My name is Amanda Shanor, and I represent MCG-JMR Joint Venture. I also work at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, which is a founding member of the Alliance for Fair Food.

The Alliance for Fair Food is a network of faith-based, human rights, student, labor, and community leaders and institutions across the country, among them the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Amnesty International (U.S.A.), United Students Against Sweatshops, Congressman John Lewis, and Julian Bond, Chairman of the N.A.A.C.P.

The Alliance for Fair Food is appalled by the grave human rights abuses that today exist in America’s fields and is committed to supporting the farmworkers of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an award-winning human rights organization, in their struggle to end the sweatshop conditions farmworkers currently face.

Since 1997, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has uncovered and assisted the F.B.I. and U.S. Department of Justice in successfully prosecuting five slavery rings in the Florida agricultural industry alone, freeing over 1,000 workers. That means workers held against their will and forced to work with violence and the threat of violence.

These cases of slavery are not examples of a few bad apples, but instead extreme manifestations of the pervasive sweatshop conditions that exist generally across the agricultural industry, the root cause of which is the fact that farmworkers are denied a voice in their industry—an industry that stretches from America’s fields to McDonald’s tables.

In fact, today there are slavery investigations currently underway in the tomato fields of Florida

That is the bad news. The good news is that there is today a golden opportunity for McDonald’s to take leadership – as it has in so many other arenas – and bring about substantive changes in wages and working conditions for farmworkers in Florida.

My question, then, is why has McDonald’s chosen to work solely with agricultural producers who for years have turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses in their fields and actively worked to stifle the voice of farmworkers, rather than partner with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, internationally recognized human rights and anti-slavery leaders, to engage with McDonald’s suppliers to end these abuses?