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Over the last century, people have started demanding more from the businesses where they shop. Whether it be a pair of jeans or the food on their plates, consumers want to know that what they’re buying isn’t just good quality but also ethically and sustainably made.
In the early 20th century, groups like the National Consumers League and the now-defunct League of Women Shoppers organized consumers to take advantage of their power in an effort to improve labor protections and the rights of workers in the United States. Today, ethically minded consumers are also motivated by climate change and animal rights, as the consequences of our overconsumption have become clearer.
Fast-forward 90 years and the global marketplace has become exponentially more complex. Globalization has remade how and where corporations make products. If it was difficult for activists at the turn of the 20th century to identify ethically made products, the challenge to the modern consumer is even greater.
You might think regulations or legislation could compel companies to produce more ethically made goods. But ultimately, no one government is responsible for a supply chain that crosses borders and oceans. In a globalized economy, nobody is in charge. So “corporate social responsibility” — or the idea that companies can hold themselves accountable — emerged, responding to this consumer demand.
In practice, corporate social responsibility can look like companies donating to charities every year, committing to net-zero emissions by a certain date, or focusing on labor practices. To prove they’re doing this work, companies will partner with nonprofits or hire third-party consultants to audit their supply chains, and then measure and report their progress in annual reports, press releases, and on their websites.
These practices are now nominally widespread in modern business. According to the EPA, roughly 80 percent of all Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies publish a report on their corporate social responsibility practices and progress.
But while corporate social responsibility sounds good on paper, the workers deep within these corporations’ supply chains — the ones that sew the clothes you wear and harvest the produce and ingredients for your food — say that they are not feeling the benefits of such programs.
Despite the profits they help companies rake in through their labor, many of these workers are still making pennies while stuck working in unsafe environments. In some cases, the conditions are so bad that they amount to exploitation that is clearly unethical and, in many cases, illegal, as many labor rights advocates and corporate watchdogs have argued. Some of what corporate responsibility programs claim they’re doing and have achieved, workers and advocates say, qualifies as greenwashing or “social washing” — using these strategies and initiatives to mislead the public and appear as if they have robust, effective environmental or labor practices.
To fill the gap between a commitment and reality, collectives of workers and labor advocates worldwide are organizing to create a solution that will not just address labor abuses when they happen but encourage the prevention of exploitation altogether. They come from a variety of industries, and they’re leaving the promises of corporate social responsibility behind and creating something new — and more importantly, effective — in its place: worker-driven social responsibility.
What is corporate social responsibility?
The price of America’s rapid industrialization at the turn of the 20th century, which brought dramatic economic expansion and the proliferation of consumer goods, was unchecked corporate power. It was common for young children to be employed in dangerous workplaces, for factory workers to take home just a couple of dollars after hours of work, and for workers to be seriously injured or killed on the job.
In response to this power imbalance, activists and writers like Upton Sinclair pressured the government to enact various reforms, including labor rights. This period, known as the progressive era, was marked by a growing sense of humanitarian concern for the vulnerable and the idea that the government should do something about it. (Though people of color and immigrants were largely excluded from these conversations and reforms.)
In 1953, Howard Bowen, an American economist known as the “father of corporate social responsibility,” argued that business owners should also take the idea of human welfare seriously in his book, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. He said the choices of businessmen have significant influence on the lives of everyday people, and thus, businesses should operate in a way that considers “valued social goals,” like a high standard of living, personal security, and justice.
Corporate social responsibility went mainstream during the new wave of globalization and the growth of multinational corporations that followed in the second half of the 20th century. As these businesses expanded their reach and production speed, they sought to cut their costs by contracting cheaper labor in other countries with weak worker protections.
This idea of outsourcing wasn’t necessarily new. Businesses in the US already had a history of moving to Southern states where they knew corporate regulation was more relaxed and labor would be less expensive, made possible by the racist legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. A century later, new technology — particularly the internet — made it even easier for companies to scale up and outsource their operations. By moving overseas, companies could obscure unsafe working conditions from American consumers, who might’ve known very little about how their products were being made.
But public awareness of the costs of globalization started to grow in the early 1990s, thanks to stories and reports from human rights organizations and newsrooms that laid out the abysmal working conditions and standards of major brands, often in their factories overseas. Nike, the world’s biggest shoe seller, faced backlash after multiple stories came out about grueling conditions and the use of child labor in its contracted factories, sparking boycotts and protests against Nike from consumers and activists alike. Businesses saw how consumers could rise against them if they weren’t careful about what went on in their supply chains, leading to more companies developing their own voluntary corporate social responsibility initiatives to address their environmental and social impacts.
Today, corporate social responsibility programs are widespread. They often refer to commitments a company makes toward a particular area of social impact, like diversity, ethical sourcing, or the environment. It usually looks like this: A company will set goals around one or more of these areas, assess its progress, and then publish its results.
