Have you ever sat down to eat and looked at the tomatoes in your salad or the watermelon sliced on the plate and wondered: How did this get here?
Not the journey from farm to store. Not the truck that drove it or the shelf where you bought it. But the hands that picked it. The person who bent over in the brutal Florida heat, hour after hour, to harvest the food your family is about to eat.
Gerardo Reyes Chavez wants you to know that story. The Emory Climate Hub recently sat down with Gerardo, a longtime leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, to hear firsthand how farmworkers built one of the most successful labor rights movements in modern U.S. history.
Gerardo grew up in Zacatecas, Mexico, and moved to Immokalee, Florida in 1999 at just 21 years old. His first job was picking tomatoes. He remembers it as backbreaking work under the scorching sun, getting paid just 40 to 45 cents per 32-pound bucket. Understanding that he was being exploited, he demanded basic rights like better pay, food, and decent housing. Unfortunately, those demands cost him his job and his only shelter.
While searching for a place to live, he met two farm workers who later became his roommates. Both were part of an organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a group built by and for farmworkers. Through them, he began to realize that the exploitation he faced was not an isolated experience. He learned about the broader system of abuse and the challenges many farm workers faced every day. They also introduced him to the work of CIW, from helping prosecute modern-day slavery cases to organizing workers to demand their rights. Eventually, he accompanied them to a CIW meeting.
“I went to one meeting,” Gerardo says. “And since that moment, I have never stopped participating.”
What Gerardo learned at those meetings shocked him. The piece rate for tomatoes had remained virtually unchanged since 1980, sitting at just 50 cents per 32-pound bucket. To earn minimum wage, a worker had to pick more than two and a half tons of tomatoes in a single day (Coalition of Immokalee Workers, n.d.). Gerardo recalls that the conditions went beyond low wages. In the most extreme cases, farm workers were held against their will and forced to work for little or no pay.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) formally began organizing in 1993 as a small collective of farm workers in Immokalee, Florida, working to address extremely low wages and poor working conditions in the tomato industry. In 1995, they organized the first major work stoppage, successfully reversing a wage cut by a large tomato grower (CIW, n.d.). However, the wage decline continued in other farms. In December 1997, six CIW members staged a month-long hunger strike after ten major growers ignored a request signed by nearly two thousand area farm workers to meet with the coalition to discuss wages, which had fallen from fifty cents a bucket to forty cents over the previous two decades. The strike drew public attention and clerical support, but growers remained largely unmoved.
Gerardo recalls that during this strike, then Governor Lawton Chiles urged the growers to sit with the workers to discuss the wage issue. When he inquired to the growers about their hesitation to do so, one grower said
“I'm gonna put it to you like this - the tractor doesn't tell the farmer how to run the farm."
According to Gerardo, that single sentence exposed the rotten core of the entire system. To the growers, these workers weren't human beings with rights and dignity. They were equipment. Tools. No different from the tractors in the fields or the buckets filled with tomatoes.
"We were viewed as structures, as disposable tools, where if somebody falls, they just replace that person," Gerardo says.
That’s when the CIW realized they had been fighting the wrong battle. The power wasn't with the growers. It was with the corporations buying their tomatoes.
That moment forced CIW to rethink its strategy. The power wasn’t just with the growers; it was with the corporate buyers at the top of the supply chain: big fast-food chains and supermarkets and people whose purchasing power dictated how growers treated workers. The CIW launched the Campaign for Fair Food, targeting fast food giants whose carefully cultivated public images made them vulnerable to consumer pressure.
Their first target was Taco Bell. Their demand was simple: one penny more per pound of tomatoes. In 2000, CIW marched over 230 miles from Fort Myers to Orlando. Launched boycott of Taco Bell. They knew they couldn't do it alone. They turned to college campuses, where students were already organizing issues of social justice. The effort grew quickly — within a few years, over 300 colleges and universities joined the campaign. In 2004, students held “Boot the Bell” campaigns, cutting Taco Bell contracts on campus and 22 schools did exactly that. At the same time, the CIW built alliances with religious organizations, eventually gaining the support of the National Council of Churches, representing 45 million parishioners across the country.
"Churches would prepare meals, give us a place to sleep, welcome mass, pray with us, and bless our path," Gerardo says.
Church groups helped fund a cross-country Truth Tour in 2004 that ended with a ten-day hunger strike outside Taco Bell's headquarters in California. The pressure came from every direction. By 2005, Taco Bell's parent company Yum! Brands agreed to the CIW's demands across all of its restaurant chains, including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC. CIW’s demands were clear: one penny more per pound passed down as a wage bonus, an end to purchasing from any farm with modern-day slavery, and a worker-crafted Code of Conduct to protect labor rights. (Estabrook, 2011; Dias-Abey, in press).
Within two years other buyers fell in line. McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart and others signed similar agreements in 2007. In total, CIW negotiated fourteen binding agreements with major buyers (CIW, n.d.). CIW contracts required each buyer to suspend purchases from any farm that violates the Fair Food Code of Conduct. This created a real market incentive for fair practices. As Gerardo phrased it, “once companies realized customers would not buy these items from someone who’s not in the program, growers had to change”.
