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.
Vietnam has consistently featured in official statistics on modern slavery as one of the top three source countries for victims of the crime. Driven by this, the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner visited Vietnam in 2015 and subsequently commissi...Read More
Survey data suggests that a minimum, some 229,000 Nepali's were subject to some form of modern slavery in 2014. While some of this involved victims and offenders within Nepal itself, a significant proportion is likely to have been exploited outside ...Read More
The Fondation Scelles, for the third consecutive year, presents the Global Report on the evolution of sexual exploitation throughout the year. This report is an informational tool that aims to be as objective as possible. They find human traffick...Read More
The Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) has created an ex- pansive system of unprecedented state control over the 13 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other minoritized eth- nic and religious groups of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autono- mous Region (Uyghur...Read More
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