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 Issue Paper examines the concept of ‘harbouring’ in the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organiz...Read More
Data on the Number of people referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) as potential victims of modern slavery in the UK has increased year-on-year. The number for referrals rose by 36% from 2017 2018 and buy for their 52% in 2019 the second ...Read More
At present, human rights disclosure among top-listed companies in ASEAN falls substantially short of the benchmark set by the UNGPs. The lagging human rights disclosure in ASEAN reflects a lack of specific guidelines and oversight from national and ...Read More
The data in this report represents signals and cases from January 1, 2019 through December 31, 2019 and is accurate as of July 30, 2020. Cases of trafficking may be ongoing or new information may revealed to the National Hotline over time. Consequen...Read More
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