Dr. Bama Athreya

Bama Athreya is a Senior Specialist, Labor and Employment Rights. She has twenty years’ experience on international labor rights issues, and has developed and led multi-country projects in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia on the rights of working women, including addressing gender-based violence and discrimination in the workplace; on labor law reform and implementation; on trafficked, forced and child labor, and on ethical supply chain and business practices. She has developed and led multi-stakeholder initiatives with global corporations on labor compliance, and has worked and written extensively on labor rights in US trade policy. She served as one of the founding Board members of the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium, an entity serving state and city governments in the United States who have adopted legislative or executive commitments to ethical procurement. In 2009 she was appointed by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to a special Consultative Group on Forced and Child Labor. She speaks French, Spanish, Chinese and Indonesian.