$12.2 Million: DOL’s International Labor Bureau Promoted “Worker Empowerment” in South America. American Workers Are Still Waiting.

The Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) awarded $12.2 million in grants to promote worker empowerment in South American countries — including freedom of association, collective bargaining rights, anti-discrimination in the workplace, and union organizing capacity. ILAB’s statutory mission includes promoting core labor standards internationally as part of U.S. trade policy, most relevantly under the Generalized System of Preferences eligibility criteria and trade agreement labor chapters.

The DOGE critique is not primarily that labor standards don’t matter overseas — fair labor standards have bipartisan support in trade policy contexts — but that the Biden administration’s ILAB programs embedded “worker power for equity and justice” ideology and progressive labor organizing models beyond basic ILO core standards. The rebranding of standard labor rights programs as “worker empowerment” with explicit equity and justice framing is the editorial flag; the underlying standards work has a legitimate home in trade-linked labor policy.