Multi-Stakeholder Labour Monitoring Organizations: Egoists, Instrumentalists, or Moralists? (original) (raw)
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Corporations have increasingly turned to voluntary, multi-stakeholder governance programs to monitor workers' rights and standards in the global apparel industry. While much has been written on whether, in general terms, these Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs are or are not effective, the literature has not fully explored under what conditions these programs fail and succeed. This paper argues that CSR effectiveness varies significantly depending on stakeholder involvement and issue areas under examination. Corporateinfluenced programs can be effective in detecting and remediating minimum wage, hour, and occupational safety and health violations because addressing these issues provides corporations with legitimacy and reduces the risks of uncertainty created by activist campaigns. Corporate-influenced programs, however, are less effective in ensuring workers' right to form unions, bargain, and strike because these rights are perceived as lessening managerial control. I explore this argument by first contrasting corporate and labor-influenced programs, and then analyzing 730 factory audits of the Fair Labor Association between 2002 and 2009. This analysis is complemented with a case study of Russell Athletic in Honduras. Since the 1990s, there has been a considerable shift toward voluntary, multi-stakeholder governance mechanisms to monitor compliance with labor standards and rights in the global economy (Fung et al. 2001; 2007; Rodríguez-Garavito 2005; Seidman 2007). These-Corporate Social Responsibility‖ (CSR) initiatives are a response to new challenges presented by economic globalization, notably corporate efforts to oversee the operations of increasingly-complex global supply chains. As media exposés and social movement activists highlight extreme labor abuses in factories producing for well-known global brands, corporations have been pushed to monitor their employment relations practices through multi-stakeholder programs. 1 The author thanks Dong Fang and Katherine Cornejo for their research assistance in coding FLA factory audits.
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Private labor regulation emerged as a an important international governance tool to enforce international labor standards such as minimum wages, maximum working hours, safety at the workplace, etc. Initially, these private schemes were welcomed as 'one of the most innovative and startling institutional designs of the past 50 years and regarded as key instruments in ratcheting up labor standards on an international scale . More recently, however, doubts have been expressed concerning the potential of these systems to effectively improve labor conditions in many developing countries. Both academic and journalistic accounts point to weaknesses in the design of these systems to effectively enforce international labor standards. The top-down auditing form of enforcing standards is considered not to be appropriate to enforce international labor standards. This leads several authors (e.g. Locke, 2013) to dismiss these systems and look for alternatives.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015
Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) are increasingly used as a default mechanism to address human rights challenges in a variety of industries. MSI is a designation that covers a broad range of initiatives from bestpractice sharing learning platforms (e.g., the UN Global Compact) to certification bodies (e.g., the Forest Stewardship Council) and those targeted at addressing governance gaps (e.g., the Fair Labor Association). Critics contest the legitimacy of the private governance model offered by MSIs. The objective of this paper is (1) to theoretically develop a typology of MSIs, and (2) to empirically analyze the legitimacy of one specific type of MSI, namely industry-specific MSIs. We argue that industry-specific MSIs that set out to govern corporate behavior have great potential to develop legitimacy. We analyze two industry-specific MSIs-the Fair Labor Association and the Global Network Initiative-to get a better understanding of how these MSIs formed, how they define and enforce standards, and how they seek to ensure accountability. Based on these empirical illustrations, we discuss the value of this specific MSI model and draw implications for the democratic legitimacy of private governance mechanisms.
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2001
Through their attention to working conditions as labor rights, labor advocates seek to wrest protections for workers from corporate actors. At the same time, corporate actors, through their own codes of corporate conduct, publicize to consumers that they are acting voluntarily to ensure that workers in their global production chain enjoy certain rights. In both cases, these initiatives purport to contribute to improved regulation of the workplace. In this article, I posit that these initiatives are themselves emerging forms of labor regulation. I contend that as self-regulatory initiatives, they can best be understood through the lens of two key discourses: legal pluralism and economic globalization. These discourses cast light upon the specific nature of labor law, the limits to state regulatory action, and the ability of codes of corporate conduct to adapt to the logic of the new international division of labor.
Over the past decades, there has been a growing number of corporate Codes of Conduct (CoC) being developed and introduced by multinational corporations (MNCs) to promote international labour standards in supply chains. This paper examines the implementation of CoC by suppliers in developing countries. A study was carried out at three garment factories in Vietnam that supply products to a number of well-known international brands. Findings of the research show that there are different levels of compliance with CoC although the three factories are requested to implement the same sets of CoC from similar buyers. The foreign owned factory, which has direct relationships with buyers, complies with most of the standards required in buyers’ CoC while the other two factories, which are subcontracted by intermediaries, violate the codes and deceive auditors to pass buyers’ audits. Nevertheless, workers working in the factory with high level of compliance do not seem to enjoy better working conditions and benefits than those who work at the non-complying factories. The study also found that in the non-complying factories, there is a high level of willingness of workers to collaborate with employers to deceive the auditors. The findings of the study raise the question whether CoC imposed by the MNCs practically help workers in developing countries.