by Peter O’Driscoll, Executive Director, EFI
November 1 marks the second anniversary of the launch of the Ethical Charter Implementation Program (ECIP). Two years in, ECIP has already engaged 6 major produce buyers, nearly 300 of their suppliers and more than 1,500 growers.
EFI is proud to have helped facilitate collaboration among major brands and their key suppliers to translate the principles of the produce industry’s Ethical Charter on Responsible Labor Practices into 54 labor management systems. The ECIP LAB (Learn, Assess, Benchmark) is a capacity-building software platform that helps agricultural employers understand each of those management systems, asks them to honestly assess how well those systems function in their own operations, then benchmarks their continuous improvement over time as they strengthen their labor practices.
As an educational resource based on self-assessment, ECIP is neither an audit nor a compliance test. It measures the willingness of an employer to engage in the process, acknowledge vulnerabilities and improve over time. Needless to say, employers could knowingly provide false information to bolster their “engagement profile,” or score. Nonetheless, as the system aggregates field-level labor practice data for suppliers, then asks them to assess how their own management systems support their growers to uphold the Ethical Charter, EFI believes that the ECIP supplier engagement profiles that retail buyers review are the industry’s best available proxy for compliance.
Why? Because simply put, there is not enough credible capacity in the world to audit every one of the 20,000+ farms that sell fruits and vegetables into the North American market every year. Given that reality, as a tool that measures growers’ and suppliers’ willingness to share information about their labor management systems, ECIP is the best way to meet employers where they are and support them to improve over time. Moreover, each year the criteria for demonstrating engagement on the LAB platform become a little more rigorous. As of September 2025, in order to earn a gold star as a mark of full engagement with ECIP, suppliers are asked to affirm their willingness to provide documentation of the size of their grower network. By late 2026, ECIP will begin to gather worker data on how they experience the effective implementation of these management systems, which will either corroborate or contradict employer self-assessments. As the program requirements tighten each year, the room for “gaming the system” shrinks.
Even as ECIP expands, the program certainly has its critics. To some observers, ECIP is not rigorous enough, and allows employers to “fairwash” their reputations by misrepresenting the rigor of their labor management systems. To others, the program just represents another expense for employers to swallow (growers pay $200/year to access the platform, while supplier subscriptions average about $4,000, depending on their annual sales volume), and some users are wary of the annual criteria changes as the rigor increases.
These concerns are valid, but they beg further questions. To those who challenge ECIP’s credibility, are there any other systems out there that are capable of generating field-level data on labor practices across the entire international produce supply chain? And would those who question the program’s cost prefer to spend at least $5,000 per farm for an annual third-party audit? While ECIP is neither perfect, nor a painless magic wand for addressing the labor challenges that led the industry to write the Ethical Charter in the first place, EFI sees it as the best option in the medium term for building better, safer, more dignified agricultural workplaces.
EFI’s mission is to transform agriculture and the lives of farmworkers. For years, we have been bringing together stakeholders from across the supply chain to seek “win-win” solutions to labor issues. There is currently no common minimum standard for agricultural working conditions in the United States, let alone other countries from which we source fruits and vegetables. Because farmworkers were not protected by the New Deal National Labor Relations Act in 1935, workplace protections in this country are a patchwork quilt of state regulations with minimal budgets for inspection or enforcement. Until that changes, efforts by major buyers to require responsible labor practices as a condition for doing business are likely the shortest route to an industry-wide international “floor” on working conditions. And if ECIP can help establish that floor, and gradually raise it through continuous improvement over time, then its potential for international impact that the produce industry can be proud of is greater than anything else on the horizon.
Peter O’Driscoll serves as Executive Director of EFI and works with major buyers, suppliers, workers and consumer groups to provide greater assurance regarding supply chain conditions, while generating measurable value for all stakeholders.