Tag Archives: United Farm Workers

Coffee’s MVPs (“Most Vulnerable Players”)

2016-01-05 Comments Off on Coffee’s MVPs (“Most Vulnerable Players”)

We ended 2015 with nine posts on the issue of modern slavery in the coffeelands—this eight-part series on our research into wretched labor conditions on a small number of Brazilian coffee estates and this reflection on how that work is inspired by our mission to serve the poorest and most vulnerable people.  Those posts were […]

Final Thoughts (For Now) on Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

2015-12-21 Comments Off on Final Thoughts (For Now) on Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

For more than a week we have been writing here about Brazil’s extraordinary effort to eradicate modern slavery, and how that effort relates to the country’s coffee sector. Today is the eighth, final, and perhaps most important post in the series. The one that answers the question, “So, what?” So, now we know this terrible […]

The National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labor

2015-12-18 Comments Off on The National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labor

On Tuesday, we explained here that Brazil gets high marks for enlisting businesses in the country’s campaign to eradicate modern slavery.  Yesterday we profiled in some detail one of the two instruments that leaders in the country’s private sector use in their efforts to eradicate modern slavery from their supply chains: the Dirty List.  Today, […]

Brazil’s “Transparency List”

2015-12-17 Comments Off on Brazil’s “Transparency List”

Earlier this year we visited with Rosa Maria Campos in Brasilia. She leads the union of labor inspectors who visit factories and farms all over Brazil as part of the country’s fight against slavery—inspectors who face budget shortfalls in the capital and hostility from the employers they inspect in the field. Rosa Maria is inspiring—courageous, […]

Brazil’s Fight Against Modern Slavery

2015-12-16 Comments Off on Brazil’s Fight Against Modern Slavery

Brazil’s fight against modern slavery has been held up as an example by labor rights advocates from Free the Slaves to the U.S. Department of Labor to the UN’s International Labor Organization. Its effort has been ambitious (the goal is total eradication of modern slavery), courageous (websites have been hacked, activists threatened, inspectors killed), creative […]

Brazil and the “S-Word”

2015-12-11 Comments Off on Brazil and the “S-Word”

The Atlantic slave trade left a ruinous legacy everywhere, but in the Americas, perhaps no country was more affected than Brazil.  During a ghastly period of more than 300 years, estimates suggest that somewhere between four and five million slaves were delivered to its shores by slave traders—more than one-third of all Africans dragged to […]

Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

2015-12-10 Comments Off on Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

During the summer of 2013, we learned quite by accident that 15 coffee estates in Brazil were included in the government’s “Dirty List,” an official registry of farms and firms found to be profiting from what the country’s laws define as modern-day slavery. We turned for insight to a long-time CRS partner in São Paulo […]

Beyond business as usual at La Revancha

2015-10-21 Comments Off on Beyond business as usual at La Revancha

The tools coffee companies use most commonly to identify and address challenges related to farm labor in their supply chains are certifications and third-party verifications.  There has been generally very little engagement by market actors beyond those approaches.  That’s what makes La Revancha, a coffee estate in Nicaragua, so extraordinary.  Ownership, management and labor at […]

“Field baristas”

2015-10-19 Comments Off on “Field baristas”

United Farm Workers, the iconic farmworker union started by César Chávez during the 1960s, may be most closely associated with California, but it has been working in the coffeelands since 2012. . . Erik Nicholson, a national Vice President at UFW, has been leading the charge.  He has been working tirelessly for farmworker justice for […]

407. “A dignified life”

2014-05-01 Comments Off on 407. “A dignified life”

Today is International Workers Day, also known as Labor Day throughout the coffeelands of Latin America.  Seems like an appropriate day for me to share some reflections on the farmworker conversation I had the privilege to moderate during last week’s SCAA Expo. The post is unusually long because the conversation was uncommonly rich. Of all […]