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.
Edited by Genevieve LeBaron and Neil Howard. This is the second volume of the series Beyond Trafficking and Slavery Short Course. There is a growing and sober awareness among international policymakers and within global civil society that hum...Read More
By: Liberty Asia & Blue Dragon Children's Foundation The Vietnamese government has made significant progress to reinforce the current legal system on combating trafficking, particularly in regulating and criminalising trafficking in the Penal Co...Read More
This paper describes money laundering techniques used by different criminal organizations operating in the U.S. sex market. Prior to this study, scholars have not investigated money laundering techniques used in the U.S. sex market in a comprehensiv...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
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