Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Rise of Private Voluntary Regulation in a Global Economy
- 2 The Promise and Perils of Private Compliance Programs
- 3 Does Private Compliance Improve Labor Standards?
- 4 Capability Building and Its Limitations
- 5 Alternative Approaches to Capability Building
- 6 Are We Looking in The Wrong Place?
- 7 Complements or Substitutes?
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
Collaboration, Compliance, and the Construction of New Institutions in a World of Global Supply Chains
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Rise of Private Voluntary Regulation in a Global Economy
- 2 The Promise and Perils of Private Compliance Programs
- 3 Does Private Compliance Improve Labor Standards?
- 4 Capability Building and Its Limitations
- 5 Alternative Approaches to Capability Building
- 6 Are We Looking in The Wrong Place?
- 7 Complements or Substitutes?
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This book has analyzed multiple private voluntary initiatives, across different countries and economic sectors, all aimed at improving working conditions and enforcing labor standards in an economy shaped by global supply chains. Chapters 2 and 3 evaluated the compliance programs of several major global corporations – Nike, ABC, Hewlett-Packard – and showed that although each of these companies had spent years developing ever-more-comprehensive monitoring tools, hiring growing numbers of internal compliance specialists, conducting hundreds of factory audits, and collaborating with external consultants and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), working conditions and labor rights had improved somewhat among some of their suppliers but had stagnated or even deteriorated in many other supplier factories. After more than a decade of concerted efforts by global brands and labor rights NGOs alike, private compliance programs appear unable to deliver on their promise of enforcing labor standards in today's new centers of global production. This does not mean that private compliance efforts have not delivered on any improvements in working conditions. As the data presented on the Nike case in Chapter 3 illustrate, it clearly has. The point is that these improvements seem to have hit a ceiling: basic improvements have been achieved in some areas (e.g., health and safety) but not in others (e.g., freedom of association, excessive working hours). Moreover, these improvements appear to be unstable in the sense that many factories cycle in and out of compliance over time. This pattern of mixed and unstable compliance is not unique to Nike but characterizes the compliance programs of the other global brands analyzed in this book. Similar patterns have been described by other scholars studying labor standards in a variety of sectors throughout the world (Barrientos & Smith 2007; Egels-Zandén 2007; Korovkin and Sanmiguel-Valderrama 2007; Yu 2008; Nadvi et al. 2011).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Promise and Limits of Private PowerPromoting Labor Standards in a Global Economy, pp. 174 - 182Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013