Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

Combatting Modern Slavery - Genevieve LeBaron


Скачать книгу
agriculture, the garment and footwear industries, domestic work and hospitality, construction and the extractives sector. While statistical data on forced labour is shaky at best, the ILO estimates that 24.9 million people were victims of forced labour in 2016 and that the private sector’s use of forced labour generates US$150 billion per year in illegal profits gives a good sense of its scale.22 But whether corporate antislavery efforts are making a dent in the problem is less apparent.

      Why Global Labour Governance Is Failing

      Why aren’t these governance efforts working? And what type of supply chain governance is needed to protect the world’s most vulnerable workers?

      The answers, as this book will reveal, are complex and vary across different sectors, type of governance initiative, and parts of the world. But stepping back, it is clear that two mutually reinforcing problems stand in the way of improving labour standards in global supply chains: both the design and the implementation of contemporary labour governance are severely flawed and limited, in ways that benefit individuals and organizations profiting from exploitation, and fail to protect workers.

      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.

      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

      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.


Скачать книгу