Ben & Jerry’s Strikes Deal to Improve Migrant Dairy Workers’ Conditions
What Ben & Jerry’s did not have was a reliable way of ensuring
that the dairy farms supplying it with milk were providing humane conditions for their workers, a major issue in an industry where many people work seven days a week for less than minimum wage.
Under the program, called Milk With Dignity, workers at dairy farms
that supply Ben & Jerry’s will have the right to one day off a week and will earn at least the state minimum wage, currently $10 an hour.
“We don’t see a huge gap in hard-core standards,” Mr. Solheim said, “but we see an opportunity to make it work better.”
Migrant Justice began its campaign to improve conditions for immigrant farm workers in Vermont several years ago, not
long after a worker died after getting tangled in a piece of machinery and being strangled by his own clothes.
“By signing this agreement, Ben & Jerry’s is prioritizing dairy workers as the most important ingredient in their ice cream,” Mr. O’Neill said.
A 2014 survey of about 170 dairy workers in the state by Migrant Justice, the farmworkers’ advocacy group
that signed the agreement with Ben & Jerry’s, found that in addition to a scarcity of days off, workers had schedules that frequently kept them from sleeping more than a few hours at a time.