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 considers how effectively the Action Plan to Tackle Trafficking in Persons and to Enhance Protection of Foreign Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong (the Action Plan) 1 has been implemented and, specifically, whether it has helped trafficked pe...Read More
The purposes of the study was to examine what is known about effective policy to achieve SDG Target 8.7 in the context of justice, by: (1) collecting and collating existing evidence on what works; (2) identifying the range of claims and hypotheses c...Read More
While industrial recycling is squarely situated in the formal sector of the economy, the upstream segments of the recycling supply chain may reach deep into the informal sector, intersecting with the centuries-old occupation of waste picking. In man...Read More
Unpacking Human Trafficking is a summary of the laws in the United States relating to the display of human trafficking awareness posters in lodging facilities, the requirement that employees be trained to recognize and handle suspected incidents of ...Read More
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