Description
Book SynopsisThe authors examine developments in labor standards in global supply chains over the past thirty years, analyzing factors that create challenges and opportunities for improving working conditions. They illustrate the complex dynamics within and among key groups, including brands, suppliers, governments, workers and consumers.
Using extended examples from China, Honduras, Bangladesh and the United States, as well as new quantitative evidence, the authors analyze stakeholders and mechanisms that create or obstruct opportunities for improving labor rights. They evaluate key clusters of actors and their interests in order to comprehensively map the complex interactions and relationships that make up global supply chains. Original data and analyses, including four in-depth case studies, present a systematic evaluation of the points of leverage for changing labor standards in sectors including apparel, footwear, and electronics.
This exciting new contribution to a burgeoning field of study will benefit scholars of labor rights and human rights, as well as students with an interest in labor and working conditions. It also presents critical information for political scientists, NGOs, and practitioners looking to effect change in working conditions and learn more about key players in the global economy.
Trade Review'
Exhibiting a refreshing disregard for industry-approved narratives about labor rights, in which progress flows from the spigot of an espresso machine at a 'corporate social responsibility' seminar, the authors focus with precision on the factors that actually determine labor rights outcomes: the economic interests of global brands, and their suppliers, and how these are mediated by governments' regulatory choices and by the efforts of workers and allied groups to make brands pay a reputational price for the labor abuses they help create. Readers will better understand why early 20th century working conditions still exist in the 21st - and what might be done about it.' --Scott Nova, Executive Director, Worker Rights Consortium
Table of ContentsContents: 1. Introduction 2. The Worlds Brands Create 3. Aligning Interests Across Global Supply Chains: An Analytic Framework 4. The International Framework for Labour Standards 5. Labor Standards Around the World: A Quantitative Examination 6. The United States in the Struggle for Labor Standards 7. Apparel Production in Honduras: A Case of Cross-cluster Alignment 8. Apparel Production in Bangladesh: Opportunity Amidst Tragedy? 9. Labor Resistance and Local Government – Supplier Collusion in Post-1986 China 10. Conclusion Index
