Farmworkers Are Frequently Exploited. But Few Farms Participate in a Program That Experts Say Could Prevent Abuse.

When Jon Esformes was in his 20s, farmworkers staged protests outside one of his family’s tomato farms, in California’s Central Valley, calling out the fact they were paid less than 50 cents for each bucket of produce they picked. The summer of 1989 was particularly memorable: The demonstrations were tense — strikers warned that anyone who crossed the picket line would “pay with your blood” — and then turned violent. Someone threw a rock at Esformes’ head, leaving him with a scar.

By the time Esformes became a vice president of Pacific Tomato Growers in 2008, the family’s relationship with workers hadn’t changed much. Pay had barely increased. He and the rest of Pacific’s leadership still considered outside efforts to improve working conditions in the fields to be a threat to the business. “When we heard ‘worker organization,’ the initial response was to put on the flak jacket and get ready for war,” Esformes recalled during a panel in 2018.

Many of the issues that workers had been protesting still persist at farms nationwide, fueled by the constant pressure for cheap produce and the high demand among foreign workers for U.S. jobs. But Pacific, one of America’s largest tomato growers, is a rare outlier. The company changed course by adopting reforms that many farms across America have resisted, starting with the daunting task of getting rid of the labor-market middlemen who are instrumental in recruiting foreign farmworkers — and are largely responsible for the abuse and exploitation of those workers.

Pacific, with its 2,500 workers at farms and packing houses in four states, was able to show that it could adopt such reforms at scale without disrupting the profits it draws from over $90 million in annual revenue. Those reforms were possible in part through the company’s participation in the Fair Food Program, an initiative that launched in 2010 with the goal of preventing farmworkers from being harmed in the fields. By the end of Pacific’s first year in the program, other major tomato growers followed its lead, in hopes of not losing customers because of their labor practices.

“We needed to see the world as it was,” said Esformes, who is now CEO and operating partner for Pacific. “Not how we wanted it to be.”

The reason more farms haven’t signed on to these reforms over the past 15 years is complicated. Some growers have said they are concerned about the potential up-front costs to implement those kinds of changes, especially in an era when wages are soaring and margins are shrinking. Others say they’re hesitant to sign on until more big grocers and other buyers commit to purchasing their produce through the program. Many more have historically been quiet on the topic.

ProPublica reached out to more than two dozen farm trade groups and produce growers associations in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of why so few of their farms participate in the program. Most of them didn’t answer our questions. Some of them have opposed recent efforts by government officials to enact protections similar to ones that the program requires. They have warned that such changes could have a “detrimental impact” that would “burden the whole industry for a few bad apples” who had disregarded the rights of farmworkers.

Brian Reeves, a fourth-generation farmer in upstate New York who is president of the state’s vegetable growers association, told ProPublica that many farmers just want to focus on farming itself without the extra burden of compliance, such filling out paperwork and submitting to audits.

“There’s a little bit of: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Reeves added. “A lot of farmers are just afraid that it’s going to be more of a headache than it’s worth.”

Labor experts say that the program is a potential solution to decades of shrinking governmental oversight coupled with insufficient state and federal protections. They say the lax regulatory environment has led to the widespread abuse of farmworkers — including threats of violence, stolen wages, forced labor and deaths in the fields. It also has led to criminal charges and convictions against people who abused and exploited workers. In 2021, Operation Blooming Onion, one of largest investigations into the trafficking of seasonal guest workers, revealed that thousands of them had been illegally charged millions of dollars to work on Georgia’s farms. Some were forced to pick crops for little to no pay in what prosecutors described as a form of modern-day slavery. The very worst of those abuses included the repeated rape and kidnapping of a foreign farmworker, which was at the center of a recent ProPublica investigation.

There had been a similar probe in Florida during the 2000s. Prosecutors indicted multiple labor contractors who had forced workers to pick crops and chained them inside a truck at night. Following the indictments, Publix grocery stores suspended orders from growers with ties to the case. Pacific was one of them. (The contractors later pleaded guilty to forced labor and trafficking charges and were sentenced to prison.)

Even before Publix paused its orders, Pacific had started implementing changes. Then public outcry over Pacific’s past ties to those labor contractors prompted Whole Foods to stop buying from the company. One of the driving forces behind the pressure on Whole Foods was the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a human rights advocacy group that had been organizing widespread protests and threatening boycotts of fast food chains until they forced suppliers to improve working conditions.