To legitimize these programs, companies will hire social auditing firms, seek certifications from multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) like the Fair Labor Association or Fair Trade to show they meet certain standards, or develop codes of conduct around labor and human rights. Such programs matter to consumers, and they’re willing to pay more for sustainably made products — and hey, if something is good for both the world and for business, what’s the harm?
Corporate social responsibility in practice
Corporate social responsibility is everywhere today, driven by consumer demand and a growing socially conscious workforce. One 2023 study found that over 80 percent of companies are increasing their budgets for sustainability initiatives. Chief sustainability officers are now common, and more companies are disclosing the exact factories their products are made in and the reported conditions.
But it’s hard to know how honest or effective these programs really are at protecting labor and the environment.
Part of the issue is they’re voluntary. While companies must comply with local, federal, and international laws, that’s the end of their legal obligations. Beyond that, there’s no requirement for corporate social responsibility programs to show their methodology or metrics for calculating their progress and no obligation to release all results from a social audit. A company can change its corporate social responsibility programs at any point, or drop them entirely.
A lot of these initiatives also have a top-down approach: High-level management in a company will design its corporate social responsibility programs with no requirement to seek input from people they may impact. “That failure to really actively incorporate workers in a meaningful way in the auditing process means that social auditors miss huge things all the time,” said Charity Ryerson, executive director of the Corporate Accountability Lab.
One study that highlights these concerns in-depth is the 2020 “Not Fit-for-Purpose” report from the Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity. After 10 years of analyzing dozens of MSIs — tools that companies often use within their corporate social responsibility programs — the report found that broadly, MSIs were neither capable nor designed to hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses in their supply chains, and didn’t provide sufficient access to remedies for those impacted by such abuses. Well-known supply chain MSIs that have been around for decades, like Fairtrade International, the Rainforest Alliance, and the Fair Labor Association, were some of the many MSIs analyzed in their research.
The report included interviews with workers at certified factories in Cameroon and the Philippines, in which workers said they were told ahead of time what to say during audits and were threatened with retaliation if they didn’t comply. If workers can be intimidated into keeping quiet, and if audits don’t catch that and move forward with certifying the factory as a fair workplace, then social auditing, certifications, and MSIs are, at best, well-intentioned but ineffective tools for preventing and correcting abuses. At worst, they preserve corporate power at the expense of communities affected by company activity.
“Some [corporate social responsibility programs] have really good intentions and people working really hard,” Ryerson said. “Other ones were designed as a PR initiative, front to end.”
Giving the veneer of social responsibility without actually addressing the underlying problems is misleading to consumers and harmful to the communities affected by these businesses’ operations. Businesses and corporations may tout their high standards for ethical sourcing or their commitment to ensuring safe working conditions across their supply chains — but in reality, many workers are still prone to abuse and exploitation because, fundamentally, the business model that created these poor working conditions hasn’t changed.
But some workers are organizing to disrupt that model entirely.
The rise of worker-driven social responsibility
Around the same time that corporate social responsibility was taking off in the 1990s, a group of farmworkers in a rural Florida town called Immokalee had a meeting that would challenge the status quo, from the bottom of the supply chain all the way to the top.
The farmworkers were Mexican, Guatemalan, and Haitian migrants, and they harvested buckets of tomatoes in grueling conditions for as long as 12 hours a day, receiving poverty wages for providing crucial produce to US grocery stores and restaurants. The fields they worked in were rife with verbal and physical abuse, sexual harassment, wage theft, and, in the worst cases, involuntary servitude.
Tired of the exploitation they encountered in the fields, the Immokalee farmworkers discussed how they could really change the way things were done. This 1993 meeting marked the beginning of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and, later on, the first ever worker-driven social responsibility program.
Lucas Benitez, one of the founders of the CIW, told me that, at first, the farmworkers thought their employers, the tomato growers, had all the power. “Then we came to see and recognize what was essentially an invisible hand that was putting that pressure further and further down on the supply chain,” Benitez said via an interpreter. “That started at the top, because it’s those retailers that fundamentally dictate to growers the conditions under which that food is being produced. And so that’s really where the power lay, and so that’s where we turned.”
In 2001, the CIW set its sights on Taco Bell and called for a boycott over the reportedly abysmal conditions in its tomato supply chain. Four years later, Taco Bell signed an agreement that included vital demands from the CIW: Taco Bell would pay a premium for its tomatoes that would go directly to workers’ paychecks, it would only buy from growers who met the code of conduct that protected workers, and this would be monitored and enforced by an investigative body with help from the CIW. It was all backed by a legally binding contract.
A binding contract is crucial to worker-driven social responsibility, a sharp contrast to those toothless corporate social responsibility initiatives. If one of the tomato growers that Taco Bell bought from was found not to be passing on the premium to workers’ pay or wasn’t living up to the code of conduct, then Taco Bell was obligated to stop buying from the grower until they corrected their actions. Thus, it incentivized the growers to abide by the standards set by this agreement. Corporate social responsibility programs, on the other hand, don’t regulate themselves in this way because no legal agreements are involved.
