Rights-based, worker-driven accountability in the fields: Contesting the uncontested contestable

We investigate the politicizing of migrant farmworkers’ rights regarding a fair and humane work environment using an agonistic-based critical dialogic accounting and accountability (CDAA) lens. The aim of CDAA is to employ accounting and accountability in the service of progressive social and environmental programs by taking pluralism seriously. This process of democratization means engaging the political by making visible the contestable that is presumed otherwise; bringing the contestable into the political/public arena; and giving power and voice to traditionally underrepresented groups. The Fair Food Program (FFP) developed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) presents a meaningful opportunity to study a rights-based, worker-driven, non-state directed accountability system designed and implemented by the workers in a highly contested, for-profit arena where workers’ rights traditionally have been egregiously oppressed and abused.

Constructing an accountability system is a political process that can be made sense of using critical dialogic accountability (CDA). We describe the FFP’s effective accountability system, and the associated responsibility network, that enables the enactment, and facilitates the ongoing assurance, of the human rights of migrant farmworkers. The study goes beyond “thought experiments and conceptual discussions” and demonstrates that the CDA framework offers a useful approach for considering ways to hold powerful actors accountable for their treatment of people and resources, specifies what is important, indicates if change is needed, and provides the evaluation criteria used to motivate and appraise the powerholder’s actions. The analysis provides useful insights into the challenges associated with implementing progressive social programs for underrepresented groups and how the challenges might be addressed.