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 was originally conceived to be an exploratory analysis of case data on trafficking and exploitation in Southeast Asia that begins online, trying to understand if recruitment is occurring via social media, messaging apps and websites and,...Read More
Research conducted by Labour Rights Promotion Network (LPN) and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School (JHSPH) of Public Health Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, and supported by the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP). ...Read More
The data in this report represents signals and cases from January 1, 2017 through December 31, 2017 and is accurate as of July 11, 2018. Cases of trafficking may be ongoing or new information may be revealed to the National Hotline over time. Conseq...Read More
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
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