FOOD CHAIN WORKERS ALLIANCE INC
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Mission Statement
The Food Chain Workers Alliance is a bi-national coalition of worker-based organizations whose members plant, harvest, process, pack, transport, prepare, serve, and sell food, organizing to improve wages and working conditions for all workers along the food chain. The Alliance works together to build a more sustainable food system that respects workers’ rights, based on the principles of racial and economic justice, in which everyone has access to healthy and affordable food. Currently, FCWA has 34 members representing roughly 370,000 food workers in the US and Canada.
About This Cause
22 million people work in the U.S. food system, and they are the lowest-paid working group in the country. According to our 2016 study, food workers' median wage is $10/hr and they are forced to rely on food stamps at more than twice the rate of other groups. Food workers have a lower rate of unionization than the general workforce, suffer dangerous conditions, and are subjected to racial/gender discrimination and violence. BIPOC communities are overrepresented in these jobs—we saw this manifest in recent years when BIPOC communities have been more likely to contract COVID and die, largely because their jobs do not allow remote work, sick leave, or time off. According to a 2021 study by The Guardian, "a few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain." These companies rely on a flow of precarious workers for cheap labor. By empowering food workers to organize, unionize, and fight for the wages and protections they deserve, we can build economic security for workers and push back against the monopoly power of major food corporations. FCWA provides strategic and technical support for our members' organizing campaigns, and training programs for workers and organizers to start and lead campaigns. We provide collective spaces where workers and organizers learn, build relationships, and incubate collective fights, building a multi-racial and multi-sector food worker movement. We believe our food system should: 1. Be democratically controlled. 2. Be managed by more cooperative ownership, less private ownership. 3. Provide local, healthy, sustainably produced food that is beneficial to both people and the environment. 4. Allow all to work with dignity, livable wages, and meaning. Our Program Areas: We are working to transform the food system through intersectional movement-building, policy innovation, support for worker organizing campaigns, worker leadership development, and public education. These main activities fall under our three strategic pathways: 1. Growth & Learning: We are investing in the organizing success of our member groups and new food worker organizations by training worker leaders and allies. 2. Campaigns & Messaging: We are changing the story about food workers and the food system and asserting worker power. Our work in this area builds support for members’ campaigns and our own policy campaigns. We are also leaders of the Good Food Purchasing and Good Food Communities programs, which work with institutional purchasers to redirect food contracts to high-road employers who meet labor, nutrition, economic, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability standards. 3. Movement-Building: In order to have the power to transform the food system, we are building a “bigger we” by growing our membership, connecting the food and labor movements, and cross-issue organizing with other national groups. Recent Accomplishments: June 2024: After three years and a broad coalition of support across the state, the Good Food New York bill passed the state legislature on June 6, 2024. With the passage of this bill, public institutions across the state will no longer be restricted by “lowest bidder” mandates and will be able to build supply chains that truly reflect our community values. This is just one part of our decade of work on values-based food procurement. March 2024: FCWA Farmworker Committee hosted a Bi-National People's Tribunal on the Struggles of Farmworkers in North America in New York City. Dozens of farmworkers in the U.S. and Canada provided testimony on conditions they face on the job and what protections are needed now. October 2023: 65 workers and organizers from 19 member groups gathered in Springdale, Arkansas for our annual Food Worker Summit. With support from our local member and co-host Venceremos, programming included artmaking for organizing, plenaries on organizing in the south, peer-to-peer skills-building workshops, and a march on the Tyson Foods HQ to deliver a letter demanding action on inhumane line speeds and illegal child labor in their supply chain. May 2023: Release of our report, "Procuring Food Justice: Grassroots Solutions for Reclaiming our Public Supply Chains" with our sister org HEAL Food Alliance. This report distills lessons from a decade of organizing to offer advocates a new blueprint for leveraging a “values-based purchasing” strategy to challenge corporate control of public food and redirect billions of taxpayer dollars toward small producers, producers of color, and suppliers with fair labor practices. Read the report at procuringfoodjustice.org. May 2023: On International Workers' Day, we officially launched our Food Workers Organizing Institute, a new umbrella for all the different leadership development programs we do with food workers and organizers, which includes: 1) Sector-Based Virtual Cohorts in which food workers learn and share organizing strategies, campaign planning and power analysis skills; 2) Member Organizer Fellowship, in which workers and organizers expand their work under the mentorship of our staff, and receive funding to develop an organizing project important to their sector; and 3) Senior Organizer Trainings for experienced organizers, covering topics like overcoming employer retaliation and supply chain mapping. October 2022: Our return to in-person annual summits! After two years of meeting virtually after the outbreak of the pandemic, we returned to an in-person Food Worker Summit for FCWA members in Los Angeles! 68 organizers and workers from 20 worker groups convened for three days of programming and critical relationship building. Long-term Measures of Success: 1. Higher wages and improved working conditions for workers in the food system. 2. Thousands of individuals are mobilized to take action around the country in support of our member campaigns and Good Food Purchasing Program campaigns. 3. Strong, long-term coalitions of organizations in the health, environment, agriculture, animal welfare, and labor sectors of the food movement. 4. Trained workers become leaders in their organizations and in their communities. 5. Trained workers run for office at the local, state, and federal levels. 6. Media coverage for food worker issues increases. 7. Culture shift toward holistic food system-wide thinking that includes workers at its core. 8. Support for food system change work that includes workers at its core grows amongst funders and donors. 9. In order to get elected, local, state and federal candidates adopt portions or the entire HEAL Food Alliance Platform for Real Food (co-developed by the FCWA).