Global labour governance: potential and limits of an emerging perspective

Abstract

The article addresses the meaning and relevance of the recently emerged idea of ‘global labour governance’. Increasingly influential in policy, it has been criticized for political and theoretical reasons, including the risk of normative ideological uses. The article suggests that labour studies should nonetheless engage, theoretically and empirically, with the issue and the perspective of ‘global labour governance’. This is because of its growing political importance and for the attention it brings to still understudied issues of ‘multi-level’ dynamics, ‘networks’ and ‘reflexivity’. Systematic analysis of governance alternatives is needed. The traditions of the sociology of work and industrial relations can contribute to this analysis through their elaboration on informality, sectoral differences and collective action, as well as by problematizing the idea of ‘effectiveness’.

Keywords

globalization global labour governance regulation

Introduction

The term ‘global labour governance’ (Hassel, 2008) has gained resonance over the last 15 years in debates about globalization and labour standards. This might be viewed as reflecting the growing popularity of the term ‘governance’ in two – themselves contested – fields. First, the idea of a shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ (Held, 1995; Rosenau, 1987) and from ‘hard regulation’ to ‘soft regulation’, which has been particularly visible in the EU. Second, the growing attention accorded to ‘corporate governance’ and, additionally, to ‘corporate social responsibility’ (Crouch, 2006).

While the term global labour governance has become established among international organizations and in legal and political studies, industrial relations and the sociology of work have largely neglected it. For instance, up to the end of 2012 Work, Employment and Society had never published an article employing this term – although one discussed the ‘global governance of labour standards’ (Bloor and Sampson, 2009). The concept of ‘global governance’ itself comes from politics (Rosenau, 1987), but it has found only occasional application in industrial relations (e.g. Niforou, 2012), although ‘European governance’ has gained more space (Léonard et al., 2007; Marginson and Sisson, 2004; Smismans, 2012).

This article asks what, setting aside the broader debates on ‘governance’ in general, the specific phenomenon of ‘global labour governance’ can add, as an object of inquiry and as an analytical perspective. As argued by Sisson (2007), industrial relations has always been about ‘governance’ rather than simply regulation and certainly more about ‘joint regulation’ (especially, but not only, through collective bargaining) rather than ‘government’. Accordingly, the article contends that the study of labour relations at the international level needs to take global labour governance seriously – but also critically – and that the concept offers much needed analytical promise. In this way, a multi-disciplinary research programme can be opened up on issues of increasing social relevance. To do this, the article first reviews disputed aspects of the concept and then establishes its relevance, before briefly reviewing the available literature adopting the global labour governance perspective, and identifying a more systematic research agenda opened up by that perspective.

Conceptual issues

Although international concerns with labour standards have a long history, preoccupation with global labour standards has become an important international political issue since the 1990s, in the context of debates on ‘globalization’, its labour consequences and its policy implications (Reich, 1991). However, the term ‘global’ remains problematic on two grounds.

In terms of geographical scope, ‘global labour governance’ is supposed by definition to be exhaustive. However, many of its forms do not cover the whole world and leave important gaps. This is well known for more traditional international regulations. Many of the ILO’s Conventions, the oldest form of global labour governance, are not ratified by important countries: the USA and China have ratified only, respectively, 14 and 22 of the 189 Conventions. Similar ‘gaps’ occur in more recent private regulations. Volkswagen, for instance, a leading company in the globalization of employment relations, created a ‘Global Works Council’ back in 1999. It was not until 2010, however, that this ‘global’ council included the second-largest country by number of employees, i.e. China. Moreover, the use of the term ‘global’ in social issues often implicitly assumes a focus on developing, low-wage countries and their potential for unfair competition with higher-wage ones. It distracts attention from threats to labour standards originating in the latter, highlighted by living wage campaigns and instances of restrictions on union rights.

In terms of institutional architecture, ‘global’ regulations are in fact closely intertwined with national ones in problematic ways. The linkages between global and national governance can be of both a complementary and a substitutive nature (Locke et al., 2013), but also involve contradictions and can induce regulation avoidance (Niforou, 2012). As global regulations are often less strict than previous national regulations, a focus on global regulation might be seen as a tacit form of deregulation. Some have also argued that even in export-dependent countries (such as in plantation-based Central America) labour exploitation nonetheless follows patterns that are predominantly determined by national forces (Hough, 2012).

