‘Boycott Wendy’s’

Farmworkers with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and their allies marched in midtown Manhattan Nov. 18 demanding real transparency and verifiable human rights protections in Wendy’s produce supply chain. 

CIW built the Fair Food Program, a unique worker-led monitoring and enforcement campaign that has ended sexual harassment, forced labor and other long-standing human rights violations in the Florida fields and beyond.

All the largest fast-food companies — McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Taco Bell and Chipotle — along with nine major food retailers, including Whole Foods and Walmart, have joined the program. 

But for years, Wendy’s has refused to open its supply chain to the Fair Food Program. Instead it uses widely discredited, for-profit social auditing companies to monitor its suppliers’ operations, which effectively deny workers, who harvest Wendy’s produce, a voice if their rights are violated and leaves them vulnerable to rampant sexual assault, widespread violence and systemic wage theft. 

Chanting “Boycott Wendy’s” and “Wendy’s escucha, estamos en la lucha,” protesters took their demands for farmworker rights to 280 Park Avenue where they picketed the hedge fund Trian Partners, Wendy’s largest institutional shareholder.