Columbia is among the 31 schools affiliated with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) that has contributed more than $250, 000 to the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) to extend and expand a program to develop the ability of community-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to monitor labor practices in factories.

The new funding will allow the ILRF to extend training programs to Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Taiwan and Indonesia, and to assist trained NGO partners in monitoring factories for companies under the FLA or other similar systems. The ILRF will also expand in at least two other countries where sweatshop conditions already exist or may be emerging.

Under this program, the ILRF will share the monitoring responsibilities with other countries interested in distributing information and participating in monitoring activities.

An intensive two-week training course, based on lessons learned in previously developed programs in which local activists will learn to serve as factory monitors, will be provided.

"Thanks to the support of the university community we have been able to initiate important experiments in NGO monitoring in Taiwan, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala," said Pharis J. Harvey, executive director of the IRLF.

"This new support will enable us to engage community-based groups to monitor sweatshops in some of the world's largest apparel-producing countries, possibly including China, Mexico, India, or new labor markets in Sub Saharan Africa."

The ILRF was created in 1986 by labor leaders, policy makers, human rights activists and religious leaders to monitor practices such as child labor, forced labor attacks on and imprisonment of union leaders and other violations of international labor standards and to develop means to counter these abuses.