Global labour governance can also be problematic with regard to its object. In the Western industrialized world, ‘labour’ has been predominantly identified with formal employment, which in turn has been historically regulated through legislation as well as institutionalized collective compromises between employees and employers. The concept of ‘global labour’ might imply, following modernization theory, that developing countries are bound to move towards formal employment and that there is a firm distinction between formal and informal labour. This is contestable: in both the global South and North, current global processes are as much about informalization as formalization and the development of the latter does not imply a decline of the former (Standing, 2011). In fact, urbanization in the global South has coincided with new forms of informal work, in particular through increased migration. Moreover, the boundaries between formal and informal work and even between free and unfree work are not clearly distinct: the two spheres coexist and co-operate (Denning, 2010); formal international organizations such as the World Bank and the ILO value the informal sector as a functional safety net (Breman, 2009). One telling example is ‘neobondage’, whereby workers may at the same time work in the formal, often advanced economy and have informal migration status or be tied to illegal trafficking organizations (Breman, 2010). Child labour similarly involves sensitive definitional boundaries: the ILO has made its prohibition one of its four Core Labour Standards but defined the age threshold differently for North and South, rather than as fixed and ‘global’. De jure, child labour should not exist (unless ‘light’) yet the ILO reports 210 million child labourers worldwide, most working in hazardous conditions (ILO, 2002). Also, child labourers organize and engage to assert their rights, despite not having the right to work in the first place, as in the cases of the Bolivian Union of Child and Adolescent Workers and the African Movement of Working Children and Youth.

The example of child labour organization leads on to an additional complexity of the term ‘labour’. It refers not simply to an employment status, but also to a social actor. In the North, this has been generally identified with the organizations defending employees and especially with trade unions. While trade union power has declined in most of the global North, some have argued that it is structurally bound to increase in the global South (Silver, 2003). It is, however, an open question whether the forms of labour organization in the global South will resemble the historical ones of the North. Nonetheless, it can be asked whether regulation is possible without effective voice for workers and in turn whether this is possible without effective organization.

In sum, the focus on labour as formal employment, and even more on labour as formal employee organization, runs up against the risk of ‘labourism’ (Standing, 2009) and the exclusion of different, widespread, forms of work and activity – especially female. It is therefore advisable to adopt an extended, non-legalistic conception of labour. It is also useful to add the ‘subjective’ meaning of labour, even if not necessarily in the classic trade union form – something that is largely neglected by political studies of global labour governance.

In political science, the term ‘governance’ has been introduced as an alternative to ‘government’ and has gained particular attention within international organizations, with the Commission on Global Governance set up by the UN in 1991 and the ‘White Paper’ on European Governance by the European Commission of 2001. In academic discourse, the term has become the focus of sustained controversy. The idea of global governance, as something complementary rather than substitutive of the nation state, has been advocated by Held (1995) as the only democratic option to preserve social policies and social regulations, including on labour, in a globalized economy.

Critics have questioned, however, how far the term is more than a new label, with new ideological connotations, rather than a new analytical concept. In its explicit linguistic contrast from ‘government’, governance can be seen as a programmatic, ideological choice to de-politicize issues and to understate the role of states, fostering a form of new hegemony that hides the actual sources of power behind undefined ‘networks’ (Davies, 2011). Hardt and Negri (2006) have dismissed global institutions as an ‘Empire’ protecting global capital, proposals for their democratization as unrealizable and governance as replacing democracy with transparency. Social movement theorists have criticized global labour governance for its Northern perspective, its imposition of Western tripartite formulae and its demobilizing nature, and have argued for mobilization from the South as the only democratic alternative (Waterman, 2006).

In the field of labour studies the appeal of ‘governance’ is less immediately apparent, since two of its main implications are already well established. It is a commonplace that labour has long been regulated in many different ways than just by ‘governments’, with private mechanisms prominent, including collective bargaining. Equally well known is the role of bottom-up processes and the associated scope for informality (Brown, 1973). Established approaches to theorizing in the field, however, reassert the centrality of the nation state and are not readily extendable to account for the emergence of an international dimension where there is no equivalent state actor at global or regional level (Keune and Marginson, 2013). In this context, ‘governance’ has gained recent traction in theorizing the emergence of international levels in addition to the national one (Hassel, 2008) and as providing a step forward from the previous concept of ‘regulation’ (Sisson, 2007). It is not simply a ‘broader’ concept, but also a ‘deeper’ one, paying particular attention to processes, enforcement and compliance.

