Background on the Food Chain Worker S Alliance (FCWA)

Background on the Food Chain Worker’s Alliance (FCWA)

ROC’s Impetus for Founding the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA)

Early in its existence, ROC learned that it was most effective in generating mainstream community support when it was able to integrate with a broader cause with numerous audience segments. ROC found just such a cause in the “good food” movement, a sustained “farm to fork” campaign that vilifies corporate food supply chain companies and restaurant chains. For years ROC has utilized its COLORS restaurant in New York as a home base for “good food” proponents, which include chefs, professors, journalists, organic food producers and other “foodies” behind this movement. ROC sees this as “food justice”, something that aligns well with its “worker justice” agenda. Most importantly, this relationship has increased ROC’s support and helped elevate its credibility.

Similarly, ROC founded FCWA to help support its primary agenda of organizing restaurant workers. FCWA is a formal web-based umbrella organization through which ROC and its operational partners are able to coordinate actions across the food system. ROC has levered broad-based support for both COLORS and the FCWA to effectively work with operational partners ranging from universities, unions, good food advocates, and environmental groups to elected officials and regulators.

FCWA History and Capacity

At just under two years old, the FCWA is still in its infancy. Not only did ROC found the FCWA, online donations to the FCWA are still deposited into a ROC account. ROC is the FCWA’s “fiscal sponsor,” and its funders are ROC’s oldest and most loyal funders:

·  Abelard Foundation-East

·  Ben & Jerry’s Foundation

·  Ford Foundation

·  Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation

·  Norman Foundation

·  Presbyterian Hunger Program

·  Sociological Initiatives Foundation

·  Surdna Foundation

·  Oxfam America

·  Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock

·  RESIST

·  Liberty Hill Foundation

ROC has recruited its regular operational partners to join the FCWA. The FCWA has no actual physical presence and no chapters. It simply serves as an online communication hub for ROC’s operational partners. The FCWA claims to have a membership that exceeds 100,000 (this number is derived from the total membership of each member organization) and to maintain a presence in almost every state. FCWA’s membership includes:

·  Brandworkers International – Daniel Gross

·  Coalition of Immokalee Workers – Julia Perkins

·  Center for New Community – Axel Fuentes

·  Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas (CATA) – Richard Mandelbaum

·  International Labor Rights Forum – Liana Foxvog

·  Just Harvest USA – Damara Luce

·  Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center - Fernando Garcia

·  Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York – Daisy Chung

·  Restaurant Opportunities Centers United – Jose Oliva

·  UNITE HERE Food Service Division – Chris Bohner

·  United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 770 – Rigo Valdez

·  United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1500 – Diana Robinson

·  Warehouse Workers for Justice – Mark Meinster

FCWA Actions

The FCWA to date has only organized a handful of truly coordinated actions, most notably, a protest of Publix in Florida for which partners flew in from around the country. The effort received media attention but forced no outcome.

A missed opportunity for the FCWA was the recent, and in many ways historic, unionization effort of Jimmy John’s restaurant. The failure of the FCWA to engage, whether due to a lack of resources or because the union, the Industrial Workers of the World, was not an FWCA member, is unclear.

Despite the fact that the FCWA has not yet executed a sustained multi-jurisdictional campaign, observers should not be complacent. Each individual organization in its own right has executed sustained and successful campaigns against large corporate entities. Of particular note, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers waged a prolonged campaign against YUM Brands and Burger King and won concessions for tomato pickers. ROC’s vision for the FCWA has always been to sync its campaigns with the campaigns of its operational partners, like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and in doing so coordinate a massive effort that indicts the entire corporate food system, farm to fork. The FCWA is structured not to act as a single entity, but rather to magnify the sum of its parts.

It’s important to note that ROC and the FCWA’s desired outcome is not necessarily to win particular concessions for an individual worker or even within a particular company. Their real objective is to systematically change the conversation around an economic class of workers (restaurant workers, farm workers, warehouse workers, etc.) and force businesses to make concessions through advancing systematic change.

A Long Term Threat

ROC, and by extension the FCWA, is pioneering an organizational model that could prove to be labor’s long sought after path to unionize the restaurant industry. Intensifying this threat is the robust foundation structure that is propagating organizations like ROC and the FCWA, best typified by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Ford Foundation. These organizations are working in concert with many others across the country to finance data-driven, university-endorsed justifications for these social justice campaigns. They are financing both the communications and organizational efforts of these organizations. It’s important to recognize that ROC and the FCWA are able to operate due to the support of a foundation network that will continue to drive their issues to the forefront.