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.
The decision calls on OSCE participating States to: • Consider ensuring that contractors who knowingly use subcontractors involved in traf- ficking for labour exploitation can be held accountable for that crime; • Develop programmes to curb th...Read More
Methodology This report is based on interviews with 141 children ages 7 to 17 who said they had worked in tobacco farming in the United States in 2012 or 2013. During multiple field research trips between May and October 2013, Human Rights Watch ...Read More
This report from 2005 researches the weaknesses of social auditing. Social audits to check working conditions in production facilities emerged in the mid-1990s after a number of high profile companies were widely scrutinized for substandard working ...Read More
U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo released the State Department’s 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report on June 25 2020. This report marks the 20th anniversary of the TIP report and the introduction to the 2020 edition celebrates the progress in combati...Read More
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