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.