Under the regime of private company or multi-stakeholder voluntary codes of conduct and industry social auditing, workers have absorbed low wages and unsafe and abusive conditions; labour leaders and union members have become the targets of both government and factory harassment and violence; and trade union power has waned. Nowhere have these private systems of codes and audits so clearly failed to protect workers as in Bangladesh’s apparel industry. However, international labour groups and Bangladeshi unions have succeeded in mounting a challenge to voluntarism in the global economy, persuading more than 180 companies to make a binding and enforceable commitment to workers’ safety in an agreement with 12 unions.
The extent to which this Bangladesh Accord will be able to influence the entrenched global regime of voluntary codes and weak trade unions remains an open question. But if the Accord can make progress in Bangladesh, it can help to inspire similar efforts in other countries and in other industries.
Asia Monitor Resource Centre (AMRC) has been working to understand and deal with the unprecedented impacts of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the working population. In the past few years, AMRC developed a core position paper on the CSR tha...Read More
For many years the dirty secret of the steadily growing Bangladeshi garment industry has been its underpaid workers, treated as disposable objects. The lowest paid garment workers anywhere in the world, hundreds of them have died in preventable fact...Read More
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government continues to carry out genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang), China The PR...Read More
The agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. It seeks to strengthen uni- versal peace in larger freedom. The agenda recognizes that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest g...Read More
2025 © Copyright, RESPECT International. All Rights Reserved. Website Disclaimer | Privacy Policy
