We urge Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Postmates to stand on the right side of history and join the national Wendy’s Boycott. We call on these food delivery services to stop doing business with Wendy’s until the hamburger giant ensures enforceable protections for farmworkers’ human rights by joining the Fair Food Program.

As leaders in the food industry, these companies are surely aware that farmworkers in this country have confronted myriad human rights abuses for generations, including discrimination, extreme poverty, systemic wage theft, exposure to dangerous pesticides as well as deadly heat and storms, violence and humiliation at the hands of their employers, sexual harassment and assault, and even modern-day slavery. Unfortunately, these harsh conditions continue to be the grim reality for all too many farmworkers toiling in America’s fields today.

This past year, the coronavirus pandemic has further exposed these longstanding inequities in our food system while dramatically deepening consumers’ awareness of the essential contributions farmworkers make to the nation’s economy and food supply.

The paradox at the base of our food system — the shameful fact that we treat our country’s essential food workers as expendable people — has been laid bare by the pandemic, and our trillion-dollar food industry can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to their abuse.

If we are to finally right this ongoing and historical wrong, it is incumbent on industry leaders at the top of the food supply chain to help ensure the health and wellbeing of the essential people at the bottom of that chain who do the work of feeding us all.  As consumers utilize their services more than ever, delivery companies can play a crucial role in supporting the Fair Food Program (FFP).

The FFP is a uniquely powerful solution to the human rights crisis in the U.S. agricultural industry. After nearly two decades of organizing with farmworkers and consumers across the country for systemic change, the CIW established the FFP in 2011 as a pioneering partnership for social responsibility among farmworkers, farmers, and over a dozen major food retailers.  Today, the FFP ensures humane wages and working conditions for tens of thousands of workers on participating farms in eight states and counting, effectively eradicating gender-based violence and sexual assault, guaranteeing health and safety protections in the fields—including enforceable COVID-19 safety protocols designed to combat the scourge of coronavirus infections and deaths currently plaguing farmworkers nationwide—and even preventing modern slavery operations.

Since 2001, SFA has powered national consumer campaigns in solidarity with the CIW, contributing critical support for the CIW’s success in signing Fair Food Agreements with 14 multi-billion dollar food retail companies, including Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods and Walmart. However, there remains a notable outlier: Wendy’s.  The hamburger giant is the only major fast-food chain not to join the Fair Food Program, thereby depriving the farmworkers who pick its produce of the FFP’s best-in-class human rights protections.

In 2016, the CIW launched a national boycott of Wendy’s, calling on the company to join the Fair Food Program, and hundreds of thousands of consumers—including students, faith leaders, and people of conscience —have answered that call by refusing to patronize the fast-food giant.  As young consumers and allies in the fight for Fair Food, we believe it is important for the aforementioned delivery companies to understand the implications of actively partnering with a company that has failed to meet the standard set by all its peer restaurants for protecting farmworkers’ human rights.

In the wake of recent protests in support of racial justice, UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Postmates all affirmed their responsibility to speak up and take action against injustice, inequality, and discrimination. We believe this admirable commitment must be extended to the mostly Brown, Indigenous, and Black farmworkers that make it possible for restaurants to produce food, and thus for these businesses to deliver meals nationwide. This is true now more than ever before, with farmworkers facing a far higher risk than most Americans of contracting COVID-19, and thus in dire need of the FFP’s human rights protections, including the Program’s unique COVID-19 safety protocols.

Actions speak louder than words, and action means more than charity.  

We urge Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Postmates to join the Wendy's Boycott, stand on the right side of history and take bold leadership on the issue of human rights in our country’s food system by refusing to do business with Wendy’s until the company joins the Fair Food Program.  

By doing so, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Postmates will be committing to delivering food with dignity.