Agricultural workers’ participation in certification as a mechanism for improving working conditions: The Equitable Food Initiative

ABSTRACT

The Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) is a third-party certification program seeking to improve agricultural working conditions as well as food safety practices, environmental stewardship, and farm viability. The initiative uses innovative cross-functional labor-management teams to promote compliance with EFI standards and advocate for worker interests. Based on focus groups, interviews, and observations at five EFI-certified operations in the U.S. and Mexico, we describe how farms implemented the participatory system and the degree of involvement and influence the teams achieved. We elucidate how organizational dynamics generally associated with concertive control instead contributed to logics of collective advocacy. Theoretical implications address debates about (a) worker participation and empowerment, (b) corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate accountability, and third-party auditing, and (c) positive deviance and critical praxis. Practical insights can guide EFI operations and other worker-driven accountability systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Worker participation
• labor-management teams
• agricultural labor
• corporate accountability
• organizational communication
• organizational power
• concertive control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Berkeley Food Institute (BFI), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation [grant number 2015-62308], and the Waterhouse Family Institute, Villanova University.