Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

and their enforcement. Second, changing patterns of corporate ownership, organization and scale – and industry actors’ growing political power – is making them more and more ungovernable. Third, a sizable governance gap surrounds the booming recruitment industry, through which workers are supplied into global supply chains. Finally, a profitable enforcement industry has arisen, with vested financial interest in monitoring tools and programmes, and no financial interest in actually solving problems. These are profitable and advantageous for industry actors, but seldom lead to accurate depictions of labour standards or concrete improvements for workers.

In the remainder of this section, I’ll briefly outline each of these four challenges, which are taken up, respectively, in Chapters 2–5, and then highlight the book’s key conclusions, which are developed in Chapter 6.

      Labour exploitation in global supply chains

      Labour exploitation is endemic in several industries and global supply chains today, including more minor forms like wage theft and forced overtime, as well as the worst forms of labour exploitation typically described as forced labour, human trafficking and modern slavery. The worst forms of exploitation tend to thrive more in some portions of supply chains than in others, and among certain types of businesses.⁶⁰ Further, there are predictable and stable patterns regarding the workers who become vulnerable to it.

      As I substantiate in Chapter 2, labour exploitation does not occur randomly or spontaneously in global supply chains. Rather, it is a logical outcome of the ways that contemporary supply chains are set up, and, more broadly, of the high-volume, low-cost business model of retail production that powers the global economy. It can be linked to political economic drivers. These include both the factors that trigger a business demand for forced labour, as well as those that create a supply of workers who become vulnerable to it.

On the demand side, a variety of pressures that lie at the heart of global supply chains as they are currently constituted create a demand among businesses for exploited labour. These include irresponsible sourcing practices, which put severe cost and time pressures on suppliers, leading to steep financial penalties for delayed orders and missed deadlines. This can lead to risky practices like unauthorized subcontracting, and to outsourcing along both product and labour supply chains, which makes oversight over labour standards difficult, in part because it fragments responsibility for workers across multiple businesses and agents.⁶¹ As the architects of global supply chains, MNCs bear sizable responsibility for business pressures experienced by suppliers, and the forms of exploitation that result from them. If they were serious about tackling labour exploitation, rather than setting up elaborate CSR programmes, corporations would alter their business practices.

      On the supply side, across recent decades, political economy dynamics have created a supply of workers who are vulnerable to forced labour and overlapping forms of exploitation. These include: poverty, including among workers in lucrative supply chains; discrimination on the basis of social identity, such as race, gender and sexuality; lack of labour protections, which means that many workers face barriers to collective action and the exertion of their rights; and restrictive mobility regimes, which leave migrant workers unprotected. These dynamics have intensified in the latest era of global capitalism, as political elites and business actors have transformed the rules of the global economy in ways that privilege the profitability of businesses.

      Understanding the complex political economy dynamics that give rise to labour exploitation in global supply chains is vital if we are to grasp the weaknesses within prevailing initiatives to tackle it. In particular, it is essential to understand the disjuncture between the patterns of labour exploitation and the design and enforcement patterns of industry-led initiatives, which tend to circumvent the portions of supply chains in which exploitation is known to manifest and thrive.

      Corporate power and the state

      Understanding the changing nature and organization of corporations at the helm of global supply chains, and their deepening political power, is also essential to understanding why contemporary labour governance is failing to yield concrete improvements.

As corporations merge, monopolize and grow, they are exerting heightened control across broad global industrial sectors of production and consumption, and gaining even further power to dictate labour conditions within global supply chains. Further, changing patterns of financialization, corporate ownership and market speculation are introducing new and deeper pressures for corporations to produce profits for their shareholders. Under these circumstances, the value created within global supply chains is increasingly concentrated at the top, among investors and shareholders, and as profit.

      At the same time, industry actors – including brand and retail firms, as well as big asset managers, big auditors and industry associations – are becoming increasingly proactive in initiating and shaping public regulations on supply chains, at the national and subnational levels, as well as in international conventions. In addition to longstanding lobbying activities, corporations are now seconding employees to national policy organizations, pioneering and funding civil society coalitions to stop slavery and human rights abuses by business, and integrating CSR initiatives into their long-term growth strategies. Yet, at the same time as they champion CSR initiatives to combat modern slavery and promote worker voice, industry actors are part of regulatory coalitions to fend off stronger labour laws and their enforcement. The result is that even the governance actors and initiatives we generally consider to be ‘public’ are often highly influenced by corporate power.

      As I argue further in Chapter 3, the deepening political power of corporations is allowing them to leverage strategic control over supply chain governance initiatives, and especially those intended to bolster labour rights and reduce exploitation. It is staving off more radical reforms on corporate production activities, and it is undermining and co-opting civil society efforts to increase corporate liability and accountability for the worst forms of labour exploitation. It also troubles prevailing academic conceptualizations about the clean division between public and private, market and state, which has implications for solutions to these problems.

The recruitment industry

      As part of the broad political economy dynamics outlined earlier in the book, a booming recruitment industry has emerged within global supply chains, posing major problems for the enforcement of global labour standards. A high and growing proportion of victims of labour exploitation – and especially victims of forced labour and human trafficking – are not part of companies’ core workforces. Rather, they are supplied through long and complex labour supply chains and employed by labour market intermediaries like agencies or brokers. Yet, recruiters and third-party agencies are very poorly regulated, and are inadequately covered (where included at all) in market-based labour governance initiatives. Indeed, as I will argue in Chapter 4, recent governance initiatives may even be fuelling exploitation by the recruitment industry as suppliers facing increased scrutiny by brands are turning to recruiters and labour agents as a strategy to outsource risk and cut costs.

      A key part of the story of why labour governance is failing relates to this recruitment industry. In particular, it lies in the dynamics of labour supply chains, how recruiters and agents within them facilitate the transnational supply of vulnerable workers, and the role of the industry in anchoring labour exploitation within the global economy. Due to flaws in both design and implementation, contemporary efforts to govern labour standards have tended not to touch the recruitment industry, and, in doing so, have missed highly vulnerable and exploited workers.

      The enforcement industry

Another set of industry actors