Jeff Vockrodt ’06 applies what he learned at the University of Minnesota Law School to enhance the lives of millions of workers in factories and farms worldwide. As CEO and president of the Fair Labor Association (FLA), he leads an organization that establishes standards to improve labor conditions globally.
“We promote human rights in supply chains, and leading that work is challenging and really fulfilling,” says Vockrodt, who started with FLA in 2023. “Back in the 1990s, when awareness was growing about sweatshop labor in supply chains, President Clinton brought together the largest apparel and footwear brands, major universities whose logos appeared on sweatshirts and jerseys, and civil society organizations to combat the problem and improve workers’ lives. More than 25 years later, we’ve become a global organization and built a presence in the agriculture sector alongside apparel, but we maintain that governance structure, with equal representation from businesses, universities, and civil society.
“We work to make human rights concrete and practical, with specific standards and KPIs, ongoing monitoring, investigations of third-party complaints, tools like our fair compensation toolkit and the human rights and environmental due diligence tool we launched last year, and by continuing to innovate and drive the field forward. We also bring companies together to invest in systematic remediation.”
The highlights of his time at the association have included visiting farms and factories, talking with workers, and working with the “remarkable, expert, generous team” at FLA.
Vockrodt inherited a strong legacy, built over a quarter-century, when he came to FLA. But there is more to do. “We continue to grow the organization, innovate in various ways to build out human rights due diligence across the supply chain, and bring companies together to invest in collective remediation,” he says. “The Harvesting the Future program, for example, has us bringing together the largest buyers of targeted high-risk commodities in high-risk countries, and we are investing in refurbishing schools, creating child labor-free zones, and working with local and regional governments to set up a real community approach to changing the dynamics that result in child labor.”
“And we are working to deepen our understanding of our impact on workers,” he says. “Our North Star has to be: what impact do we have for workers in supply chains?”
He took lessons from his previous leadership positions, including the role of Executive Director of Climate Jobs NY, which he held from 2019 to 2022.
“My board was made up of the leaders of most of the large unions in New York, and they were very much committed to promoting investment in climate infrastructure and really putting political capital behind it,” Vockrodt says. He found it to be very much in the vein of taking a big problem and trying to find very practical, concrete progress forward, as Climate Jobs NY did on offshore wind and distributed solar.
Vockrodt also previously held senior policy positions at the U.S. Department of Labor. He found that these roles similarly involved bringing diverse constituencies together to look at how to move forward, a common theme of his career.
“The future of work initiative was my baby, including bringing 400 people together for three days for a symposium to dig into what this future should look like,” Vockrodt says. “I also had the opportunity to lead a team that drafted guidance implementing President Obama’s executive order on labor standards in federal contracting, which involved bringing together multiple enforcement agencies. There again, it was about bringing different viewpoints to the table to develop something together that was unified and practical.”
Gopher Grounding
Vockrodt believes his experiences at the Law School had a huge effect when it came to success in his career. He found it grounded him in many ways in the fundamentals of law and policy.
“I learned so much about labor law and, as an example, Professor David Weissbrodt was one of my mentors,” he says. “[Weissbrodt] founded the Law School’s Human Rights Center nearly 40 years ago, and he was just a giant in the field of human rights. Getting to work with him and having a Human Rights Center fellowship gave me a deeper understanding of international institutions and ground-level human rights realities—and how the two relate to each other. Both are really fundamentally important. You need to have that international leadership on human rights, along with engagement where the rubber meets the road.”
For Vockrodt, he says there have been three criteria he’s looked at when considering any career opportunity: who he wants to work with, what’s interesting, and what he thinks is going to have an impact that he cares about. Those criteria have taken him a lot of interesting, rewarding places, including his current role.
At FLA, he has a few important goals when he thinks about the future of the organization. “We want to be a source of stability and innovative leadership for companies and a variety of audiences,” he says. “There is a lot of volatility around us in terms of regulation, trade, and the economy, and we are a place where companies and other stakeholders can come together, innovate together, and invest in human rights due diligence programs they know are credible and robust. We also want to be a holistic partner across all tiers of the supply chain. And we want to better understand and deepen our impact on workers. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re accountable to.”