To avoid a normative use of the concept, it is imperative to include the state in it and leave its supposed ‘retreat’ (Strange, 1996) as an empirical problem, rather than an assumption. In this more open sense, the concept’s main added value is in stressing aspects that, while known in labour studies, have hitherto been accorded relatively little importance. First, the multi-level aspect (Hooghe and Marks, 2001), which becomes more complex and less hierarchical at the international, rather than national level (Keune and Marginson, 2013; Marginson and Sisson, 2004). Second, the attention to networks, besides hierarchy, which has already proven valuable in the understanding of transnational trade union action (Fichter and Sydow, 2002; Meardi, 2012). Third, the growth of new forms of reflexive regulation at the global level and their contribution to the establishment of a global labour law regime (Hepple, 2005; Rogowski, 2013).

Relevance

We move to address the relevance of global labour governance as a field of inquiry, doing so in three steps. First, the idea of global labour governance assumes the pre-existence of a global labour problem that requires governance. Pro-market optimists and social-democratic pessimists have resisted this assumption. The former have focused on the benefits for labour from economic globalization, regardless of regulations (Flanagan, 2006), while the latter have argued for the enduring priority of the national level (Scharpf, 1997). There is, however, by now a sufficient consensus, both institutionally and academically, about the relevance of globalization and its problematic nature (e.g. Bacchetta and Jansen, 2011; Bonacich and Appelbaum, 2000; Standing, 2009). The economic crisis that started in 2008 has underlined both interdependence and social vulnerability. Moreover, in recent times industrial strife has risen dramatically in the so-called emerging economies of China, India, Bangladesh, South Africa and Brazil, indicating that labour is not an ‘old world’ problem. Recent disasters in Bangladeshi garment factories supplying Western brands highlight the weakness of national regulations, the responsibility of multinational companies and the complexity of the challenges to be surmounted to improve the situation. Further, ‘global labour’ issues are not simply of relevance for developing countries or for specific transnational phenomena, such as the international maritime sector (Bloor and Sampson, 2009). They also disrupt national employment relations in developed countries, as in the protests against foreign contract workers in British construction in 2009 and in the growing concerns with issues such as people trafficking, living wages for immigrant workers and the social consequences of multinationals’ actual and threatened relocations.

Second, if it is agreed that there is a global labour problem, are the traditional forms of labour governance not sufficient to cope with the challenges? It has been widely argued that national instruments such as labour law and collective bargaining, and for transnational issues inter-governmentalism, are meeting increasing obstacles in their operation (e.g. Marginson and Sisson, 2004; Standing, 2009). In particular, national regulations are finding it problematic to deal with increased cross-border movement of labour and services and with multinational companies, although on both fronts they are far from having become irrelevant (Cremers, 2011; Marginson and Meardi, 2010). Among recent examples is the disruption to long-established national arrangements governing collective bargaining and industrial action in Germany, Finland and Sweden as a result of European Court of Justice rulings favouring the right of establishment and the freedom to provide services over national labour law. Another is the destabilizing impact on Italy’s collective bargaining system of the exit of its largest industrial employer, the Fiat-Chrysler multinational alliance. The imposition of labour market reforms by international institutions, in order to enhance international competitiveness, is no longer confined to developing countries. In Europe it occurs under direct pressure from international institutions in Greece and Portugal, and under pressure from international financial markets, as well as from European institutions, in Italy and Spain. The problem is even deeper in developing countries where reference to national regulations may even mean, in practice, lack of regulation, as illustrated by Niforou (2012) in the case of International Framework Agreements (IFAs).

