Abstract
This volume contributes to the discussion of international labor standards. Specifically, Labor Standards in International Supply Chains addresses the question: Under what conditions should we expect labor rights in global supply chains to improve? Daniel Berliner and coauthors build an analytical framework based on coalitions of stakeholders and how their alignment might impact (positively or negatively) labor rights along supply chains. They discuss dimensions of alignments between these actors and conclude that governments play a significant role in improving labor standards in supply chains.
After the Introduction, Chapter 2 focuses on the examples of a few world brands, how they organize their supply chains, problems they have had in the past, and how they have dealt with them. For instance, one of the cases is the already well-known Nike sweatshops and how North America, as well as international organizations and activists, pressured the company to improve their practices. The chosen examples are representative and give a reasonable overview of how global chains operate, their challenges, and the several actors that pressure organizations.
Chapter 3 introduces the main analytic framework of the book, in which stakeholders are clustered according to their relationship to the production process. For example, supply chain workers and their allies are one cluster, and governments are another. Additional clusters they identify are unions, nongovernmental organizations, companies, and consumers. The authors argue that each group has related interests, and alignments with and between such clusters in a determined context might generate cooperation to solve labor problems. In Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, when case studies are presented, the authors structure their analysis by explaining the interests of the different clusters they identify in each case.
Chapter 4 summarizes the main existing international labor standards. Their origins are explained, and the discussion culminates with the creation of the International Labour Organisation and other international agreements (e.g., European Social Charter, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Political Rights, European Convention on Human Rights). The authors elaborate on how various organizations reached a point of convergence on minimum labor standards, such as the elimination of forced and child labor, whereas there is still no consensus on other concerns, such as discrimination, which is a widespread practice in many countries. Such a selective adoption of standards illustrates the limits of international organizations and norms to influence countries—an aspect that is not highlighted enough. This chapter is mainly descriptive but provides a useful introduction to the emergence of international standards to monitor supply chains.
In Chapter 5, the authors present their quantitative measurements on labor standards using rights and enforcement as the main variables. They score a range of countries based on labor rights and the mechanisms used to enforce such rights. The idea is that countries with better labor conditions not only create laws but also enforce them. A number of factors are considered in the analysis, such as whether the country is a democracy, if it is ruled by a left-wing party, its gross domestic product, and state capacity. The measures are clear, but this model is somehow forgotten in the following chapters.
Chapter 6 dives into the US context, explaining how actors have been dealing with the growing erosion of labor standards in the country. The authors thoroughly explain how government, businesses, and consumers (some of the clusters they identified) have become anti-labor unions, leaving a freeway-size path for organizations to lessen labor rights. Chapter 7 complements this thought, with the cases of Russell and Nike in Honduras. These important chapters reinforce the difficulties of controlling and improving supply chain standards. Briefly, the authors mention that despite growing awareness of lousy labor conditions in supply chains by consumers and international organizations, several cases still occur in which workers are exploited in relative silence. Unfortunately, the scenario has not changed much since the book’s publication, which makes these chapters very current.
Chapter 8 explores the Rana Plaza incident in Bangladesh (2013), in which the collapse of an 8-story building killed 1,127 people who were mostly workers from suppliers of big apparel companies. In a sense, this case summarizes all of the already-mentioned struggles to improve conditions in supply chains: weak labor unions, employees in inadequate working environments, and the difficulty of international organizations to enforce legislation at the national level. However, the analysis of the consequences of Rana Plaza—which could provide good insights from the case—is rather superficial. Subsequently, it is left for the reader to guess how this case contributes to the development of the book.
Chapter 9 broadens the readers’ perspective by bringing the recent and problematic formation of super collusions between two clusters in China: suppliers and local governments. The authors explain that local governments are to enforce economic and labor laws. Coupled with a system that fragments workers into categories (e.g., rural, urban, and migrant), an ideal space for abuse is created. The cases of Yue Yuen (Nike’s biggest supplier) and Foxconn (Apple’s biggest supplier) illustrate well the problem, culminating with the dramatic episode of employees’ suicide at Foxconn in 2010.
The authors conclude the book by highlighting that despite the improvement of labor conditions in supply chains, change is issue-based and sporadic. The role of information is then central in the diffusion of misdeeds and the generation of public awareness to such problems. Labor abuses are far from being solved, as the authors effectively argue. Since publication of the book, little has changed in this sense. Overall, it is an excellent introductory book to the limits of labor standards in international supply chains and covers a range of essential aspects to understand the topic. It may be disappointing to a more specialized audience though, given that all the cases and challenges explored in the book have been well publicized by the media and previous academic research.
The book has some limitations, as it is structured in a way that the chapters are not built on preceding material. As a consequence, the quantitative model presented in Chapter 5 is not explored in the remainder of the book. In that chapter, the authors consider specific features in their model (e.g., signatories of the UN Global Compact) and find some relationships that cannot be satisfactorily explained by their propositions. For example, they find that countries with more UN Global Compact members are in worse positions in their ranking, both in terms of rights and enforcement. They give some succinct interpretations for such a surprising finding, but future studies are needed to explain, or even refute, their measures. All case studies are presented in the same format, in which the authors explore alliances between clusters that are mostly the same in every case (government, consumers, business). In this sense, unless the reader is interested in the nuances of each case, Chapter 9 is enough to cover most barriers to improvements in supply chains.