Forced Labor

The Sustentar project aims to increase private sector stakeholders’ accountability to uphold core labor standards consistent with Mexican labor laws and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s (USMCA) Labor Chapter, with a specific focus on addressing child labor, forced labor, and acceptable conditions of work.  The project will include a focus on states that produce chile peppers and tomatoes, including Baja California, Baja California Sur, and Chihuahua.

This project will enhance the effectiveness of the Government of Mexico to combat child labor and forced labor at the federal level and support specific interventions in the southern states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo. The duration of the project will be five years (60 months).

The project will work with civil society and workers' organizations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to strengthen their capacity and bolster their collaboration with government agencies, the private sector and other stakeholders to protect labor rights and reduce child labor and forced labor. The project will focus on organizations that represent indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Garifuna populations, while promoting gender and racial equity.

The ALFA project will strengthen the capacity of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) sectoral bodies and member countries to coordinate and collaborate to address forced labor and abusive working conditions in the region’s fishing industry. ALFA will focus on ASEAN regional policy implementation, and increased engagement with the private sector, worker organizations, and civil society to mitigate forced labor and trafficking, and improve working conditions for a more sustainable, responsible and resilient fishing sector.

The MY Voice project will combat forced labor and child labor in the garment and palm oil industries in Malaysia in three main ways: 1) building the capacity of workers and civil society organizations to advocate for labor rights; 2) elevating the role of worker voice in private sector social compliance systems in these industries; and 3) increasing access to remedies for workers exploited for forced labor or child labor.

ILAB’s Global Accelerator Lab 8.7 project will support broader and more effective action under Alliance 8.7, a global partnership to assist United Nations (UN) member States to end child labor, forced labor, human trafficking and modern slavery by 2030. 

The STREAMS project seeks to increase downstream tracing of goods made by child labor and forced labor.  The project is developing a comprehensive analytical framework for use by a broad set of stakeholders to categorize supply chains and methods for tracing and validating supply chain connections.  The project will disseminate the supply chain tracing tools and methodologies to enable and promote adoption by diverse actors across sectors.

The Global Trace Protocol Project by ELEVATE seeks to increase downstream tracing of goods made by child labor and forced labor. The project is designed to address the barriers in supply chain traceability, and result in the development and sharing of open, accessible and replicable tools that can advance the knowledge base on supply chain tracing and scale the adoption of traceability solutions by various actors in different sectors.

This project aims to promote increased use of forced labor research in policy and programmatic decision-making to help eliminate forced labor around the world. The project will achieve this by increasing knowledge through robust research on forced labor in the textile and garment sector and engaging decision makers and stakeholders to use this knowledge to take actions against forced labor.

EQUAL seeks to increase job quality and safety, create opportunities for economic participation, and address gaps in social programs to reach remote and impoverished families in Mexico.