[5] The Fair Food Program is credited with helping eradicate modern-day slavery and forced labor on participating farms and has extended its protections to workers in 10 states and nine crops domestically.
[1][6] Several current participating buyers in the Fair Food Program have pledged their support for expanding the enforceable protections for workers in the three countries with pilot farms, including Mexico, Chile, and South Africa.
In turn, farms, or Participating Growers, which follow the worker-developed Code of Conduct gain access to sell their produce to Buyers with preferential ordering.
[15] The FFSC performs field audits interviewing a majority of farmworkers on each participating farm seasonally, operates a 24/7 confidential hotline maintained by Spanish, Haitian Creole, and English-language speakers allows workers to anonymously voice complaints regarding living and working conditions, and sends reports of code of conduct violations to growers in the form of corrective action plans.
[1][16] The FFSC also works with the CIW to host on-the-clock education sessions informing farmworkers on participating farms of their rights and responsibilities under the program.
[17][18] Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, a retired New York State Supreme Court Justice is the current executive director of the FFSC.
[24][25] In addition, the Fair Food Program is reported to have dramatically transformed the working conditions in portions of the agricultural sector in which it has participating farms.
[3] The FFP has been lauded by the United Nations as an “international benchmark” in the fight against modern-day slavery and called one of “the most important social-impact success stories of the past century” by the Harvard Business Review.
This creates a virtuous constant feedback loop, in which complaint resolutions provide for ongoing monitoring and enforcement complemented by the broader investigations and more expansive changes enabled through audits and corrective action plans.
This suggests that at least part of the workforce now trust in the system enough to call their employer first, without fear of any retaliation.”[31] In 2021, Oxfam Great Britain conducted a survey querying human rights experts about effective means of worker representation in the economy.