Corporations have increasingly turned to voluntary, multi-stakeholder governance programs to monitor workers’ rights and standards in global supply chains. This article argues that the emphasis of these programs varies significantly depending on stakeholder involvement and issue areas under examination. Corporate-influenced programs are more likely to emphasize detection of violations of minimal standards in the areas of wages, hours, and occupational safety and health because focusing on these issues provides corporations with legitimacy and reduces the risks of uncertainty created by activist campaigns. In contrast, these programs are less likely to emphasize workers’ rights to form democratic and independent unions, bargain, and strike because these rights are perceived as lessening managerial control without providing firms with significant reputational value. This argument is explored by coding 805 factory audits of the Fair Labor Association between 2002 and 2010, followed by case studies of Russell Athletic in Honduras, Apple in China, and worker rights monitoring in Vietnam.

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Forced Labor of Public-Sector Employees in Uzbekistan
Publications

Although the government of Uzbekistan has made progress on ending child and adult forced labour in the cotton fields after more than a decade of international pressure, a new report finds that forced labour remains rampant in other arenas of Uzbek l...Read More

Third-party monitoring of measures against child labour and forced labour during the 2017 cotton harvest in Uzbekistan
Publications

There is no systematic use of child labour in the cotton harvest in Uzbekistan and significant measures to end forced labour are being implemented. The annual cotton harvest in Uzbekistan is a unique large-scale effort. In 2017, an estimated 2.6 mil...Read More

The Torture in My Mind: The Right to Mental Health for Rohingya Survivors in Myanmar and Bangladesh
Publications

United Nations agencies estimate that 12 months after an emergency, approximately 15 to 20 percent of adults will experience some type of moderate or mild mental health disorder. However, data published today reveals that 88.7 percent of Rohingya re...Read More

TAGS: Asia
Missing Home: Providing Safety to Trafficked Children
Publications

Between December 2017 and December 2018, Unseen ran the UK’s first Ofsted registered children’s home for non-UK national children who have experienced trafficking (hereafter referred to as trafficked children). The model we developed was a compl...Read More