Reflecting the absence at global or regional level of a centralized state authority, the traditional regulatory instruments at international level are those deriving from inter-governmental institutions, in particular the ILO. These too are finding it problematic to deal with the global labour problem. Despite going beyond mere inter-governmentalism thanks to its tripartite dimension, the ILO’s capacity for setting standards considerably exceeds that for ensuring their implementation and compliance with them, as indicated by the rather limited ratification of its Conventions noted above. In the rare cases where a country has been condemned for breaching one of its core labour standards, the ILO itself cannot enforce any sanctions. The WTO possesses stronger powers of enforcement, via trade sanctions, but it never came close to agreeing on a ‘social clause’ (Granger and Sireon, 2006). At regional level, with the exception of the EU and to a lesser extent Mercosur, inter-governmentalism generally prevails among regional trade blocs – with social commitments at most extending to a mutual pledge by each member government to enforce national labour laws (Kaminska and Visser, 2011).

Third, the increasingly apparent limitations of national and inter-governmental regulations have raised new calls for transnational co-ordination and new forms of governance. Are new relevant forms of global labour governance now emerging? The main examples addressed by the literature are soft law in the EU (Zeitlin, 2010) and the ILO (Vosko, 2002), EU-level social dialogue (Léonard et al., 2007) and private initiatives relating to multinationals. These include Codes of Conduct (Locke et al., 2013), IFAs (Papadakis, 2011) and multi-stakeholder initiatives both from above, such as the UN Global Compact, and from below, such as the Fair Labor Association (Anner, 2012). Criticism has been raised on these experiments, in particular on their limitations in terms of democracy (Niforou, 2014) and their dependence on structural power configurations (Keune and Marginson, 2013). Some have also argued that rather than governing labour standards, they pre-empt national regulations and result in the promotion and justification of neo-liberalism (Esbenshade, 2004; Standing, 2008). Nonetheless, it can be argued that the emerging system of global labour governance is relevant in two ways. First, the simple growth of the system must be explained by some sort of function, whether the declared ones, tacit ones, or even unintentional ones. Second, there is at least sufficient evidence that the system is leading towards a shared understanding of labour standards and to a common discourse around it (Hassel, 2008).

Open questions

We therefore contend that global labour governance urgently invites further inquiry. Its relative novelty implies important gaps in knowledge, already the focus of the developing literature on private – unilateral, multi-stakeholder and joint (management-union) – initiatives concerning multinational corporations and their supply chains. Broadly speaking, this literature has considered the actual forms governance takes, its substantive content and its consequential effects.

On forms, authors have provided analytical distinctions according to whether the governance instruments concerned are: controlled by (as under unilateral codes of conduct, e.g. at Nike and Hewlett Packard, or business association initiatives, e.g. WRAP [Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production]); influenced by (as under multi-stakeholder initiatives including NGOs, e.g. FLA [Fair Labor Association] and ETI [Ethical Trade Initiative], or IFAs negotiated with international trade unions); or autonomous of (e.g. WRC [Workers’ Rights Consortium]) the multinationals which are the object of these new forms of regulation (Anner, 2012; Fransen, 2011; O’Rourke, 2003). Criteria for assessing different forms have also been proposed and applied, such as legitimacy, transparency and accountability (Niforou, 2014; O’Rourke, 2003, 2006). The legitimacy basis of initiatives varies, including: hierarchy, e.g. unilateral codes of conduct; representativeness of the actors involved, e.g. multi-stakeholder initiatives, IFAs; epistemic, e.g. reference to scientific standards; and normative, e.g. reference to established principles such as the ILO’s four core labour standards. On accountability, considerable attention has focused on mechanisms for monitoring implementation. Alternatives include: regular self-evaluation, as under the Global Reporting Initiative; internal audit units, as at Nike and Hewlett Packard (but which raise potential conflicts of interest); external expert agencies, as under FLA and WRAP (but which raise questions of access to data and beyond ‘gatekeepers’); joint evaluation, as under IFAs; and verification by autonomous expert agencies, as under WRC. Transparency concerns the openness and availability of results of monitoring and review procedures: there is no public disclosure under WRAP, the FLA fully discloses its reports on lead companies, but not the identity of supply factories, whereas WRC practices full disclosure.

