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 Action plan aims to give ideas and examples for developing victim-centred and trauma-informed criminal justice systems. The Action plan compiles concepts from research, reports, and past projects as well as examples of models and ways of working...Read More
This review was conducted as a “scoping study” of two distinct areas of recruitment policy and programming: (1) current government policies and initiatives to improve recruitment standards for low-wage migrant workers; and (2) current non-govern...Read More
Homelessness organisations and anti-slavery organisations have both been aware of links between modern slavery and homelessness, yet there has been little research into how these issues overlap and impact on one another. An initial scoping exercise ...Read More
In late 2017, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) began receiving increasing allegations by various civil society groups that members of the Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority communities were missing o...Read More
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