Child Labor Tools Updated

Child Labor Report Issued

The Labor Department released its annual report on the worst forms of child labor, spotlighting child labor abuses globally and reviewing progress made by some countries to meet their international commitments to eliminate abuses.

In conjunction with the report, Labor announced updates to its tools to help businesses identify and avoid child labor in their supply chains.

The report provides an overview of 131 countries and territories’ child labor situations. These situations include trafficking, debt bondage, forced labor, hazardous work, commercial sexual exploitation and the use of children in armed conflict or illicit activities.

The report also details how governments are working to eliminate child labor through legislation, law enforcement, policies and social programs. It provides more than 2,000 country-specific recommendations for government action in each of these areas.

The International Labor Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund estimate that 160 million children – almost one in 10 children worldwide – toiled in child labor in 2020, an increase of 8 million children since 2016. Nearly half work in conditions likely to harm their safety, health or morals.

Online Tool

Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs has made updates to a number of online tools:

• A redesigned Comply Chain website that offers businesses a comprehensive set of best practices for developing strong, worker-driven social compliance systems to reduce child labor and forced labor in supply chains. The site now offers customized navigation, useful examples of good practices and content focused on helping businesses’ due diligence efforts.
• An updated Sweat & Toil app with easier to access information on child and forced labor. The app includes the List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor and the latest details on how governments around the world are addressing child labor. Users can also view goods produced with exploitative labor by region and sector, the sectoral distribution of where children work by country, and labor inspectorate information by region.
• An updated Better Trade Tool includes revamped, dynamic dashboards and custom queries that allow users to view and analyze US trade data against potential child labor and forced labor risks in US supply chains. The tool now offers a global data dashboard to alert users to the risk of child labor and forced labor in global supply chains.