Substantively, governance differs according to whether the standards required involve: complying with local labour laws/material terms and conditions which prevail locally, as under some unilateral codes of conduct and WRAP; complying with international labour standards, as under ETI, FLA or with IFAs; or even aiming to improve on these, as in the living wage commitments of ETI and WRC (Fransen, 2011; O’Rourke, 2003). In respect of labour, a problematic issue is the relative emphasis on fundamental rights, such as the ILO’s four core labour standards, or on material standards such as wages and conditions. In part influenced by the ILO’s approach, private forms of governance have tended to focus more on the former (although as just noted some also commit to a living wage); IFAs, for instance, tend to be ‘rights agreements’ rather than collective agreements in the classic sense of specifying material standards (Papadakis, 2011).

In terms of their effects, distinctions have been drawn in the degree of independence of the monitoring of implementation, as indicated above; also in its extent and rigour (Fransen, 2011; Locke, 2013; O’Rourke, 2003). Extent and rigour are not necessarily related, with the highly rigorous monitoring of WRC not being routine but triggered by complaints from labour or civil society groups. Conversely, monitoring mechanisms under some unilateral codes of conduct are very extensive, although subsequent review and therefore rigour is compromised by lack of transparency over results. In general, the degree of rigour seems to increase movement from initiatives which are controlled by multinationals to those which are autonomous of them, and when interacting with public (state) institutions (Locke, 2013). Distinctions have also been identified in the mechanisms, if any, available to ensure compliance (Niforou, 2012). Possibilities range across ‘soft’ market sanctions, such as ‘naming and shaming’, to ‘hard’ ones, such as loss of contracts; and also include problem solving, as under IFAs and some multi-stakeholder initiatives. Again, there is considerable variation, with unilateral codes and business association initiatives tending to be softer in these respects than multi-stakeholder initiatives and IFAs. Finally, new forms of governance seem to vary in their effectiveness between issues, being least effective in upholding the core industrial relations issues of freedom of association and collective bargaining (Anner, 2012).

Systematic research is largely missing, though, on the intersection of formal, substantive and consequential aspects of global labour governance: most research so far has been exploratory and most usually on specific forms. To assess the varieties of global labour governance, it is necessary to distinguish between and investigate all three. An integrated approach is needed, which can consider governance alternatives and governance gaps, rather than initiatives in isolation. Public initiatives, such as the OECD’s revised and strengthened (2011) guidelines on multinationals, and hybrid ones, such as the UN’s Global Compact, need to be included as well as private ones, enabling comparative assessment of various combinations of public and private governance. The forms of regulation involved tend to rely on reflexive regulatory mechanisms intended to prompt self-regulation (Rogowski, 2013), but the ways in which this is achieved and their relative success have yet to be evaluated. Unresolved also is the extent to which different forms might constitute competing regimes offering more or less rigorous mechanisms in a market for regulation (Fransen, 2011) and the extent to which they are complementary to, or a substitute for, traditional, ‘harder’ regulation (Locke et al., 2013). Crucial intervening factors, such as economic sector and configuration of global value chains, need to be controlled for. Anner et al. (2006) identify different, sector-specific, prevailing modes of international trade union organization and action. Donaghey et al. (2014) propose an analytical distinction between consumer activism and labour activism as sources of pressure to improve global labour standards, and relate alternative possibilities to sector characteristics and differences between ‘buyer’-driven and ‘producer’-driven supply chains. The configuration of global value chains and the extent of collaborative buyer-supplier relations have particularly strong implications for the effectiveness of different forms of private governance initiatives and for the extent to which multinationals may develop a self-interest in them (Lakhani et al., 2013; Locke, 2013).

Moreover, although multinationals and their supply chains have attracted by far the most attention, it has been argued that labour standards are significantly more threatened by – and more difficult to regulate under – foreign trade and freedom of movement of labour and services than by foreign direct investment (Meardi, 2012; Mosley, 2011). On trade, however, where the possibility of a multi-lateral measure on the inclusion of social clauses foundered at the WTO, the first decade of the 21st century saw a steady increase in the number of bilateral trade agreements containing such clauses (Ebert and Posthuma, 2011; Granger and Sireon, 2006). Considerable variation is evident in the nature of the regulation specified, from ‘harder’, either ‘punishing’ or ‘rewarding’ breaches or compliance with international labour standards, respectively, to ‘softer’ mechanisms which promote learning and good practice, with distinct differences in approach seemingly apparent between three main global regions: Europe, North America and south and east Asia. Migration brings implications for labour conditions, notably in terms of flexibility and insecurity (Raess and Burgoon, 2013), and transnational regulatory mechanisms have emerged, through bilateral agreements, EU Directives and soft policies, inter-regional social dialogue bodies and transnational labour networks. Embracing the range of different forms of international economic exchange and factor mobility raises further questions about the ways in which global labour governance initiatives concerning multinationals and/or movement of labour and/or trade might interact, and whether these can be mutually reinforcing.

