Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

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Most public and private initiatives to combat modern slavery and bolster labour standards in global supply chains are designed to omit the portions of supply chains in which the most severe forms of labour exploitation are known to thrive. Focused on the large ‘Tier 1’ suppliers (those that hold contracts directly with and take orders from brands and retailers), corporate and government programmes rarely address labour supply chains – the unregulated networks through which contingent and sometimes forced and trafficked workers are recruited, transported and supplied to businesses by third party labour agents – nor the ‘shadow factories’ (unregistered and undisclosed production sites that are used to meet orders on time and evade compliance) in which unauthorized production takes place. They tend to create loopholes around the most vulnerable workers within supply chains, rather than seeking to protect them. Indeed, in spite of the widespread recognition that severe exploitation is accelerating in the bottom tiers of supply chains, among labour subcontractors, in unauthorized factories, in the informal sector and in home-based work, recent labour governance initiatives tend to conceal and disclaim responsibility for these spaces and relations of exploitation rather than bring them to light.

      In addition to their design flaws, the implementation of labour governance initiatives is similarly deficient. In recent years, most countries have scaled back public labour inspectorates and given businesses more authority to enforce private labour standards and laws. A booming private industry of accounting firms, social auditors and supply chain analysts has emerged to monitor and enforce labour standards, and verify conformance to CSR standards, often in collaboration with NGOs. Yet, while the enforcement industry has helped corporations to generate media- and consumer-friendly metrics and reports and bolster the credibility of their aspirational goals, it has led to very little concrete improvement in the detection, reporting and corrective action of severe labour exploitation.

These flaws, I will argue, are not coincidences. Rather, as civil society actors work to raise labour standards in the global economy, powerful business interests are fighting to preserve the status quo of a retail-driven economy that is heavily dependent on labour exploitation. Today’s corporations are hardwired to maximize profits for their shareholders and executives, to monopolize and to grow, and built into this wiring are enormous risks and dangers to workers. To preserve their profitable business models, corporations are leveraging strategic control over the design and implementation of public and private supply chain governance initiatives. And they are wielding power in governance arenas – from policy processes within national governments, to global forums and organizations like the ILO – to stave off restrictions on their production practices and increases in legal liability. In short, industry actors are speaking out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to labour governance. They are championing causes like safe workplaces and worker voice and initiatives to combat modern slavery even as they are, at the same time, quashing laws and conventions that would spur real and long-lasting change to labour practices in the global economy.

      The overall result is that, by creating an illusion of effective governance and buy-in to incremental improvement, CSR is doing more to cover up labour problems in global supply chains than it is doing to fix them, or even bring them to light. No doubt, there are some cases where corporate initiatives have led to improvements for some workers with respect to some issues, like better health and safety standards. But, as this book will reveal, overall the trend is towards the legitimization and reinforcing of prevailing business models and endemic exploitation. The issues that matter most in terms of protecting workers and improving their conditions – wages, forced overtime, forced labour, collective action rights – are rarely altered by existing private governance programmes. In short, efforts and initiatives to govern global labour standards are working to enhance corporate growth and profit, but are failing workers and civil society actors seeking to raise labour standards in the global economy.

      This Book’s Approach

Hundreds of academic journal articles and books examine individual labour governance initiatives and the micro-conditions for their successes and failures. This body of research gives us insights into the opportunities and challenges surrounding individual cases – for instance, the implementation of ISO 26000 (a social sustainability standard) by an orange juice company in a region of Algeria, or an NGO’s efforts to address the plight of rug-weaving families in a city like Delhi. These studies have helpfully analysed operational issues associated with the design, uptake, merits and shortcomings of various private, public and hybrid initiatives within various sectors and geographical contexts, as well as relationships between stakeholders, such as activists and firms, in standard-setting processes.²³

      The academic literature on the design and effectiveness of individual labour governance initiatives has yielded important insights about whether and under what conditions supply chain governance initiatives do or do not work to make improvements across a range of issue areas, how they can be improved through redesigning procedures and implementation, and how the interactions between public and private governance systems can be optimized to yield better outcomes.²⁴ But these studies often lose sight of broader questions about whether or not labour governance initiatives are actually solving the problems they’ve been established to address, like living wages, safe working conditions and protecting workers’ rights to collective action. On-the-ground effectiveness is seldom analysed. Furthermore, most scholars focus on case studies, with few investigating the net and combined results of individual labour governance initiatives, such as whether they are solving – or even marginally improving – the world’s major labour market challenges, like forced labour and poverty wages in global supply chains.

This gap is rooted in a common conceptual limitation within the literature on private governance and labour standards. Namely, that scholarship tends to be technical in its focus, treating labour governance initiatives as objective and neutral instruments that can be pushed towards better performance. Debates around the effectiveness of initiatives like ethical certification, MSIs, social auditing and other supply chain governance efforts tend to take for granted the notion that such measures can be tweaked to resolve any current shortcomings.²⁵ For instance, as political scientists Matthew Potoski and Aseem Prakash see it, ‘the theoretical and policy challenge is to identify the program characteristics that can ex ante predict program efficiency’.²⁶ However, these technical and predictive approaches tend to overlook the role of structural power dynamics within the global economy, as well as the broader politics that surround labour governance initiatives, which pose fundamental obstacles to improving these systems.²⁷

      In this book, I take a different approach. After 20 years of CSR, I argue that it is time to confront the reality that industry-led efforts are not neutral and that nudging them towards better performance won’t solve the problems of labour exploitation in the global economy. Corporate actors’ longstanding resistance to transforming labour governance initiatives in light of their well-documented flaws begs us to ask bigger, more political questions. Specifically, I question the interests, power and forms of profitability that are safeguarded and reinforced through CSR approaches to setting and enforcing labour standards. I examine the fundamental governance question surrounding the growing adoption of industry-led labour governance initiatives: that of who these initiatives are effective for. Are current systems designed and equipped to find and resolve labour abuses in supply chains, or are they set up to spur corporate profitability, protect business models, generate reassuring metrics for investors and shareholders and help already massive companies to grow even bigger?

Throughout this book, I draw on primary and secondary research that I conducted between 2012 and 2019 on the effectiveness of labour governance initiatives in a range of geographical contexts, including China, India, Ghana, Switzerland, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). This research has involved case studies encompassing a range of sectors, including consumer goods, agricultural products, construction and garments. It has also covered an array of labour governance initiatives, including labour-related disclosure legislation such СКАЧАТЬ