By 2011, the first worker-driven social responsibility program, created by the CIW, had a name: the Fair Food Program. Since then, it has secured agreements with McDonald’s, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, and other major retailers, and now covers 90 percent of tomato growers in Florida. In mid-June, the CIW announced that 27 farms covering thousands of workers are set to join the Fair Food Program after the United States Department of Agriculture announced big financial incentives for farms that strengthen worker protections.
The Fair Food Program has also expanded its operations and strengthened its standards since that first contract. It now includes worker-to-worker education sessions and monitoring from the Fair Food Standards Council, which audits farms extensively, operates a 24/7 complaint line for farmworkers, and investigates potential violations of the Fair Food Program. Its work evolves as workers face new challenges: A few years ago, the Fair Food Program added heat protections to its standards as the threat of climate change on workers grows and the absence of a federal workplace heat standard leaves most farmworkers endangered.
According to its website, the Fair Food Program has resulted in more than $45 million being added to workers’ paychecks, over 82,000 farmworkers attending worker-to-worker education sessions, and over 9,300 violations caught during audits and addressed by growers.
“There has been a bright light of not only hope but real and positive change in the darkness of continuing violence and human rights violations,” wrote Susan Marquis, a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, in an extensive report. “In Fair Food Program fields, abuse long endemic to our nation’s large-scale agricultural operations is now effectively eliminated.”
The concept has spread to workers in other industries across the US and around the world.
A group of dairy workers was directly inspired by the Fair Food Program to found Migrant Justice, a farmworker-centered organization. After learning about the CIW’s work, Migrant Justice created its own worker-driven social responsibility program, Milk with Dignity, that included all of the same standards as the Fair Food Program. Milk with Dignity got Ben and Jerry’s to sign on as its first retailer in 2017.
“For us, [the Fair Food Program] was a light,” former dairy worker and current Migrant Justice staffer Enrique Balcazar told me via an interpreter. “That was a really exciting thing to realize that there was this model … for us to bring change to our context to the dairy industry.”
On the other side of the world, around the time the Fair Food Program was established, garment workers in the Asian and Pacific regions were facing increasingly serious issues of their own. As more major Western clothing brands outsourced work overseas, garment workers were forced to work in unsafe conditions, like factories housed in dilapidated buildings with little to no safety standards — a dangerous combination that led to fatalities in the form of fires and building collapses.
In Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest clothing exporters, human rights groups and labor organizations worked together to create a program that would legally bind brands to address working conditions and safety in Bangladesh factories in order to prevent these fires and collapses from happening again and again. Unfortunately, they had little success getting signatories until after the worst disaster in the garment industry struck. In 2013, a building that housed multiple garment factories called Rana Plaza collapsed, killing over 1,110 workers.
Rana Plaza had been audited prior to the collapse, and a day before the tragedy, cracks were discovered in the building. Yet, workers were told it was safe to go to work. The Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitoring group, wrote that brand audits and inspections failed to check for critical safety issues, like fire exits or building integrity.
A month after the Rana Plaza collapse, 43 corporations based in over a dozen countries, alongside local and global trade unions, signed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. It required participating retailers to provide financial support so suppliers could afford safety renovations, education sessions around worker safety, consistent inspections, and a mechanism for workers to make complaints and independent investigators to follow through — all key aspects for creating a legitimately safe workplace.
Since this first agreement, the Accord has evolved into the International Accord and expanded to Pakistan. While there’s still a long way to go before the garment industry as a whole is free from hazardous conditions, the International Accord has been a major step toward creating a safer, more sustainable environment for garment workers covered by the agreement.
Where is worker-driven social responsibility going?
While the success of the worker-driven social responsibility model shouldn’t be underestimated, it’s still in its early stages and has not quite yet become a household name in the business world. Organizing meaningful change takes time. The responsibility shouldn’t be placed entirely on workers to end their exploitation: Governments need to improve regulations and enforcement to protect workers.
But it’s still an exciting moment for worker-driven social responsibility, as a growing number of industries outside of the US are looking at the model. Funding has been secured to explore worker-driven social responsibility in Spain’s farms, where migrant workers face abysmal conditions; a $2.5 million dollar grant from the Department of Labor was awarded to implement a worker-driven social responsibility program like the Fair Food Program in Chile, Mexico, and South Africa; and in the United Kingdom, they’re about six months into their worker-driven social responsibility pilot program in northeast Scotland’s seafood industry, where migrant fishers are often isolated, paid low wages, and abused.
“We need to make sure that the only model that is given any credibility and is demanded by the supply chain is something that centers workers,” Chris Williams, a fisheries expert with the International Transport Workers’ Federation working on the pilot program in Scotland, told me. ”Because otherwise, it’s all just a waste of time.”
The exploration of worker-driven social responsibility across different industries doesn’t just center workers — it’s led by them, too. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is involved in all of these developing projects as the expert and original pioneer of this emerging field.
“With [worker-driven social responsibility, we’re no longer letting the foxes guard the henhouse,” Benitez, co-founder of the CIW, told me. “We as workers are protecting our own rights.”