Conclusion

The concept of global labour governance should not be taken uncritically, because its terms and implications constitute an ideological minefield. Labour studies, including the sociology of work and industrial relations, should not, however, neglect a phenomenon of fast growing interest academically and politically: as with globalization (Giles, 2000), rather than dismissing it, one should take it seriously.

Adopting a global governance perspective promises conceptual advance in terms of ‘depth’, ‘multi-level’ dynamics, ‘networks’ and ‘reflexivity’; and requires labour studies to open up to categories elaborated by political science. In reverse, industrial relations and sociological labour studies can contribute through sensitivity to bottom-up processes and associated informality (Brown, 1973), the specificities of economic sectors (Bechter et al., 2012) and the logics of collective action, whether of employers (Hassel, 2008) or workers (Erne, 2008).

This opens up a broad area of research and in particular an assessment of various forms of governance, relating to different modes of international economic activity (trade, foreign direct investment, migration, provision of services). It also invites the problematization of the issue of ‘effectiveness’, including the potential ‘displacement’ of other forms of regulation. Theoretically informed research on global labour governance can then contribute to the detection of the specific conditions and obstacles that explain the variation of global labour governance by sector, issue and region.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Phil Mizen and Ralf Rogowski for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Guglielmo Meardi is Professor of Industrial Relations and Director of the Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick.

Paul Marginson is an Emeritus Professor and former Director of the Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick.

References

Anner

(2012) Auditing rights at work in a globalizing economy. Paper presented at the ILERA World Congress, Philadelphia, PA, 2–5 July.

Anner

Greer

Hauptmeier

Lillie

Winchester

(2006) The industrial determinants of transnational solidarity. European Journal of Industrial Relations 12(1): 7–27.

Bacchetta

Jansen

(eds) (2011) Making Globalization Socially Sustainable. Geneva: ILO.

Bechter

Brandl

Meardi

(2012) Sectors or countries? Typologies and levels of analysis in comparative industrial relations. European Journal of Industrial Relations 18(3): 185–202.

Bloor

Sampson

(2009) Regulatory enforcement of labour standards in an outsourcing industry. Work, Employment and Society 23(4): 711–26.

Bonacich

Appelbaum

(2000) Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Breman

(2009) The myth of the global safety net. New Left Review 59: 9–36.

Breman

(2010) Outcast Labour in Asia: Circulation and Informalization of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown

(1973) Piecework Bargaining. London: Heinemann.

10.

Cremers

(2011) In Search of Cheap Labour in Europe. Brussels: International Books.

11.

Crouch

(2006) Modelling the firm in its market and organizational environment. Organization Studies 27(10): 1533–51.

12.

Davies

(2011) Challenging Governance Theory. Bristol: The Policy Press.

13.

Denning

(2010) Wageless life. New Left Review 66: 79–97.

14.

Donaghey

Reinecke

Niforou

Lawson

(2014) From employment relations to consumption relations: balancing labor governance in global supply chains. Human Resource Management 53(2): 229–52.

15.

Ebert

Posthuma

(2011) Labour Provisions in Trade Agreements, Discussion Paper 205, International Institute for Labour Studies, International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland.

16.

Erne

(2008) European Unions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

17.

Esbenshade

(2004) Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers and the Global Apparel Industry. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

18.

Fichter

Sydow

(2002) Using networks towards global labor standards? Industrielle Beziehungen 9(4): 357–80.

19.

Flanagan

(2006) Globalization and Labor Conditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

20.

Fransen

(2011) Why do private governance organizations not converge? Governance 24(2): 359–87.

21.

Giles

(2000) Globalisation and industrial relations theory. Journal of Industrial Relations 42(2): 173–94.

22.

Granger

Sireon

(2006) Core labour standards in trade agreements. Journal of World Trade 40(5): 813–36.

23.

Hardt

Negri

(2006) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of the Empire. London: Penguin Books.

24.

