Читать книгу Combatting Modern Slavery - Genevieve LeBaron - Страница 10

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 as the UK Modern Slavery Act, CSR programmes including 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.

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.