Combating child labor through collective action

By Richa Mittal, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at the Fair Labor Association

Eliminating child labor requires systems that protect children, support families’ livelihoods, improve working conditions, and enable responsible business practices across supply chains. The Fair Labor Association (FLA)’s award-winning Harvesting the Future (HTF) initiative creates large-scale change on child protection and responsible recruitment through a multi-country, multi-commodity approach.

Models like HTF – which include collaborative approaches to problem-solving; cost savings; sustainable sector-level improvement; enhanced leverage, credibility, and reputation for companies; and more – demonstrate tangible benefits when tackling thorny challenges like child labor. Rather than approaching issues individually, project partners join a multi-stakeholder structure that prioritizes collective action and achieves concrete results.

Since 2019, more than 100 companies and suppliers have partnered with FLA to collaborate with dozens of government organizations and civil society groups across three countries (Türkiye, Egypt, and India), concretely improving the lives of more than 30,000 farmers, workers, and their families. We started with a single raw material in Türkiye: hazelnuts. Today, Harvesting the Future has expanded to 14 supply chains across three countries. Overall, 54 companies and 57 suppliers have partnered through HTF to collaborate with 35 government organizations and 26 civil society groups.

Each year, we advance efforts to improve the HTF model’s efficiency and impact. Partners are discovering new ways to advocate, engage stakeholders, streamline internal human rights due diligence processes, and shift from a reactive to a proactive approach.

The keys to success

HTF activities take an area-based approach, focusing beyond individual supply chains and acting at the village, community, or regional level. HTF’s approach integrates human rights due diligence—strengthening company-level management systems for supply chain mapping, training and capacity building, and responsible procurement practices—with development strategies such as child protection and case management, social services, and community-level awareness building. Strong stakeholder engagement, advocacy, and the cultivation of local, self-sustaining structures are integral to the HTF’s transition plan from FLA to local stakeholders.

A business case for collective action

While each HTF company approaches supplier engagement and purchasing practices differently, several common benefits emerge from a collective approach.

1. Companies can build expertise in collective problem-solving in a pre-competitive way. Companies typically don’t collaborate on product innovation, marketing ideas, or pricing. However, through a program like HTF, they build trust, share challenges in a safe space, work together to solve labor and human rights issues, and plan for the future. Collaboration is founded on the mutual acknowledgment that addressing labor and human rights issues in upstream supply chains is complex, with no single solution, and that no company can solve them alone. Working together, individual companies don’t need to outsource the development of a theoretical due diligence strategy. Instead, practical experience and expertise are found, shared, and implemented within their own cohort. For example, based on lessons learned through HTF in the rose sector in Türkiye, HTF partners expanded efforts in the jasmine sector in Egypt and several raw materials (naturals) in India.
2. Companies and suppliers save money through collective investment. Field-level interventions—especially refurbishing schools, establishing child-safe spaces, building toilets and washrooms, creating child-labor-free zones, and distributing personal protective equipment—are expensive. For small businesses (especially suppliers), the cost of implementing these measures can be excessive. HTF pools resources, with each partner contributing between 0.5 percent and 14 percent of the total budget based on its size and revenue, resulting in greater collective progress and impact. Additional cost savings are achieved through a shared administrative structure across various HTF chapters. 
3. Working at scale helps efficiently address issues across communities. An area-based, community-level approach helps companies target child labor, which could be a community problem rather than just a farm- or supply-chain problem. Suppliers and local government officials take ownership of the process, enabling the sector to address issues rather than focusing solely on a handful of farms. This establishes long-term local norms against child labor through local ownership, reducing re-emergence and preventing the need to repeatedly invest in the same areas. In the 60+ villages covered by HTF globally, child protection activities are implemented in collaboration with local schools, village and district authorities, parents, youth groups, and children. 
4. Companies have improved leverage, credibility, and reputation. Collective expectations set by companies increase their leverage to drive supply chain improvements across an entire sector. Collective advocacy facilitates access to government programs and influences policymaking. Tangible outcomes of HTF include updated legislation in Egypt that brings agriculture under the labor inspection system, and the mobilization of government resources in all three countries to support children’s education.
5. Companies are more likely to comply with HRDD legislation and investors’ expectations. A growing body of legislation is being implemented across jurisdictions to ensure that companies respect labor and human rights in their supply chains. In the U.S., these include Section 307 of the U.S. Tariff Act and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act; in the EU, similar aims are being pursued through the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the EU Forced Labor Regulation. HTF offers a good-practice example of how companies might work together to meet these new obligations – and related expectations from responsible investors – that is recognized by governments. For example, U.S. Department of Labor reports note that HTF programs in Turkiye and Egypt help reduce the risk of child labor in agricultural supply chains.

Our success is a testament to the power of collective action. Companies and suppliers may compete on innovative product design, formulations, or marketing strategies rather than on human and labor rights. Collective action creates a compelling business case for companies and suppliers to address the depth and scale of supply chain issues – including the risk of child labor –and pursue long-term success.