Abstract
Reviewed by: Lance Compa, ILR School, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA DOI: 10.1177/0730888417702201
Big-brand marketers like Nike and Adidas and retailers like Wal-Mart and Gap have had a quarter-century to implement corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in their supply chain factories around the world. All have crafted codes of conduct for suppliers requiring good labor standards, backed up by monitoring, auditing, certifying, and other application measures. Most have joined industry associations with counterparts and multistakeholder plans with civil society groups, each with its own additional code and monitoring system.
What are the results? In the past 5 years, repeated fire and building disasters in Bangladesh, mass-fainting workers and shot-down strikers in Cambodia, child labor and assassinated trade unionists in Central America, labor repression in China, and other workplace abuses in the tens of thousands of supply chain factories serving the Brands. Moreover, these abuses often occur in factories that have gotten a clean bill of health under companies’ CSR monitoring and auditing programs.
So much CSR, and so little to show for it. This is a central theme of Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein’s edited volume, with chapters from 21 scholars and advocates deeply grounded in supply chain labor issues. To their credit, the editors and contributors do not stop with identifying and decrying the problem. They offer several new ideas and approaches for strengthening labor standards enforcement in the global supply chain system.
The editors’ introduction is finely balanced. They do not condemn firms’ CSR initiatives in toto, pointing out that experience with codes of conduct and enforcement efforts can bring discrete advances by exposing conditions and providing space for organizing and mobilizing international support efforts. But gains are episodic, not systemic. The crushing pressure of the global supply chain system still blocks progress.
Scott Nova and Chris Wegemer trace the arc of CSR approaches and how they fail to address supply chain structural and pricing pressures that brands put on contractors and employees. They examine closely the Bangladesh Accord on Building and Fire Safety, with its trade union involvement and binding arbitration clause, as a possible way forward.
Appelbaum’s chapter provides a concise history of CSR initiatives. He goes back to the Sullivan Principles for U.S. firms operating in South Africa in the 1970s, then moves through responses to “sweatshop” exposés in the 1990s, advent of the Worker Rights Consortium and Fair Labor Association in the 2000s, and the more recent United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. He stresses how the “trust me” CSR private-sector approach undermines effective government labor law enforcement.
Jill Esbenshade argues for a new triangular contracting structure with binding agreements among brands, suppliers, and workers’ organizations. She offers prototypical case studies of such arrangements, citing again (as do many of the authors) the Bangladesh Accord, as well as a novel trade union rights agreement by Fruit of the Loom corp. and unions in its Honduras supply facilities and resolution of disputes at Nike suppliers in Honduras and an Adidas supplier in Indonesia.
Even casual observers know about the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse that killed more than a thousand apparel workers. Robert J. S. Ross recounts several earlier, less publicized examples of deadly disasters in other Bangladesh factories that presaged Rana Plaza. In those tragedies, too, monitors and auditors dispatched by brands had given those facilities passing grades on labor standards.
Lichtenstein places supply chain labor dynamics in a historical context, citing the demise of European-style social dialogue among labor, management, and government, and the appearance of CSR in its place. The new triangulation excludes unions and government but, correspondingly, gives rise to a critical nongovernmental organization community that takes up advocacy campaigns on workers’ behalf, along with Brands and their suppliers. A close look at recent experience in Bangladesh and Cambodia informs the historical analysis with concrete current examples.
Anne Posthuma and Renato Bignami present an important country study on efforts by Brazilian apparel brands to create a self-regulating CSR system for their own large internal market. Its results show both potential and limitations. It is dependent on unique country conditions. But then, every country has unique conditions; what we learn here is a helpful comparative lesson.
Gary Gereffi and Xubei Luo offer a global perspective, emphasizing the need for continuous upgrading of apparel manufacturing systems backed by government policy measures that push firms toward a high road. Jason Kibbey presents an innovative effort to break from the firm-by-firm code of conduct or monitoring model and move toward a consensual plan involving many firms, with an agreed set of standards called the Higg Index and related benchmarking and scoring system.
Brishen Rogers analyzes the need and suggests a legal model for brand-supplier-workers triangular bargaining, hearkening to the jobbers-manufacturers-union arrangement that took shape in the U.S. apparel industry in the 1930s. Mark Anner, Jennifer Bair, and Jeremy Blasi provide detail on that historical experience and how it broke down when the industry moved to a footloose global supply chain system. Like Rogers and other authors, they evaluate key cases that map a return to effective triangular bargaining with workers and trade unions at the table: the Bangladesh Accord, Fruit of the Loom’s agreement with a Honduran union, Knights Apparel’s agreement with a Dominican Republic union, resolution of disputes in Central America, and Asia involving Nike, adidas, Inditex, and other global brands.
Jeff Hermanson builds on these models and cases to call for new forms of cross-border union organizing and solidarity campaigns. He introduces the new International Union League for Brand Responsibility and its campaigns for workers in Indonesia, India, Cambodia, Haiti, Central America, and other supply chain centers. He also offers a sharp critique of global unions’ “top-down” approach to supply chain labor standards, relying on high-level discussions with Brand managers and vaguely worded “framework agreements” rather than bottom-up mobilization and solidarity.
Three other chapters provide a wealth of information and analysis on China. Jenny Chan, Ngai Pun, and Mark Selden describe the rise of Foxconn as Apple’s biggest supplier (and indeed, the biggest manufacturing company in the world). Katie Quan reviews strikes and other forms of militant work action in recent years, notwithstanding their unlawfulness under China’s repressive labor regime. Anita Chan examines several cases of union leadership elections that broke with the standard Chinese model in which human resources managers become top factory union officials, and the challenge of sustaining such democratic models in the Chinese labor relations system.
A recurring theme in the book is the need to bring workers and their trade unions into the supply chain labor equation, along with stronger government regulation and enforcement. Reliance on voluntary codes of conduct and CSR methods is insufficient. Workers and unions should be monitoring workplace conditions, not cost-conscious checklist monitors. And a new triangular bargaining structure among brands, suppliers, and unions should create an upward-moving dynamic for labor standards in place of the cost structure putting all the weight on assembly line workers.
Achieving Workers’ Rights is a significant contribution to the literature on labor standards in the global economy. It provides a strong theoretical framework packed with concrete cases, lessons learned, and proposals for moving forward. It speaks to scholars, advocates, activists, journalists, government officials, policy makers, and as well to corporate managers in the supply chain system—indeed, to all actors involved in global supply chain labor concerns.