Private Sector

The Worker Empowerment in South America project seeks to improve respect for labor rights in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru by strengthening democratic, independent workers' organizations in the agricultural, platform (gig) economy, manufacturing, and mining sectors.

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.

Part of the Root Causes of Migration Strategy for northern Central America, the Promoting Safe and Healthy Workplaces in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador (PREP for Change) project seeks to improve occupational safety and health (OSH) conditions for workers in the sugar and garment (maquila) sectors. The project will focus on workplace illnesses and injuries, chronic kidney disease of non-traditional causes (CKDnt), and COVID-19.

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.

Senderos — works with government, the private sector, and civil society to improve adherence to international standards on child labor, forced labor, occupational safety and health, and other acceptable conditions of work in the sugarcane and tobacco sectors in Jalisco and Nayarit. The project is building government capacity to enforce labor laws in agricultural supply chains, improving private sector awareness and compliance with labor laws, and increasing farmworkers’ knowledge of labor rights and grievances mechanisms.

This project works to improve the implementation of social compliance systems that promote acceptable conditions of work and the prevention and reduction of child and forced labor in palm oil supply chains in Colombia and Ecuador. It also disseminates best practices in social compliance systems in these and other palm oil producing countries, particularly Brazil and Peru.

This project helps businesses establish systems to prevent, detect and eliminate child labor and other forms of labor exploitation from their supply chains. It is assembling a powerful coalition of coffee buyers to collectively incentivize compliance among suppliers. In doing so, the project promotes supply chains that are free of exploitative labor and helps to create a fair playing field for workers in the U.S. and around the world.

The United States is the leading importer of coffee, accounting for over 18 percent of total coffee imports in the world, with Brazil and Colombia as the top suppliers. But before that coffee reaches our cups, tens of millions of workers globally select, pick, and process the beans. Many of those workers are children – toiling in the fields rather than learning in school.

Project Objectives: To improve educational outcomes for child and adolescents involved in child labor; and improve family income so that households do not need to rely on the work of children for survival.