Key Accomplishments

USLEAP was one of the first U.S. groups founded to address globalization and its impact on workers in the South.  

Since 1987, USLEAP has been at the forefront of efforts to hold U.S. companies accountable for conditions, wages, and basic rights of their workers abroad, pioneering corporate responsibility work in the apparel, banana, coffee, and flower sectors. 

USLEAP has also been at the forefront of efforts to link worker rights to trade policy and initiatives to make fundamental policy changes that make respect for worker rights a core part of U.S. and international trade policy and practice. 

USLEAP’s work has been covered in The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, Financial Times, In These Times, Wall Street Journal, Univision, and other major media in the U.S. as well as in Latin America.  

Specific project accomplishments include:

Coffee Worker Justice Project: Persuaded Starbucks to become the first major U.S. coffee company to agree to adopt a code of conduct and accept responsibility for the working conditions and wages of coffee workers on plantations from which it buys. 

Sweatshop (Maquiladora Worker Justice) Project: Helped secure worker victories and collective bargaining agreements at apparel factories in Central America and Mexico.  E.g. persuaded the Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation to sign what was then the only collective bargaining agreement in Guatemala's maquiladora sector, establishing for a time a model maquiladora for Central America that paid a decent wage, respected basic rights, and provided all legally-mandated benefits. 

Banana Worker Juistice Project: Helped persuade Chiquita Brands to accept responsibility for the treatment of workers on "independent" suppliers and begin a dialogue with its workers at a region-wide level that led to a path-breaking regional worker rights agreement in 2001. 

Trade and Worker Rights Project: Used provisions of U.S. trade law to help obtain specific advances, such as legal recognition of maquila unions in Guatemala and banana unions in Ecuador, and broader structural changes, such as increases in the minimum wage, labor law reform and new labor courts in Guatemala.

Violence Against Colombian Trade Unionists Project.  Wrote a report on worker rights in Colombia that was released by the AFL-CIO in 2006 and whose findings were cited in The Washington Post and The New York Times, among others, as sufficient to justify opposition to a free trade agreement with Colombia.