Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

Acknowledgements

      While writing this book, I have benefited from dozens of conversations with colleagues and friends. My special thanks go to, in no particular order: Andrew Crane, David Blight, Tim Bartley, Janie Chuang, Luc Fransen, Jennifer Clapp, Daniel Mügge, Claire Cutler, Jane Lister, Ben Cashore, Elena Shih, Nicola Phillips, Vivek Soundararajan, Laura Spence, V. Spike Peterson, Jamie Peck, Michael Bloomfield, Peter Dauvergne, Mark Anner, John Hobson, Scott Nova and Brian Burgoon. Extra special thanks go to J. J. Rosenbaum for her detailed and incisive suggestions on a draft of Chapter 4, and Penelope Kyritsis and Tom Hunt for their excellent insights on a draft of the full manuscript. I am also grateful to two anonymous Polity reviewers for their helpful feedback.

My colleagues and friends at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI), especially fellow members of our Corporations Reading Group, have made writing this book exciting and a less lonely task than it would have been otherwise. They helped me to sharpen ideas and tackle parts of the global economy that I wouldn’t otherwise have been bold enough to write about. Thanks especially to Andrew Gamble, Colin Hay, Andreas Rühmkorf, Michael Jacobs, Scott Lavery, Jon Gamu, Liam Stanley, Andrew Hindmoor, Tony Payne, Owen Parker, Natalie Langford, Ellie Gore, Remi Edwards, Ed Pemberton, Patrick Kaczmarczyk and Charline Sempéré. I feel lucky to have such wonderful colleagues who reciprocate my enthusiasm for researching labour and corporations.

      I’m hugely grateful for all of the support I’ve been given over the years by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. My heads of department, Nicola Phillips and Andrew Hindmoor, and colleagues have been a profound source of encouragement since I joined the department in 2013. In the last few years, I have been especially lucky to be mentored by fellow women professors Ruth Blakeley, Rosaleen Duffy and Charlie Burns. The department has made this book possible in myriad ways, from research assistant funding to encouraging big-picture thinking and pluralism with respect to theory and methods.

      For funding the research that underpins and informs this book, I am grateful to: the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I am also grateful to Laine Romero-Alston, who, while at the Ford Foundation, supported and built a wonderful community of scholars and organizations pushing for better labour standards and building worker power in global supply chains. I was lucky to be part of this community as editor of the openDemocracy site ‘Beyond Trafficking and Slavery’, through which I met many of the key collaborators and friends who have been an important source of encouragement and expertise as I’ve written this book.

I wrote the proposal for this book and its early chapters during a fellowship at the Gilder Lehrman Center (GLC) for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, within The MacMillan Center at Yale University. I am so grateful to colleagues and staff at Yale and the GLC for their tremendous hospitality and support of my research, especially David Blight, David Spatz, Michelle Zacks, Daniel Vieira and Melissa McGrath. The GLC also formed, and serves as the home of, the Yale University Modern Slavery Working Group, which has been hugely formative in my thinking on the topics within this book and has given me new friends within this odd field.

      For part of the time I have been writing this book, I have been an editor of the academic journal Review of International Political Economy. Editing the journal and working with fellow editors Jacquie Best, Paul Bowles, Rachel Epstein, Juliet Johnson, Ilene Grabel and Lena Rethel has shaped my thinking on political economy in important ways.

      Some of the data collection for the research discussed in this book was conducted collaboratively with colleagues, including Andrew Crane, Luc Fransen, Nicola Phillips, Andreas Rühmkorf, Peter Dauvergne, Ellie Gore and Jane Lister. I am grateful to these collaborators for their many insights, which have hugely shaped my thinking.

      For their wonderful research and fact-checking assistance, I thank the ever-brilliant Penelope Kyritsis, Remi Edwards and Charline Sempéré. I am also grateful to the terrific professional service teams within the Department of Politics and International Relations and SPERI at the University of Sheffield, especially Sarah Cooke, Sarah Beddow, Katie Pruszynski, Wendy Birks, Helen Cutts, Greg Morgan and Melissa Nance.

      I am grateful to Louise Knight, my amazing editor at Polity, and her colleagues Nekane Tanaka Galdos and Inès Boxman. Without their incisive advice, patience and persistence, this book simply wouldn’t have happened, never mind taken the shape that it finally did.

      Thanks to everyone who has participated in the research contained within this book, especially the workers, who have the most to lose and often place themselves at considerable risk to share their stories and visions for change.

Thanks to my friends for the adventures, laughter, kindness, mountains, poetry, good books and starry nights they bring to my life: Rosie, Rhodri and Rupert Evans; Matthew Tann; Mark Ayyash, Chris Hendershot and Lori Crowe; Ross Bellaby, M. J. Summers and Pepper; Liam Stanley; Jonna Nyman; Jamie Johnson; Jane Lister; Shawn Arquinego; Leila Monib; Joanna Dafoe; Erin Rutherford; Julia Doherty, Brett Wilhelm, Mags and Vespa; the Kates; Travis Wayne; and Alan Nasser, Lydia Nasser and Julia Garnett.

My greatest thanks are reserved for my family. They know who they are and how much I love them. Especially my Mom.

1 Who Does Labour Governance Work For?

      In April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed near Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing more than 1,100 garment workers and injuring around 2,500 people. The workers were making clothes for western brands, including Benetton and Disney.¹ Industrial accidents are unfortunately not uncommon in the garment industry, though the high death toll of Rana Plaza caught the world’s attention and ignited calls for corporate accountability for workers in global supply chains. A few years after the accident, a court in Bangladesh charged 38 people with murder.² But some key players within the Rana Plaza disaster have largely evaded scrutiny: the people behind the ethical certification schemes, social audits, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that failed to prevent the disaster in the first place.

Although the Rana Plaza disaster has been widely reported in the media, far less frequently noted is the reality that the building itself contained two factories that had been recently checked by social auditors hired to monitor factory conditions on behalf of brand companies. It has been reported that a few months before the building collapsed, a large German certification company called TÜV Rheinland completed a social audit for the textile factory Phantom Apparel Ltd located within Rana Plaza. It used a widely respected standard, the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI) certification, which incorporates core labour standards from the International Labour Organization (ILO) to confirm that factories met requirements around labour standards such as minimum and living wages and absence of child and forced labour.³

      Following its audit, the TÜV Rheinland auditor noted that there were some ‘improvements needed’ in the factory, but reported no issues to do with child labour, overtime, freedom of association or the rapidly deteriorating building that housed Phantom Apparel. Yet, in the aftermath of the collapse, journalists began to reveal that the audit report had missed major problems. Children were working in the factory; their dead bodies found in the rubble made this undeniable. Forced overtime was also common and there were serious dangers to worker health and safety at Rana Plaza, such as the obviously compromised building structure.⁴ A few days after the collapse, the New York Times reported that, in addition to Phantom Apparel, operations at another BSCI-registered factory – New Waves Style – had also recently been passed.⁵ How could these social audits have missed and failed to fix such major problems, including those that led to the factory’s collapse?

In addition to passing recent social audits, the Rana Plaza building was covered by an array of CSR initiatives, in the same way that