The coalition had recently announced an ambitious new initiative, soon to be called the Fair Food Program. It was built around the premise that consumers wanted their produce to be ethically sourced. To facilitate that, the coalition aimed to enlist both farms that are willing to improve working conditions and big buyers, like Whole Foods, that were willing to pay those farms’ workers more for their produce they picked.

Over the next decade and a half, the program would help protect the rights of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. It would also resolve thousands of the workers’ complaints. But its protections would only reach a tiny fraction of the country’s farms.

In the mid 2000s, well before the first farmer signed up for the Fair Food Program, trade groups tried to stop it from getting off the ground. The Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association tried to undercut support for the program by creating a worker safety initiative of its own, with fewer protections and no pay increase. And the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange went so far as to prohibit any farmer from collaborating with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Anyone who tried to would be fined $100,000.

The exchange later dropped its threat after one of its member farms departed because it wanted to win the business of big buyers like McDonald’s and Taco Bell; both had committed to source tomatoes from farms willing to join the program. Eventually, Esformes reached out directly to the coalition’s leaders and agreed to meet at their offices in September 2010. Sitting at their long, shabby conference room table, he and the staff discussed the problems plaguing farmworkers and how to address them. In the weeks ahead, he’d learn more about the group’s new initiative.

The buyers participating in the Fair Food Program would pay farmers a premium of a penny per pound, most of which would be passed along to workers. That small boost from the buyers’ side could make a big difference in workers’ pay — a potential increase of more than 20%. The year the program launched, the average minimum wage for a seasonal foreign farmworker was roughly $10 an hour.

The farmers themselves would agree to routine audits to scrutinize their books, inspect their fields and interview their workers. If major problems were found, they would be investigated further. If farmers didn’t address violations of the program’s rules, buyers would suspend orders from those farms.

Esformes believed that Pacific could deliver on those promises. The following month, he became the first farmer to sign up for the program.

One of the most significant requirements for farmers who join the Fair Food program is to stop using third-party labor contractors. Farmers have long relied on contractors, who in some ways are well-equipped to source and manage farmworkers. Many workers come to the U.S. on seasonal H-2A visas. Labor contractors often speak Spanish and know where in Mexico, Guatemala and other Central American countries to recruit applicants. Contractors help them navigate the visa application process. And contractors often manage the workers once they arrive, arranging for their travel and housing, overseeing their work in the field and distributing their pay.

But all that outsourcing makes it hard for growers to know how the workers are being treated — and easy for them to ignore when workers are treated badly. “If you’re using labor contractors, you have zero visibility,” Esformes said.

In fact, labor contractors were responsible for much of the abuses of workers that federal investigators had discovered over the years. Contractors were found to have enriched themselves by charging workers illegal fees to get a visa, stealing wages from their work in the fields and crowding them into substandard housing. Those abuses continually revealed the need for more state and federal oversight, which seldom materialized.

Pacific had already phased out contractors after the Florida indictments, but Esformes committed to make the change permanent for as long as the company was in the program.

“All of these things that are illegal were going on under the labor contractor system on every farm, including ours,” Esformes said. “I’m not sitting here with my head in the sand saying we were squeaky clean before. We knew there were problems. We wanted them fixed.”

It wasn’t as hard for Pacific to abandon labor contractors as it was for some growers; given the company’s size, it already had a human resources department that it could expand. But for smaller farms, labor brokers can be essential to operations, especially if the owner doesn’t speak Spanish.

To help make the program more accessible, the council that oversees the Fair Food Program works with Mexico’s national employment service to directly recruit workers for farmers, bypassing unvetted recruiters who sometimes illegally charge workers for a visa. The council also consults with farmers to help them transition to hiring and managing workers themselves.

After Pacific joined the Fair Food Program, Esformes urged any employee to leave if they didn’t buy into the program’s reforms. He even had to fire several employees who wouldn’t quit. After that first year passed, about a tenth of his managers were gone. “Some of them were longtime employees,” he said. “I didn’t care.”

At first, Esformes was chiefly concerned with doing right by his workers. But after a few seasons there were unexpected benefits.

At a time when many farmers haven’t been able to find enough workers, Pacific largely stopped experiencing labor shortages. Over time, as Esformes’ fields became safer and the number of injuries declined, so did the risks of workers’ compensation claims. The programs’ mandatory rest breaks — 10 minutes every two hours during the summer — did not lessen productivity. Those breaks ended up having the opposite effect: The workers had more energy to pick faster, compared to when they were getting exhausted and less efficient at the end of each day.

