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.
Edited by Neil Howard and Sam Okyere. This is the seventh volume of the series Beyond Trafficking and Slavery Short Course. This volume, replete with contributions from world-renowned children’s rights academics and practitioners, argues th...Read More
Issara Institute recognizes worker voice as conveying the voices, experiences, and needs of workers, and channeling that voice into clear mechanisms committed to remediation and a rebalancing of power asymmetries between employers and workers. This ...Read More
The purpose of the paper is to examine the relationship between recruitment fees and other abusive and fraudulent practices of recruitment agencies and trafficking in persons, with a particular focus on criminal justice measures to address this relat...Read More
Climate change increases the risk of natural disasters and places a strain on livelihoods. This may contribute to high-risk behaviours and other negative coping strategies among affected populations, such as resorting to unscrupulous recruitment age...Read More
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