Verité is excited to launch a major new program in Mexico to promote and protect labor rights more effectively in the sugarcane sector. SENDEROS will combine intensive rights training and grievance mechanisms for workers with closely coordinated efforts with both the Mexican government and the private sector to create a new approach to labor rights enforcement in a sector that has long experienced poor working conditions.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 152 million children worldwide are engaged in child labor. For the past four years, Verité partnered with Winrock International and Lawyers Without Borders to address this problem by providing technical assistance to governments in five countries: Burkina Faso, Liberia, Nepal, Belize, and Panama. The project had three goals: to improve governments’ response to child labor, decrease the number of children exploited, and increase awareness of child labor in the private sector.
Verité is pleased to announce it is the recipient of two U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs (DOL-ILAB) grants for its work in Guatemala and Ghana. DOL-ILAB’s mission is to promote a fair global playing field for workers in the United States and around the world by enforcing trade commitments, strengthening labor standards, and combating international child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) released an update if its annual child labor report, Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor, which includes research on child labor in 135 countries and is accompanied by the release of the updated Sweat & Toil mobile app. In addition, ILAB launched a new toolkit and mobile app, Comply Chain: Business Tools for Labor Compliance in Global Supply Chains to help companies to address forced and child labor in their supply chains.