Verité ensures that people worldwide work under safe, fair, and legal conditions. The organization has worked with multinational brands, suppliers, and international institutions across multiple industry sectors and in more than 70 countries to improve working conditions and overall social performance within global supply chains. Verité is recognized for its independence and unique credibility, as well as the practical usefulness of its information.
Globally, workers often suffer from unhealthy, exploitive working conditions and have no leverage to effect change in global supply chains.
Verité engages workers to spotlight forced labor, monitor indicators to reduce risk, interact with labor brokers, and address the needs of victims.
Dan Viederman seeks to move from audit-focused compliance to bringing stakeholders together to addresses worker needs.
Verité is training others to replicate its model even as it works to expand its own network.
Companies transition to a rights-driven, worker-centered approach to global supply chain sustainability, influenced and incentivized by effective government and market promotion of impact-oriented trade, investment, transparency, procurement, and due diligence regulations.
Verité scales its impact by sharing its insights, data, and expertise via open-source tools, reports, and policy advocacy. We also build the capacity of other CSOs in various sectors to advance labor rights protections in their spheres and help government regulators understand how to use their leverage in supply chains.
Partner, Working Capital Fund
Dan Viederman has spent his career solving the problems of inequitable and unsustainable development. He worked in rural China teaching children who had overcome great odds simply to be in a classroom. He helped establish China offices for the World Wildlife Fund and Catholic Relief Services. Through this work he realized that the private business sector would not take steps to become more just and sustainable in response to efforts by civil society. There must be real incentives. Dan came to Verité in 2001 inspired by its potential to improve workplace conditions globally, and he has led the organization beyond its factory audit roots. Under Dan’s leadership, Verité expanded its impact geographically and across industry sectors, working to prevent human trafficking by leveraging the power of multinational companies. Its model engages factory workers in a four-step process of assessment to determine whether there is forced labor in the corporate supply chain; monitoring indicators to reduce the risk of doing business with suppliers using forced labor; interaction with labor brokers; and addressing needs of victims. Through rigorous research, tracking, story-telling and consultative expertise, Verité engages trade unions, NGOs, governments, consumers, and companies tied to more than 11,000 factories around the world in understanding and combating labor abuse. Its initiatives include labor rights and trafficking, raw materials, policy, civil society, and gender.
As of May 2016, Dan transitioned to a new role at Humanity United as Managing Director and Dr. Shawn MacDonald is the new CEO of Verité.
Verité managed more than 1,000 engagements with more than 100 clients, such as Eileen Fisher, The Gap, HP, Nestle, Patagonia, Target, and The Walt Disney Company. Verité’s efforts span multiple global supply chains, each of which requires unique interventions for ending worker exploitation. For instance, one form of labor exploitation is extracting recruitment fees from workers. Verité has reached hundreds of thousands of migrant workers and facilitated the return of more than $100 million dollars to workers. Verité has created a tech-enabled data analysis platform, CUMULUS, that effectively identifies risk of forced labor in global labor recruitment systems. Verité has a multi-year partnership with Mars Inc. to advance respect for human rights and improve the lives of the most vulnerable workers in its supply chains. Aiming to impact 1 million people, Verité and Mars are working together on a responsible sourcing program and specific programs in seafood, cocoa, sugar, mint, rice, tomatoes, and palm oil. Verité’s policy advocacy has been instrumental in major supply chain regulation advances, such as the creation of anti-trafficking procurement rules for U.S. federal contractors (Federal Acquisition Regulations), reform of the U.S. Tariff Act to prohibit the importation of goods made with forced labor, and regulations related to supply chain transparency and mandatory human rights due diligence.