Hassel

(2008) The evolution of a global labor governance regime. Governance 21(2): 231–51.

25.

Held

(1995) Democracy and the World Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Oxford: Polity.

26.

Hepple

(2005) Labour Laws and Global Trade. Oxford: Hart.

27.

Hooghe

Marks

(2001) Multi-Level Governance and European Integration. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

28.

Hough

(2012) A race to the bottom? Global Labour Journal 3(2): 237–64.

29.

ILO (2002) A Future without Child Labour. Global Report under the Follow-up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Geneva: International Labour Office.

30.

Kaminska

Visser

(2011) The emergence of industrial relations in regional trade blocks. British Journal of Industrial Relations 49(2): 256–81.

31.

Keune

Marginson

(2013) Transnational industrial relations as multi-level governance: interdependencies in European social dialogue. British Journal of Industrial Relations 51(3): 473–97.

32.

Lakhani

Kuruvilla

Avgar

(2013) From the firm to the network: global value chains and employment relations theory. British Journal of Industrial Relations 51(3): 440–72.

33.

Léonard

Erne

Marginson

Smismans

(2007) New Structures, Forms and Processes of Governance in European Industrial Relations. Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.

34.

Locke

(2013) The Promise and Limits of Private Power: Promoting Labor Standards in a Global Economy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

35.

Locke

Rissing

Pal

(2013) Complements or substitutes? Private codes, state regulation and the enforcement of labour standards in global supply chains. British Journal of Industrial Relations 51(3): 519–52.

36.

Marginson

Meardi

(2010) Multinational companies. In: Colling

Terry

(eds) Industrial Relations. Chichester: Wiley, 207–30.

37.

Marginson

Sisson

(2004) European Integration and Industrial Relations. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

38.

Meardi

(2012) Union immobility? Trade unions and the freedoms of movement in the enlarged EU. British Journal of Industrial Relations 50(1): 99–120.

39.

Mosley

(2011) Labor Rights and Multinational Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

40.

Niforou

(2012) International framework agreements and industrial relation governance. British Journal of Industrial Relations 50(2): 352–73.

41.

Niforou

(2014) International framework agreements and the democratic deficit of global labour governance. Economic and Industrial Democracy 35(2): 367–386.

42.

OECD (2011) OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Paris: OECD.

43.

O’Rourke

(2003) Outsourcing regulation. Policy Studies Journal 31(1): 1–29.

44.

O’Rourke

(2006) Multi-stakeholder regulation: privatizing or socializing global labor standards? World Development 34(5): 899–918.

45.

Papadakis

(2011) Shaping Global Industrial Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

46.

Raess

Burgoon

(2013) Flexible work and immigration in Europe. British Journal of Industrial Relations. Epub ahead of print 8 April 2013. DOI: 10.1111/bjir.12022.

47.

Reich

(1991) The Work of Nations: Preparing for the 21st Century. New York, NY: Random House.

48.

Rogowski

(2013) Reflexive Labour Law in the World Society. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

49.

Rosenau

(1987) Governance without Government: Systems of Rule in World Politics. Los Angeles, CA: Institute for Transnational Studies.

50.

Scharpf

(1997) Economic integration, democracy and the welfare state. Journal of European Public Policy 4(1): 18–36.

51.

Silver

(2003) Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

52.

Sisson

(2007) Revitalising Industrial Relations: Making the Most of the ‘Institutional Turn’, Warwick Papers in Industrial Relations 85, Industrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

53.

Smismans

(ed.) (2012) The European Union and Industrial Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

54.

Standing

(2008) The ILO: an agency for globalization? Development and Change 39(3): 355–84.

55.

Standing

(ed.) (2009) Work after Globalization. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

56.

Standing

(2011) The Precariat. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

57.

Strange

(1996) The Retreat of the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

58.

Vosko

(2002) ‘Decent work’: the shifting role of the ILO and the struggle for global social justice. Global Social Justice 2(1): 19–46.

59.

Waterman

(2006) Union Organisations, Social Movements and the Augean Stables of Global Governance, CSGR Working Paper 211/06, Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

60.

Zeitlin

(2010) Towards a stronger OMC in a more social Europe 2020. In: Marlier

Natali

(eds) Europe 2020: Towards a More Social EU? Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 253–73.