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.
This report is based on the Monitoring and Evaluation of Anti-trafficking Policies: A Handbook for Victims’ Advocates (hereafter: the Handbook) developed in 2016. The Handbook was designed with the idea to enable monitoring of national anti-traffi...Read More
No country in the world is immune to the devastating impacts of modern slavery and human trafficking. Representing one of the world’s most profitable criminal enterprises, it generates some USD 150 billion per year. Addressing the financial angle...Read More
This strategy sets out the Government’s ambition to prevent, tackle and respond to all forms of child sexual abuse. It focuses on three key objectives which overlap and reinforce one another, recognising the complex, interconnected nature of this ...Read More
This paper reflects on the implications of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on modern slavery risks in supply chains. We first reason that the global supply and demand shock resulting from COVID-19 exacerbates workers’ vulnerability to modern s...Read More
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