Why Wendy’s is the source of unrest among US farm workers
Over the past several years, farm workers have held protests and hunger strikes on college campuses, outside of corporate headquarters, at annual shareholders meetings, and in cities around the US, and called for a public boycott to demand the fast food corporate chain Wendy’s join the Fair Food Program.
The Fair Food Program was launched in 2011 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida out of the group’s Campaign for Fair Food, to ensure workers are involved in enforcing, monitoring, and designing programs to protect workers in their workplaces through the food supply chain, relying on partnerships between workers, growers, and retail buyers to raise wages and adhere to workplace standards.
Wendy’s main competitors, Burger King, McDonald’s, Subway, Chipotle, and Yum Brands which operates Taco Bell and KFC, all joined the Fair Food Program at least a decade ago.
The campaign to pressure Wendy’s to join the program has seen a resurgence as several high-profile cases of what has been called modern day slavery on farms in the US and Mexico have demonstrated the need for corporations to assume responsibility for these abuses within their supply chains.
On 2 April, farm workers held a five-mile protest march in Palm Beach, Florida, where Wendy’s billionaire majority shareholder and prolific Trump fundraiser Nelson Peltz owns a beachfront mansion worth over $123m and his asset management firm, Trian Partners, recently acquired an office building for $23m, to demand Wendy’s join the Fair Food Program and end modern slavery in farm fields.
“We’ve spent over seven years calling on Wendy’s to join this program that every single one of their competitors has been a part of for a decade, and their response to date has been to
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