ILAB's mission is to strengthen global labor standards, enforce labor commitments among trading partners, and combat international child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking.

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The mission of OCFT is to work to reduce child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking worldwide and to safeguard dignity at work by helping to ensure that other countries meet international labor standards. With a focus on the most vulnerable populations and communities, OCFT produces cutting-edge research and tools, funds targeted technical assistance, and strategically engages with foreign governments, businesses, worker organizations, and other key stakeholders to address these unacceptable labor abuses. OCFT combats the persistence of these exploitative practices in supply chains to ensure that workers in the United States and around the world can compete on a level playing field.

OCFT consists of the following divisions:

TAC:
The Technical Assistance and Cooperation (TAC) unit currently manages an active portfolio of approximately 50 technical cooperation projects to combat child labor and forced labor around the world. These projects make a difference in the lives of children and their families, including through research, education and livelihood support, awareness raising, and by increasing the capacity of governments and other stakeholders to combat child and forced labor. ILAB works with governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations to strengthen laws, enforcement, policies, and social programs to support our goal of ending child labor and forced labor.

MERL:
The Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL) Division works to improve the effectiveness of OCFT’s technical assistance program. The MERL Division facilitates the development of project monitoring and evaluation plans to track progress towards achieving intended results and oversees performance evaluations and project-level audits/attestation engagements. The Division’s research-related activities, conducted primarily through cooperative agreements, include: child labor prevalence surveys; formative research on the measurement of forced labor and human trafficking; and impact evaluations to assess the effectiveness of a variety of interventions in reducing child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking. The MERL Division publishes evaluation results and promotes the integration of learning from all of these work streams into OCFT’s programs and activities.

R&P:
The Research and Policy (R&P) Unit produces important data on child labor, forced labor and human trafficking and makes it accessible to the U.S. government, foreign governments, NGOs, businesses, and other organizations working to tackle these serious violations of human rights. Researchers work throughout the year to collect relevant data from public sources, U.S. government agencies, foreign governments, NGOs, and their own field missions to countries. They then compile the data into specific and actionable information in the Unit’s three flagship reports. These are: Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor, List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, and List of Products Produced by Forced or Indentured Child Labor.  The findings of these reports informs the selection of technical cooperation projects by the TAC unit, ensuring that OCFT’s technical assistance is focused on areas where our projects are most needed and can have the greatest impact. 

Data from these three reports is available in the Sweat & Toil app. In addition, ILAB’s Comply Chain tool provides companies with steps for developing a robust social compliance system for monitoring labor practices in their supply chains. Finally, the R&P Unit oversees ILAB’s policy engagement on human trafficking, coordinating with the Department’s domestic agencies and other federal agencies to carry out its international-facing anti-trafficking mandate and convey the efforts of the Department to address this crime within the United States and around the world.