Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

characteristics that can ex ante predict program efficiency’.²⁶ However, these technical and predictive approaches tend to overlook the role of structural power dynamics within the global economy, as well as the broader politics that surround labour governance initiatives, which pose fundamental obstacles to improving these systems.²⁷

      In this book, I take a different approach. After 20 years of CSR, I argue that it is time to confront the reality that industry-led efforts are not neutral and that nudging them towards better performance won’t solve the problems of labour exploitation in the global economy. Corporate actors’ longstanding resistance to transforming labour governance initiatives in light of their well-documented flaws begs us to ask bigger, more political questions. Specifically, I question the interests, power and forms of profitability that are safeguarded and reinforced through CSR approaches to setting and enforcing labour standards. I examine the fundamental governance question surrounding the growing adoption of industry-led labour governance initiatives: that of who these initiatives are effective for. Are current systems designed and equipped to find and resolve labour abuses in supply chains, or are they set up to spur corporate profitability, protect business models, generate reassuring metrics for investors and shareholders and help already massive companies to grow even bigger?

Throughout this book, I draw on primary and secondary research that I conducted between 2012 and 2019 on the effectiveness of labour governance initiatives in a range of geographical contexts, including China, India, Ghana, Switzerland, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). This research has involved case studies encompassing a range of sectors, including consumer goods, agricultural products, construction and garments. It has also covered an array of labour governance initiatives, including labour-related disclosure legislation such as the UK Modern Slavery Act, CSR programmes including company and supplier codes of conduct, ethical certification schemes and various forms of social auditing. My primary research has involved hundreds of interviews with business actors, including corporate executives; representatives of certification bodies, social audit firms and accounting firms; producers; suppliers at various stages along the supply chain; exporters; and industry associations. It has also involved interviews with government and international organization officers, trade unions, civil society and workers’ organizations. In addition, I draw on interviews and surveys conducted with workers within global supply chains. This includes research with vulnerable workers at the base of global supply chains, such as more than 1,200 tea and cocoa workers, some of whom have been subjected to forced labour.²⁸ Detailed case studies and methodologies for my various research projects have been published elsewhere as academic journal articles and reports.²⁹ My goal in this book is to combine and consolidate the insights within these various studies about the failures of labour governance and prospects for improving it.

In addition to drawing on original field-based empirical data from my recent research, to develop my arguments about the current state of global labour governance, I also draw on desk-based research completed specifically for this book, comprising a study of: (1) the 25 top retail and manufacturing companies (by annual sales), including their structure, ownership dynamics, supply chain, corporate social responsibility policies and workforces; (2) the business actors and dynamics of the recruitment and enforcement industries; and (3) key trends within the global labour market, including through national government and international organization statistics databases. Information has been drawn primarily from company websites, consulting firm websites, international organization and government websites, and reports, as well as industry databases such as Factset and the World Bank Enterprise Survey.

      My aim is to synthesize this body of data to advance an argument about the state of contemporary global labour governance and to stimulate debate about why governance systems are failing to protect the world’s workers. I aim to reflect on the serious but too often not spoken about obstacles that currently limit efforts to eradicate labour exploitation from the global economy – namely, corporate power, interests and ownership structures, and the ways that those affect governments and civil society – and to shift the debate on governance effectiveness from technical considerations to questions of politics. My broad approach, sweeping across a number of case studies, sectors and contexts, has the advantage of allowing me to reflect on the big picture of what’s going wrong with prevailing public and private governance systems to combat labour exploitation, delving into global political economy issues that are frequently overlooked in case studies. This wide-angle approach does have drawbacks: I will no doubt overlook some of the microlevel dynamics of individual initiatives as well as the full extent of variation across geographic contexts, sectors and types of initiative. Yet, a narrower approach would miss too much of the story of global labour governance and the breadth of challenges that need to be overcome to protect twenty-first-century workers.

      Corporations as Cause and Solution to Labour Abuse

A few decades ago, corporations were widely considered to be the cause of problems like sweatshops, poverty wages and child labour. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, activists, workers, trade unions and civil society organizations vehemently protested the globalization of production, offshoring and the lack of restrictions on multinational corporations’ activities. Mass demonstrations and general strikes raged, drawing attention to issues like water and electricity privatization, outsourcing and patterns of foreign investment. This social movement, often described as the anti-globalization movement, countered the rapidly unfolding globalization regime, which it saw as facilitating corporate greed and profit at the expense of the public. Much of the movement’s energy was targeted at challenging the mounting role, rights and benefits of corporations within global capitalism and, especially, their exploitative labour practices.³⁰

      A key contention of the anti-globalization movement was that corporations were causing labour abuse as they laid off workers and outsourced and offshored production activities to supplier firms in the global South. For corporations, one of the great benefits of using supplier firms is that they could set up relatively anonymous sweatshops, shielding brands from the legal and reputational consequences. However, at the same time as brands sought to distance themselves from these abusive labour practices, activist efforts and a raft of journalistic exposés sought to close the gap between consumers and the adults and children sewing their clothes, making their jewellery and assembling their sports equipment in appalling conditions. In 1996, for instance, a photo essay in Life Magazine introduced American consumers to the Pakistani children as young as 10 who were sewing their Nike soccer balls for around US$0.60 per day under ‘horrible conditions’, to use Nike chairman Phil Knight’s own regretful words following the incident.³¹ The next year, Nike was in the spotlight again when ‘it was revealed that workers in one of its contracted factories in Vietnam were being exposed to toxic fumes at up to 177 times the Vietnamese legal limit’.³²

Activists pushed for a range of solutions to the problems of offshoring and accelerating indecent work. Some called for an end to outsourcing, while others pressured the UN to create an international convention to impose corporate liability for labour standards. Still others pressured policymakers and international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to make trade and investment treaties more equitable by building in guarantees that a certain share of the value produced would remain in the countries and in the pockets of workers who contributed to the production of goods, even when the goods were sold elsewhere. While activists, workers and unions mobilizing for workers’ rights often differed on preferred solutions, they shared a united vision of the cause: that corporations and political elites were advancing a model of capitalist globalization allowing businesses to freely exploit vulnerable workers in poor countries desperate to attract foreign investment, and this was facilitating a global race to the bottom in labour standards and workers’ rights.³³

Nearly three decades later, corporations have made serious strides in positioning themselves as solutions to problems like labour abuse and poverty in the global economy rather than the cause. No doubt some activists and civil society organizations continue to bemoan corporate profits and greed, and many still would identify companies as the cause of exploitative labour practices within their supply chains. But at the same time,