In conversations with workers,” he continues, “we’ve [said] we can do two things. We can just do nothing, and absent complete labor reform, we will not engage and just stay away. Or we can engage and under [our] standards there are provisions that you could enjoy. What’s your choice? For workers, the decision was loud and clear: If you can get us more money, if you can improve conditions for us, we’ll take it.”

Where we go from here

The report argues that effective change must center workers, and outlines how, thanks to two notable past strikes, this has often come with worker-led unions at the helm. In 2015, 50,000 farm workers led a three-month strike in San Quintín over low pay and poor working conditions that caused severe supply chain interruptions during the peak strawberry harvest. In 2022, some 300 workers went on strike with the goal of increasing pay per box of strawberries picked. With the help of SINDJA, it was resolved one day later and workers saw their pay increase. However, many of the demands of the 2015 strike remain unmet.

In the end, the report outlines how companies and organizations can be part of the solution instead of the problem. There are six recommendations for certifiers and brands, meant to meaningfully address the issues raised in the report. The authors would like to see organizations refuse to certify growers with known labor rights abuses, such as the presence of employer unions. They suggest directly engaging independent workers’ organizations to replace voluntary certifications schemes with binding agreements, ensuring compliance with national labor laws and bringing workers on as full employees rather than contracting them. Finally, they recommend certifiers increase their prices to cover “the true cost of rights-respecting practices.”

The nine worker demands that complement the recommendations are much the same that San Quintín workers articulated in 2015, calling for good faith negotiations with independent worker unions and an end to employer protection contracts, forced overtime and temporary contracts.

Ultimately, Canning describes the report’s recommendations as “obvious,” but says that what they amount to on the whole is greater than the sum of their parts. “We need to move away from letting corporations rebrand the status quo as ethical, and really change the status quo,” she says. “It’s a failed modality. We need to move away from this model of certification to actually supporting binding agreements with [independent] worker organizations across the supply chain.”