Susan L. Marquis
I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won
Jump into Chapter 4: Has anyone talked with these guys? It gives a sense of what a great, and encouraging, story this is. The Prologue gives a short but comprehensive overview of what most readers, to include myself when I first came to learn of the CIW, likely aren’t aware of: the dark, brutal, and, shockingly, continuing story of agricultural labor in the United States. If policy is your thing (and, I must admit that it is mine), the last two chapters focus on why the Fair Food Program has worked, insights on what it takes to make sustainable social change, and why the Fair Food Program is a transformational model for the future.
The story is a good news story – all too rare these days. The people are extraordinary. But this story is bigger than that. The model of worker-driven social responsibility demonstrated with the Fair Food Program, has tremendous promise well beyond Florida’s farm fields, or even American agriculture. You could almost view the Fair Food Program as a pilot for the larger program that offers an explicit path to resolve the persistent and complex problems of low-wage labor in factories or even within the gig economy. And, the non-governmental, worker-driven, market-enforced aspects of this solution is consistent with the dramatic changes we’ve seen in policy making and public policy. I Am Not A Tractor! is a story that needed to be told and it is a set of ideas and a model that gives us not only hope, but a way forward.
Editor: Judi Pajo
I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won
Susan L. Marquis I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won Cornell University Press 296 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 1501713088
Available here →December 4, 2017
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Susan L. Marquis
Susan L. Marquis is dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and is RAND Corporation’s vice president for Innovation. She teaches and researches on organizational culture and innovative solutions to persistent and complex policy problems, on topics ranging from food policy to national security. Prior to joining RAND, Marquis held leadership positions in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Program Analysis and Evaluation Directorate. Her first book was Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces (1997).
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Florida's tomato fields went from the country's worst labor conditions to among its best without a single new law.
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