Every day, in countries around the world, workers face hardships ranging from poverty wages and forced labor to workplace health hazards and gender-based discrimination. For more than 25 years, the Fair Labor Association has brought together global brands, major universities, and labor and civil society organizations (CSOs) to address these and other thorny challenges to the well-being of workers globally.
In 2025, FLA continued decades of growth, both in terms of our membership—we welcomed 11 new members from six countries—and our global impact. This year alone, our programs and projects extended across 33 countries on five continents.
Our work investigating and remediating labor rights violations directly benefited approximately 8,300 workers, and we improved access to grievance mechanisms for countless others. One key to success? We partner with stakeholders around the world, with an emphasis on the importance of applying a local context to labor rights solutions.
We continued to support government policies and programs that protect workers, leveling the playing field and helping make regulations both practical and effective, despite significant shifts in policy and shrinking financial support for labor rights initiatives. In the EU, we called for a meaningful and aligned due diligence framework. In the United States, we argued strongly for the value of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs and its programs, which historically have built institutions to effectively protect workers and raise labor standards.
We know that robust risk-based due diligence models that address human and labor rights issues at all tiers of the supply chain remain critical for global companies. Our flagship Harvesting the Future (HTF) program continued to foster large-scale change on child protection and responsible recruitment in agricultural communities. Over the course of the year, we mobilized more than 130 partners in three countries to reach thousands of workers, families, and suppliers. We are particularly proud that HTF was recognized this year with a prestigious Gold Anthem Award, which celebrates organizations and initiatives dedicated to purpose-driven change, alongside programs from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Clinton Global Initiative, UNHCR, UNICEF, and the Citi Foundation.
HTF is not our only program that digs deeply into the upper—and often most opaque—tiers of a company’s supply chain. Recognizing that companies often face limited visibility and traceability beyond Tier One suppliers, a lack of leverage and resources to scale actions, and systemic issues that require sectoral-level interventions, this year we launched the Supply Chain Action Network (SCAN), bringing companies together to pilot practical solutions in upstream supply chains and scale them up. Our groundbreaking report on the leather industry in Brazil, co-authored with Impactt, is paving the way toward a more equitable industry for workers at all levels of the leather supply chain.
And as always, we carried on our core work evaluating companies’ systems to protect workers throughout their global supply chains. This year, we celebrated five of our agriculture companies reaching Milestone 1 in their accreditation journey.
We invite you to learn more about the impact these programs – and many others – had this year on workers at farms and factories worldwide in our 2025 Annual Report.