In late 2011, the first Fair Food Program was officially launched in Florida’s tomato fields. It was a radical new model: farmworkers helped write the Code of Conduct, and farm owners, not outside auditors, were required to abide by it. Crucially, every participating buyer began adding one more penny per pound to the tomato price – money that goes directly to workers. Employers must clock workers in and out (so hours are recorded), pay them for every bucket they pick, and add the premium to paychecks.
Equally important, the Program enforces safety and dignity standards on every farm. A dedicated third-party, the Fair Food Standards Council, conducts unannounced audits and runs a 24/7 worker hotline for complaints. Through this program, Florida’s farm workers could have rights, such as guaranteed clean water and bathrooms, shade and rest breaks every two hours, and rapid protection from heat illness. Sexual harassment, child labor and forced labor are flatly banned under this code. If a farm breaks the rules, buyers must stop buying from it. In short, the power has shifted. As Gerardo puts it, workers “stopped being tractors” once these rules took effect.
Today, the Fair Food Program delivers real results. On participating farms, workers operate under a strict code of conduct that prohibits forced labor and sexual violence, and the data shows it works: only one case of forced labor has been found across 15 seasons, and sexual violence has been effectively eradicated since the program's first year (Fair Food Standards Council, 2024). Workers can report violations without fear through a 24-hour multilingual hotline, and over 16,000 complaints and corrective actions have been resolved without requiring escalation. Since 2011, participating buyers have paid over $50 million in wage premiums directly to workers, and more than 342,000 "Know Your Rights" booklets have been distributed in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. Nearly 1,500 worker-led education sessions have reached over 95,000 farmworkers on the job (Fair Food Standards Council, 2024). These results have drawn national recognition: in 2023, the United States Department of Agriculture designated the Fair Food Program as offering “Platinum” level human rights protections in U.S. agriculture and began supporting the expansion of the program, awarding more than $15 million in grants to participating farms in 2024 (Fair Food Standards Council, 2024).
Climate change does not affect everyone equally. For farm workers, it is not a distant threat but a daily reality. Florida has always been hot, but rising temperatures and longer heat waves have turned farmwork into a life-threatening job. Farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat-related illness than workers in other sectors (Fair Food Standards Council, 2024). Gerardo remembers hearing heat warnings on the radio while still being required to work under the sun, with no shade, no breaks, and no right to stop. He also remembers that even the growers' dogs were driven around in air-conditioned cars, while workers' bodies absorbed the heat hour after hour.
Through the Fair Food Program, workers changed that. Using their collective power, farm workers won mandatory shade, clean drinking water, electrolytes, and rest breaks every two hours during the hottest months of the year. Climate change did not create this system of exploitation, but it has made it deadlier. The Fair Food Program shows that real climate solutions must start with the people whose lives and labor are most at risk.
Gerardo’s message to all of us is simple: “If you can do something to help some of the most vulnerable workers in this country, do it.”
You hold real power as a consumer and a student. Here’s how you can make a difference:
- Learn and Share: Visit ciw-online.org or fairfoodprogram.org to read worker stories, watch videos, and stay updated on farmworker issues. Share what you learn with friends and on social media to spread awareness.
- Buy (and encourage) from places with Fair Food Stamp: Look for produce from companies that have signed CIW agreements and pay the Fair Food Premium. If you eat in your university cafeteria or local restaurants, ask managers to source only from farms enrolled in the Fair Food Program. If they don't, make them aware.
- Pressure Holdouts: A few big companies still refuse to join. Write to those companies or boycott them. CIW leaders urge action: “When consumers say enough is enough, buyers will listen.”
Every consumer choice and campus decision is a vote. You don’t have to be in charge; the farmworker community asks only for your support on their leadership and demands. As Gerardo reminds us, this isn’t just charity; it’s basic justice. The next time you savor a slice of tomato or melon, remember it was picked by hands that now have rights. Those workers should be able to rest in the shade, drink cool water, and speak up without fear, thanks to the change we build together.
But there are more farmworkers out there yet to enjoy this privilege. The fight continues, but we already have the solution. It’s powered by all of us – consumers, students, faith groups, and workers united. Now it’s your turn to decide: will you let injustice continue, or will you stand on the right side of history?
- Learn more: ciw-online.org
- Support the Fair Food Program: fairfoodprogram.org
- Contact: Giselle at CIW for university campaigns
All quotes are taken directly from the interview with Gerardo Reyes Chavez's.
Coalition of Immokalee Workers. (n.d.). Farmworker facts & figures. https://ciw-online.org/farmworker-facts-figures
Estabrook, B. (2012). Tomatoland: How modern industrial agriculture destroyed our most alluring fruit. Andrews McMeel Publishing.
Dias-Abey, M. (2019). A Socio-Legal History of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Forthcoming in Alysia Blackham, Miriam Kullmann, and Ania Zbyszewska, eds., Theorizing Labour Law in a Changing World: Towards an Inclusive Labour Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing).
Fair Food Program. (2025). Fair Food Program 2024 report. https://fairfoodprogram.org
Smithsonian National Museum of American History. (n.d.). Farmworkers’ papier-mache Statue of Liberty, 2000. Smithsonian Institution.