International Labor Rights Forum

The International Labor Rights Forum is a human rights organization dedicated to advocating for labor rights worldwide. The ILRF works with trade unions, local community groups, and faith-based organizations to support workers. The IRLF strives to hold international corporations accountable for labor rights violations, advance policies that benefit and protect workers’ rights, and assist in strengthening worker self-advocacy. Some of the main issues the ILRF focuses on include child labor, forced labor, health and safety, women’s rights, precarious work, living wage, migrant labor, and the right to organize and bargain. In the early 1980’s concerned activists formed a coalition to fight for the rights of workers in international trade. In 1984, the coalition succeeded in securing the first labor rights clause in the Generalized System of Preferences. This labor rights clause would connect US trade and investment benefits to the respect of labor rights in other countries. In 1986, the coalition launched the International Labor Rights Forum to monitor the enforcement of international labor laws. The ILRF has leD and supported a number of initiatives such AS improving factory safety in Bangladesh, stopping the exploitation of children in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, increasing the income of farm workers in the cocoa fields of West Africa, developing labor law clinics in China, advocating for increased labor rights provisions in US legislation, improving the conditions of seafood workers in Thailand, promoting fair labor principles in the palm oil industry, and supporting threatened union leaders in Latin America’s banana sector. In 1990, the ILRF formed the Alliance for Responsible Trade with allied North American advocacy groups to demand transparency and labor rights provisions in NAFTA. In 1994, the ILRF founded RugMark (now GoodWeave International), a nonprofit organization that has moved over 3,000 children out of the carpet industry and provided them with education. In 2010, ILRF merged with SweatFree Communities and founded the SweatFree Purchasing Consortium, which incorporated labor rights into city and state procurement policies. In 2013, U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project became part of the ILRF. The U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP) advocates for fundamental changes to U.S. trade policies, demands corporate responsibility, denounces violence against trade unionists, and campaigns for worker justice in agro-export industries in Latin America.