When workers returned home, they chatted about life on Esformes’ farms. The pickers wanted to come back the next season. Before long, their friends and family members back home started asking for jobs too.

What was good for his workers ended up being good for his business.

This past spring, as the sun rose over southwest Georgia, Esformes steered his pickup past the low-slung barracks where a couple dozen farmworkers from Mexico were staying. Most mornings, they boarded a white school bus bound for tomato fields along the Florida border.

But today, each worker was getting paid to learn about their rights. Over the next hour, the coalition’s staffers educated them about the kinds of protections they should expect — mandatory breaks from extreme heat, access to clean water, safe transportation — and how to call a 24-hour hotline staffed by the council that oversees the Fair Food Program. “You can have the opportunity to speak up without fear,” one staffer explained. “You can make a complaint without thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to get fired.’”

Esformes sat behind them in a folding chair, his presence meant to be a reminder that the rights the coalition’s staffers described had the full support of Pacific.

The Fair Food Program’s protections currently extend to more than 20,000 farmworkers in nearly half of all states. It has led to workers getting paid more than $50 million in premiums. It is embraced by federal officials. But so far, it only includes 50 or so farmers who oversee a tiny fraction of the country’s nearly 2 million farms. The participants include other large tomato growers in Florida, corn harvesters in Colorado and sweet potato farmers in North Carolina.

Jennifer Bair, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, said that farmers are often wary of additional expenses associated with the program, given the growing costs of business and the rising number of bankruptcies. Until there is pressure from more buyers, the program may continue to only attract a small number of farmers, such as those who feel ethically obligated to protect their workers, experts told ProPublica.

“Why are there not more growers? The buyers,” said Susan Marquis, a professor with Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. She said that more farmers will join if more buyers “hold their suppliers accountable, signing on to the Fair Food Program and saying, ‘We will not buy these items from someone who’s not in the program.’”

Greg Asbed, a co-founder of the coalition that helped launch the Fair Food Program, said that farmers have been opposed to industrywide changes in the past. He compared current hesitation to the era when farmers were resistant to safety protocols to prevent the spread of foodborne outbreaks. It was only after Americans demanded it — and buyers listened to their customers — that farmers got on board.

“We have a vaccine,” Asbed said. “We’ve tested it, it actually stops it, and people don’t suffer anymore. And yet, even after the proof of concept, even after 15 years of success, there’s still reluctance on the demand side.”

Some of America’s largest produce buyers have not participated in the program, stating that it’s the responsibility of the farms to ensure that their workers are treated fairly. In some cases, buyers have created social responsibility guidelines for farmers to follow. But supply chain experts have described those nonbinding guidelines as a form of “cosmetic compliance” that can fail to hold farmers accountable if their workers are harmed.

That’s in large part why the coalition’s members have continued to pressure buyers to join the Fair Food Program. In recent years, the program’s supporters have marched roughly 50 miles to protest outside the mansion of Wendy’s board chair and asked Kroger shareholders to support a proposal that would urge the company to do more to protect the farmworkers who pick the produce sold in their aisles. Neither of the companies joined the program following those actions.

Kroger and Wendy’s did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the Fair Food Program. Wendy’s previously has stated that its suppliers must adhere to its own code of conduct and undergo a “rigorous certification process.” Kroger stated in its latest annual report that it encourages suppliers to engage in “responsible labor practices.”

Nearly all the buyers in the program limit their participation to a small number of crops. ProPublica reached out to more than 30 of America’s largest grocery and fast food chains to ask why they haven’t joined the program or expanded their participation. ProPublica also requested interviews with representatives of those companies to see how they examine supply chains to ensure that their produce had no ties to the 2021 federal indictment in Georgia that revealed extensive abuses of farmworkers. Only two of those companies — Target and Walgreens — responded to say that their suppliers didn’t have ties to the more than two dozen people indicted in the Blooming Onion case.

None of the companies’ spokespeople agreed to an interview or answered questions about the Fair Food Program.

Nearly everywhere Esformes goes, from high-profile panels to private conversations with farmers, he speaks about how the program is benefitting his business. In the early 2010s, after Esformes joined the program and complied with its requirements, Whole Foods gave Pacific another shot. The company’s transformed tomato operation now fits in line with Whole Foods’ socially conscious brand. These days, the produce section is full of tomatoes with a green Fair Food sticker featuring a female worker holding a tomato bucket on her shoulder.

But look beyond the tomatoes, toward the other fruit and vegetables, and that sticker is rarely found.