Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

launched the Global Business Network on Forced Labour and Human Trafficking, which it describes as a ‘partnership between the ILO, multinational and domestic enterprises, employers’ organizations, and business associations in the call to drive action on forced labour and human trafficking deeper into the supply chain and across industry and sectors’.⁵¹ Business partnerships with international organizations are further linking companies to civil society organizations and policymakers.

      Through all these voluntary efforts, corporations have positioned themselves as part of the solution to the problems of modern slavery and labour abuse more broadly – and have made more complex, if not wholly distanced themselves from, their earlier reputations as uncaring, profit-hungry monsters who cause labour abuse through reckless purchasing practices, planned ignorance and a lack of transparency around working conditions within their supply chains. In short, they have made sizable gains in their efforts to shed their sociopathic reputations – to paraphrase the key insight of law professor Joel Bakan’s well-known book (subsequently made into a film), The Corporation⁵² – as entities in pathological pursuit of profit and power.

The countries in which MNCs are headquartered and incorporated, often called their ‘home states’,⁵³ have done little to challenge the rise of CSR as a credible solution to labour exploitation in global supply chains. Rather, home states have reinforced this status quo through a recent wave of transparency legislation that does little more than codify existing CSR programmes, social auditing and ethical certification.⁵⁴ The growing body of labour-related disclosure legislation, which includes the 2015 UK Modern Slavery Act and the 2012 California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, might at first glance appear to be a stringent and serious state response to the problem of forced labour. However, as I substantiate in Chapter 3, most pieces of transparency legislation simply require that companies report on efforts they are taking to address and prevent modern slavery, human trafficking and other forms of severe labour abuse in their supply chain.⁵⁵ This has fuelled social auditing and certification, but, as I discuss later in the book, there is little evidence that it has actually reduced the prevalence of forced labour.

      There are typically no penalties for noncompliance and no enforcement provisions. As such, compliance rates are low. For instance, a civil society coalition estimates that between 12,000 and 17,000 companies are within the scope of the UK Modern Slavery Act, but only around 3,000 companies had published statements on the Modern Slavery Registry website by the end of 2017. Large numbers of these are of low quality and do not comply with the requirements of the Act.⁵⁶ As one NGO representative explained, ‘If you look at the number of reports that have been published, there are obviously a lot of businesses that aren’t doing anything … That compliance gap is quite worrying.’⁵⁷ With few exceptions, recent legislation to combat modern slavery has reinforced the dominance of industry-driven solutions to labour abuse in supply chains, rather than fundamentally transformed, displaced or improved it.

Some NGOs, governments and lawyers are pushing back against these trends, reminding policymakers and the public that companies often overpromise and underdeliver when it comes to social and labour standards and causes. But overall, as this brief snapshot illustrates, the trend is towards an increased reliance on corporations and CSR governance to eradicate forced labour and curb exploitation. The sheer flurry of activity alone has helped to deepen the legitimacy and authority of corporations as ‘problem-solvers’ for labour exploitation in supply chains – as has the acceptability conferred on corporate efforts by governments, international organizations and NGOs.

      This Book’s Arguments and Structure

      In this book, I argue that efforts to combat modern slavery through CSR are failing. After all, what do the vast array of labour governance initiatives described above have in common? The initiatives are almost entirely driven by industry actors. They are all voluntary and are not legally binding or enforceable, and there is little public oversight or accountability over these private efforts. CSR is failing because prevailing labour governance initiatives do little to nothing to disrupt corporate business models, leaving fully intact poverty wages, the low prices that companies pay suppliers, the short contract windows and unpredictable orders imposed on businesses lower down the chain by businesses higher up, and other drivers of labour exploitation. And they mostly fail to empower workers, or even to involve them in basic ways; only very rarely do industry-led labour governance solutions involve or meaningfully integrate workers in shaping, negotiating and operating initiatives.

      Corporations have positioned themselves as champions of labour governance for a number of complex reasons, and their motivations vary across company type, scale, size and sector. Overall, though, it’s clear that big business has forged a model in which they can have strategic control over the design and implementation of labour governance initiatives. As one company CSR executive described of Walmart’s CSR efforts:

By adopting the process that said, ‘We got it, this is our ball, we’re going to do something about supply chains’ … Walmart, on behalf of the entire retail industry said, ‘This is our problem. This isn’t a government regulatory problem. This isn’t China’s problem, this isn’t Vietnam’s problem. This is our problem. We have the power, resources, and ability to deal with it and we will.’⁵⁸

      At the same time as companies have increasingly claimed that the ball of labour governance is in their court, states have stopped or struggled to enforce the labour laws on their books. Indeed, the rise of corporate auditing and CSR has coincided with the decline of state-based labour law enforcement and inspections in many jurisdictions. In countries across the global North and South, state-based labour law enforcement is now low to nonexistent. In the US, for instance, employers are very unlikely to be inspected by the Department of Labor. Economist Gordon Lafer has estimated that ‘an employer would have to operate for 1,000 years to have even a 1 percent chance of being audited by Department of Labor inspectors’.⁵⁹ As labour abuse has continually been framed as something perpetrated by ‘bad apple’ and ‘rogue’ employers and criminal actors within the private economy, states have increasingly sat at the sidelines, except where they are afforded opportunities to rush in and lock up the really bad guys, heroically liberating victims of human trafficking and modern slavery.

But just because corporations have built labour governance initiatives and are pouring loads of money into them – money which, incidentally, is not being paid in taxes to government or as wages to the workers earning well below the poverty line in global supply chains – does not mean that these governance initiatives are designed or implemented in ways that meaningfully protect workers. By contrast, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, a growing body of research suggests that industry-led labour governance initiatives are failing to meet their stated aims and are doing little to solve workers’ most pressing challenges; they rarely achieve their aspirational goals of creating supply chains characterized by safe workplaces free from forced labour or predatory recruitment fees and characterized by women’s empowerment. When the design and implementation of industry-led labour governance initiatives is examined and compared against patterns of labour exploitation in global supply chains, it is unsurprising that many fail to yield concrete improvements. After all, business initiatives rarely tackle the root causes that give rise to exploitation in supply chains, and tend to structure systems to skirt around and cover up – rather than shed light into – the worst abuses.

      How could there be such dire problems when rich and powerful companies are channelling their resources into addressing labour abuse through CSR, supplier codes of conduct, social auditing and ethical certification schemes, and many consumers are paying more to buy products advertised as ethically made? To understand how things have gone so badly wrong in global supply chains, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of labour exploitation and deficiencies in labour governance.

      In this book, I analyse four core challenges in contemporary labour governance. I argue that, first, there is a mismatch between the patterns of labour exploitation in global supply chains and the design of labour