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For an hour last Thursday, shoppers leaving Trader Joe’s in Center City Philadelphia were greeted by an unexpected sight: 35 students and activists holding signs and asking them to sign postcards to Trader Joe’s opposing slave labor. At 6pm, a delegation led by two tomato farmers from Florida attempted to go inside to deliver a letter to management. Before they could reach the door, the store manager headed them off with a demand they get off the property and threats of calling the police.

“This shows we’re getting to them,” said one of the farmworkers, Wilson Perez. “Everywhere else, they took the letter.”

Philadelphia was the third of 10 stops on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) East Coast Trader Joe’s tour, on which tomato growers and advocates are visiting stores from Maryland to Maine to inform consumers and confront management about the company’s refusal to sign on to a Fair Food agreement. In the decade since it launched a four-year boycott against Taco Bell, CIW has won such agreements with the four largest fast food chains and with growers who collectively provide over 90 percent of US tomatoes. But the majority of supermarkets have so far refused to follow suit – including Trader Joe’s, which trades on a reputation for both relentless efficiency and social consciousness.

A Record of Success

Fair food agreements establish basic standards for wages and working conditions for farmworkers, and a complaint procedure to enforce their rights. Growers who sign on are obligated to treat their employees in accordance with these standards. Fast food and supermarket chains that sign on are obligated to do business only with growers that are complying with the standards, and to absorb increased costs: one penny per pound of tomatoes. Though the agreements haven’t stopped farmworkers’ jobs from being poverty jobs, both farmworkers on the East Coast tour say they have transformed their work conditions and reduced the intensity of their economic insecurity – especially since major growers Six L’s and Pacific Tomato Growers signed on last fall.