Thank you for an impactful year! Here are some highlights:

We continued to expand TenSquared, our 100-day accelerated change program that brings workers and managers together to find solutions to their toughest workplace challenges. 

This year, our TenSquared coaches worked closely with worker-manager teams at four facilities in Vietnam to reach their goals of improving health and safety – impacting over 50,000 workers! 

We continued the SA8000 revision process this year, publishing the SA8000:2026 Working Draft, FAQs, Certification Timeline for transitioning to SA8000:2026, and launching the updated SA8000 Basic Auditor Training course. The final version of the SA8000:2026 Standard will be published on January 1, 2026! Learn more. 

There are currently 5,723 SA8000-certified companies, impacting over 2.8 million workers across 48 countries and 71 industries. Visit our SA8000-Certified Organization page to take a deeper look at this year's numbers.  

Our USDOL-funded MY Voice project promoted worker voice and addressed forced and child labor in Malaysia's garment and palm oil sectors.

Since its launch in 2021, MY Voice trained 99 community facilitators  from 15 organizations, 137 local labor inspectors, 229 members of the National Union of Plantation Workers (NUPW), 35 NUPW grassroots leaders, and 2 private sector partners from the garment and palm oil sectors.  

Our USDOL-funded Sustentar project worked to address forced labor and child labor in Mexico’s tomato and chile pepper sectors.

Over the course of the project, Sustentar formed 11 community circles, worked with 29 companies to complete baseline assessments of their Social Compliance Systems, and trained 1,837 private sector stakeholders and workers on child labor, forced labor, and the USMCA. 

We continued to grow our living wage implementation consultancy work this year, expanding our Living Wage assessments, gap analyses, and implementation planning support with home goods, textiles, and electronics companies employing nearly 200,000 workers in total. 

We also updated our current wage assessment tool, complete with in-kind benefits and bonus calculation information, and a custom living wage training series for a technology brand’s third-party auditors.

Over 600 social auditors, business managers, union leaders, civil society representatives, government officials, and many others attended SAI's 43 public trainings in 21 countries.

We also launched our updated on-demand Introduction to Living Wage virtual training course – available in both English and Spanish.  

Our USDOL-funded Mexico Awareness-Raising project (MAP) promoted information about the 2019 Mexican Labor Reform among workers, employers, and union leaders in various industries throughout Mexico.

As part of this mission, the MAP team trained 1,341 employers and 19 employer associations, held 5 national summits, provided technical assistance to 12 companies, and developed and disseminated 38 best practices since its launch in 2021. 

The Anker Research Institute continued to produce and publish high-quality, internationally comparable living wage and living income data. This year, the institute completed or initiated 15 benchmark studies in countries such as China, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malawi, and Costa Rica.

The sub-national estimates program also expanded significantly, with studies launched for specific regions in India, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and Nigeria. In addition, the Institute updated more than 115 living wage reports for nearly 60 countries, adjusting them for inflation to 2025.