“It just was abominable.  The corporation was making all this money and the people were enslaved.  So I had a moral obligation to do all I could do so people would get a broader picture of the condition of slavery — enough to make connections that slavery also exists in the hotels, in the restaurants, not just in the fields.”

That’s what Annette Sinagra of the Adrian Dominican Sisters says in reflecting on her research of working conditions for Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s. She wrote a report on the slave conditions in the batays and sugar cane fields owned and operated by Gulf + Western that the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility published.

In this, the ninth episode of The Arc of Change: The ICCR Story, she relates this experience to her work as Corporate Responsibility Analyst for the Adrian Dominican Sisters Socially Responsible Investing Portfolio Advisory Board, which she joined in the late 1980s.

Specifically, Sinagra makes the connection to recent shareowner activism with McDonald’s, where she filed a human rights resolution in 2006 to abide by International Labor Organization labor standards. She collaborated with the AFL-CIO and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida-based farmworker rights organization that has documented modern slavery in Florida’s tomato fields. This first-year resolution survived McDonald’s appeal to the SEC to omit it from the proxy ballot, and ended up receiving eight percent support from voting shareholders, significantly surpassing the three percent threshold for re-filing the next year. More importantly, McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner promised her directly to address the issue, and in 2007 McDonald’s agreed to increase tomato pickers’ pay more than a penny a pound, extending a similar victory of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers two years before with YUM! Brands, the parent of Taco Bell.