Ben & Jerry’s Strikes Deal to Improve Migrant Dairy Workers’ Conditions<br />What Ben & Jerry’s did not have was a reliable way of ensuring<br />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.<br />Under the program, called Milk With Dignity, workers at dairy farms<br />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.<br />“We don’t see a huge gap in hard-core standards,” Mr. Solheim said, “but we see an opportunity to make it work better.”<br />Migrant Justice began its campaign to improve conditions for immigrant farm workers in Vermont several years ago, not<br />long after a worker died after getting tangled in a piece of machinery and being strangled by his own clothes.<br />“By signing this agreement, Ben & Jerry’s is prioritizing dairy workers as the most important ingredient in their ice cream,” Mr. O’Neill said.<br />A 2014 survey of about 170 dairy workers in the state by Migrant Justice, the farmworkers’ advocacy group<br />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.
