Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

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1 Who Does Labour Governance Work For?

      In April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed near Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing more than 1,100 garment workers and injuring around 2,500 people. The workers were making clothes for western brands, including Benetton and Disney.¹ Industrial accidents are unfortunately not uncommon in the garment industry, though the high death toll of Rana Plaza caught the world’s attention and ignited calls for corporate accountability for workers in global supply chains. A few years after the accident, a court in Bangladesh charged 38 people with murder.² But some key players within the Rana Plaza disaster have largely evaded scrutiny: the people behind the ethical certification schemes, social audits, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that failed to prevent the disaster in the first place.

Although the Rana Plaza disaster has been widely reported in the media, far less frequently noted is the reality that the building itself contained two factories that had been recently checked by social auditors hired to monitor factory conditions on behalf of brand companies. It has been reported that a few months before the building collapsed, a large German certification company called TÜV Rheinland completed a social audit for the textile factory Phantom Apparel Ltd located within Rana Plaza. It used a widely respected standard, the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI) certification, which incorporates core labour standards from the International Labour Organization (ILO) to confirm that factories met requirements around labour standards such as minimum and living wages and absence of child and forced labour.³

      Following its audit, the TÜV Rheinland auditor noted that there were some ‘improvements needed’ in the factory, but reported no issues to do with child labour, overtime, freedom of association or the rapidly deteriorating building that housed Phantom Apparel. Yet, in the aftermath of the collapse, journalists began to reveal that the audit report had missed major problems. Children were working in the factory; their dead bodies found in the rubble made this undeniable. Forced overtime was also common and there were serious dangers to worker health and safety at Rana Plaza, such as the obviously compromised building structure.⁴ A few days after the collapse, the New York Times reported that, in addition to Phantom Apparel, operations at another BSCI-registered factory – New Waves Style – had also recently been passed.⁵ How could these social audits have missed and failed to fix such major problems, including those that led to the factory’s collapse?

In addition to passing recent social audits, the Rana Plaza building was covered by an array of CSR initiatives, in the same way that much of the global garment sector has been since the late twentieth century. Many of the companies implicated in the collapse champion the safe workplaces and high labour standards achieved through their CSR efforts. A year before the disaster, Disney’s 2012 glossy 128-page citizenship report, for instance, noted, ‘We believe that acting responsibly is an integral part of our brand’, and detailed their extensive efforts to foster ‘safe, respectful, and inclusive workplaces’ within their global supply chains, among other issues.⁶ Benetton, which sourced 266,000 shirts from Rana Plaza in the months before the building collapse, is well known for its social commitments, such as fighting HIV and promoting multiculturalism.⁷ Given that companies like these, with established CSR programmes, sourced from Rana Plaza, how could they not have been aware of the problems?

      The Rana Plaza factory didn’t sit outside existing governance systems used to detect and address labour exploitation and dangers to worker health and safety. Rather, it sat right at the centre of these. Bangladesh is the second largest exporter of apparel. It is home to a workforce that has been making clothes sold by well-known brands for decades. Companies with celebrated CSR programmes sourced from Rana Plaza. Respected auditors using stringent social standards developed by credible organizations had recently inspected it. If existing systems to detect and address labour exploitation in the global economy had been working, the Rana Plaza collapse would never have happened. But it did. And the fact that such catastrophic problems with Rana Plaza were inaccurately reported and left unaddressed, killing and injuring thousands of workers, raises profound questions about the credibility and effectiveness of the labour governance systems in place to combat forced labour and safeguard labour standards in global supply chains.

      What is Labour Governance?

      In this book, I use the term ‘labour governance’ to capture the public and private standards regulations, responses and forms of power (including rules, norms and actions) that surround labour standards in the global economy, including its worst forms, which are frequently referred to as forced labour and modern slavery.

Within this, I primarily focus on what is called ‘transnational private СКАЧАТЬ