Название: Combatting Modern Slavery
Автор: Genevieve LeBaron
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Экономика
isbn: 9781509513703
isbn:
In addition to drawing on original field-based empirical data from my recent research, to develop my arguments about the current state of global labour governance, I also draw on desk-based research completed specifically for this book, comprising a study of: (1) the 25 top retail and manufacturing companies (by annual sales), including their structure, ownership dynamics, supply chain, corporate social responsibility policies and workforces; (2) the business actors and dynamics of the recruitment and enforcement industries; and (3) key trends within the global labour market, including through national government and international organization statistics databases. Information has been drawn primarily from company websites, consulting firm websites, international organization and government websites, and reports, as well as industry databases such as Factset and the World Bank Enterprise Survey.
My aim is to synthesize this body of data to advance an argument about the state of contemporary global labour governance and to stimulate debate about why governance systems are failing to protect the world’s workers. I aim to reflect on the serious but too often not spoken about obstacles that currently limit efforts to eradicate labour exploitation from the global economy – namely, corporate power, interests and ownership structures, and the ways that those affect governments and civil society – and to shift the debate on governance effectiveness from technical considerations to questions of politics. My broad approach, sweeping across a number of case studies, sectors and contexts, has the advantage of allowing me to reflect on the big picture of what’s going wrong with prevailing public and private governance systems to combat labour exploitation, delving into global political economy issues that are frequently overlooked in case studies. This wide-angle approach does have drawbacks: I will no doubt overlook some of the microlevel dynamics of individual initiatives as well as the full extent of variation across geographic contexts, sectors and types of initiative. Yet, a narrower approach would miss too much of the story of global labour governance and the breadth of challenges that need to be overcome to protect twenty-first-century workers.
Corporations as Cause and Solution to Labour Abuse
A few decades ago, corporations were widely considered to be the cause of problems like sweatshops, poverty wages and child labour. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, activists, workers, trade unions and civil society organizations vehemently protested the globalization of production, offshoring and the lack of restrictions on multinational corporations’ activities. Mass demonstrations and general strikes raged, drawing attention to issues like water and electricity privatization, outsourcing and patterns of foreign investment. This social movement, often described as the anti-globalization movement, countered the rapidly unfolding globalization regime, which it saw as facilitating corporate greed and profit at the expense of the public. Much of the movement’s energy was targeted at challenging the mounting role, rights and benefits of corporations within global capitalism and, especially, their exploitative labour practices.30
A key contention of the anti-globalization movement was that corporations were causing labour abuse as they laid off workers and outsourced and offshored production activities to supplier firms in the global South. For corporations, one of the great benefits of using supplier firms is that they could set up relatively anonymous sweatshops, shielding brands from the legal and reputational consequences. However, at the same time as brands sought to distance themselves from these abusive labour practices, activist efforts and a raft of journalistic exposés sought to close the gap between consumers and the adults and children sewing their clothes, making their jewellery and assembling their sports equipment in appalling conditions. In 1996, for instance, a photo essay in Life Magazine introduced American consumers to the Pakistani children as young as 10 who were sewing their Nike soccer balls for around US$0.60 per day under ‘horrible conditions’, to use Nike chairman Phil Knight’s own regretful words following the incident.31 The next year, Nike was in the spotlight again when ‘it was revealed that workers in one of its contracted factories in Vietnam were being exposed to toxic fumes at up to 177 times the Vietnamese legal limit’.32
Activists pushed for a range of solutions to the problems of offshoring and accelerating indecent work. Some called for an end to outsourcing, while others pressured the UN to create an international convention to impose corporate liability for labour standards. Still others pressured policymakers and international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to make trade and investment treaties more equitable by building in guarantees that a certain share of the value produced would remain in the countries and in the pockets of workers who contributed to the production of goods, even when the goods were sold elsewhere. While activists, workers and unions mobilizing for workers’ rights often differed on preferred solutions, they shared a united vision of the cause: that corporations and political elites were advancing a model of capitalist globalization allowing businesses to freely exploit vulnerable workers in poor countries desperate to attract foreign investment, and this was facilitating a global race to the bottom in labour standards and workers’ rights.33
Nearly three decades later, corporations have made serious strides in positioning themselves as solutions to problems like labour abuse and poverty in the global economy rather than the cause. No doubt some activists and civil society organizations continue to bemoan corporate profits and greed, and many still would identify companies as the cause of exploitative labour practices within their supply chains. But at the same time, corporations have achieved sizable legitimacy and authority as problem-solvers for labour exploitation in supply chains. Today, they are just as likely to be discussed as part of the solution to problems like modern slavery, forced labour and a lack of labour law enforcement as they are to be spoken about as the cause of such problems. And many civil society, government and international organization actors have embraced their new role, arguing that what’s right for workers and society is compatible with what’s right for businesses’ bottom lines. Indeed, this ‘business case’ for abolishing slavery is a crucial rationale for many initiatives to combat modern slavery.
Corporations Save the World’s Workers
In sharp contrast to the era in which Nike’s reliance on child labour was first exposed, corporate actors today play a central role in global labour governance. As already mentioned, multinational corporations (MNCs) like Nike, Apple and Nestlé have enacted a vast array of voluntary initiatives to detect, address and prevent labour exploitation in their supply chains. Companies at the helm of global supply chains include within their codes of conduct specific requirements for suppliers concerning labour standards and use elaborate indexes to score suppliers on labour practices and noncompliance. They develop CSR initiatives, such as Mondelēz International’s Cocoa Life programme. And they write about these in their annual sustainability reports and modern slavery statements, which are produced to comply with recent legislation to spur greater transparency over global supply chains.
In an effort to prevent the embarrassment of incidents like Nike’s child labour scandal, companies now monitor labour standards in global supply chains using social auditors. Most companies hire third party (but typically СКАЧАТЬ