Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron
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Название: Combatting Modern Slavery

Автор: Genevieve LeBaron

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Экономика

Серия:

isbn: 9781509513703

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СКАЧАТЬ company and supplier codes of conduct, ethical certification schemes and various forms of social auditing. My primary research has involved hundreds of interviews with business actors, including corporate executives; representatives of certification bodies, social audit firms and accounting firms; producers; suppliers at various stages along the supply chain; exporters; and industry associations. It has also involved interviews with government and international organization officers, trade unions, civil society and workers’ organizations. In addition, I draw on interviews and surveys conducted with workers within global supply chains. This includes research with vulnerable workers at the base of global supply chains, such as more than 1,200 tea and cocoa workers, some of whom have been subjected to forced labour.28 Detailed case studies and methodologies for my various research projects have been published elsewhere as academic journal articles and reports.29 My goal in this book is to combine and consolidate the insights within these various studies about the failures of labour governance and prospects for improving it.

      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 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

      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.