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.
At present, human rights disclosure among top-listed companies in ASEAN falls substantially short of the benchmark set by the UNGPs. The lagging human rights disclosure in ASEAN reflects a lack of specific guidelines and oversight from national and ...Read More
Despite the astounding growth in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) crimes over the past twenty years, the general public has little understanding about what it means, how vast the problem is, and how violently children are abused in order to produc...Read More
Over the past two decades multinational corporations have been expanding ‘ethical’ audit programs with the stated aim of reducing the risk of sourcing from suppliers with poor practices. A wave of government regulation—such as the California T...Read More
Most in the anti-human trafficking and modern slavery community agree that trafficking activities are aided and facilitated by corruption. Yet research shows that the available data supporting this assumption is thin. More evidence is needed to bette...Read More
2025 © Copyright, RESPECT International. All Rights Reserved. Website Disclaimer | Privacy Policy
