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.
Uzbek Forum has conducted independent, community-based monitoring and reporting on the cotton harvest since 2009. In previous reports, Uzbek Forum endeavored to expose forced labor, identify its root causes, and show the scale, impact on institution...Read More
2020 was a year unlike any other. This report documents what happened to garment workers across Asia – in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Cambodia and Bangladesh, putting numbers to the 25 per cent or so wage losses suffered by these worker...Read More
Pitiful wages, child labour and sexual abuse is reported to be the reality for some Syrian refugees working without permits in Turkey, posing a major challenge for the garment brands that source from the country to supply Europe’s high streets. ...Read More
In this targeted, exploratory research project, Verité examined three illustrative transnational migrant worker recruitment corridors – Nepal to Qatar, Myanmar to Malaysia, and Myanmar to Thailand – to identify the points in the recruitment pro...Read More
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