Since at least the 1980s, many have raised concerns over the working conditions and wages of the workers in the global supply chains that provide high-income markets with consumer products. Attention has been consistently drawn to very long hours, low pay (by high-income country standards), and unsafe conditions, as well as more striking abuses, such as widespread use of child labor, forced labor, abuse and harassment at work, non-payment of wages, and violations of local laws. Yet, after decades of inquiry, big brands’ responsibilitiesFootnote 1 with respect to these labor abuses remain a complex and unresolved question due at least in part to our evolving understanding of the ability of big brands to influence working conditions in global supply chains.Footnote 2
Throughout this article, we use the term “sweatshops” to refer to factories rife with poor or abusive working conditions, and “big buyers” for major firms in high-income countries that outsource the manufacturing of their products to lower-income countries at the risk of association with such labor abuses.Footnote 3 With this vocabulary, we question two of the main assumptions often employed in the philosophical literature to assign duties and responsibilities across global supply chains: that brands “employ” sweatshop labor and/or that they directly influence their suppliers’ labor practices. More constructively, we outline a more realistic assumption—that big buyers have a constrained influence on the practices of sweatshops. We suggest general and specific moral responsibilities for “social upgrading” in supply chains (defined as the “improvement in the rights and entitlements of workers as social actors and the enhancement of the quality of their employment”Footnote 4) that this assumption generates.
Philosophers have a crucial role in addressing sweatshops’ abuses, but the abstractions they choose to employ can distort and distract attention from the issue at hand. We separate the philosophical literature on the duties of big buyers into three rough groups, based primarily on how they understand the structure of the supply chain relations.
“Vertical integrationists” are those whose arguments treat brands in high-income countries as the direct employers of global sweatshop labor (e.g., Kates, Reference Kates2023a; Snyder, Reference Snyder2008). “Big buyer control theorists” (e.g., Arnold and Bowie, Reference Arnold and Bowie2003, Reference Arnold and Bowie2007; Berkey, Reference Berkey2021; Meyers, Reference Meyers2004) recognize the complex structure of global supply chains, with big buyers typically sourcing from many contractors and subcontractors, often mediated via intermediary sourcing agencies. Nonetheless, they still assert that individual big buyers can control the working conditions of the workers in the supply chains.
Because both vertical integrationists and big buyer control theorists assume that brands can control the working conditions and wages of sweatshop workers, we cannot routinely apply those theorists’ conclusions in a real world where these conditions are often not met. To the extent that philosophy should be applicable to actual business agents, we think it valuable to explore the responsibilities of big buyers following the approach of those we call “structural theorists.” Structural theorists move away from trying to identify wrongful acts of individuals (or governments). Instead, they try to identify ways in which the complex interplay of prima facie blameless decisions can generate unjust disadvantage.Footnote 5 Structural theorists Iris Marion Young (Reference Young2010) and Mirjam Müller (Reference Müller2024) address sweatshops in global supply chains by describing a nuanced and constrained form of influence of big buyers over working conditions, an approach that we extend in this article by focusing on the forward-looking responsibility of big buyers in global supply chains. We use it as an invitation to explore realistic responses for big buyers in the complex and messy world of sweatshop labor, without exonerating companies of their duties and responsibilities.
1. OVERSIMPLIFICATION IN PHILOSOPHICAL WORK ON SWEATSHOPS
1.1. The Vertical Integration Assumption
Whether implicitly or explicitly, vertical integrationists assume that the norm in global outsourcing (i.e., offshoring) is for brands to set up factories in low-income countries and manage and pay workers. Because that describes a vertically integrated firm, we call this assumption the “vertical integration assumption.”
An early example of the vertical integration assumption is in a prominent paper by Jeremy Snyder (Reference Snyder2008). Snyder’s argument approaches the sweatshop issue by considering which duties “employers” have to their “employees” (throughout). The “employers” Snyder refers to are what he calls “MNEs”—multinational enterprises—also referred to by Snyder as “large Western retailers” (Reference Snyder2008: 389).Footnote 6 For instance, Snyder asks us to “consider the potential interaction between would-be Developing World workers and a would-be Western employer Sam … Sam is happy to open a factory in the Developing World and hire a number of workers at the going market rate” (Reference Snyder2008: 402 [italics ours]). At other times, there is a subtler conflation. Even authors who sometimes acknowledge that most sweatshops are not owned or operated by large brands refer to sweatshop workers as the “MNE’s workers” (e.g., Powell & Zwolinski, Reference Powell and Zwolinski2012: 468).
We should note that the common use of the terms “multinational enterprise” or “multinational corporation” (MNC) is misleading in this context. The accepted definition of a multinational enterprise in the international business and law field is a company that owns and operates business units in multiple countries. Companies that only own and operate facilities in one domestic market, such as the US, might have a very large global network of independent suppliers, which is why we prefer the term “big buyers” over “MNE” or “MNC.” And crucially, such buyers typically do not employ workers to make the products they sell, as we detail in Section 1.1.2 below.
Snyder (Reference Snyder2008) and Powell and Zwolinski (Reference Powell and Zwolinski2012) are not alone in making the vertical integration assumption. One of the central scholars in the ethics of exploitation—philosopher Alan Wertheimer—also makes the vertical integration assumption. In a transparent “not-so hypothetical example,” a firm called Nike “sets up factories in less developed countries” where “employees work long hours under ‘sweatshop’ conditions” (Reference Wertheimer2011: 259 [italics ours]).Footnote 7 Another vertical integrationist is Michael Kates, whose recent argument (Reference Kates2023a) we will explore in later sections of this article.
Relying on the oversimplified vertical integration assumption can reduce the applicability of the arguments of vertical integrationists, as the next example will show.
1.1.1. Nonworseness Objection and the Vertical Integration Assumption
The nonworseness objection is a philosophical argument intended to defend the permissibility of putatively exploitative sweatshop labor transactions by emphasizing the mutually beneficial and voluntary nature of those transactions. The argument first draws attention to the idea that a brand could keep production in its home country (perhaps using automation), rather than seek labor offshore. The second step is to emphasize the voluntary nature of sweatshop employment: if the worker accepts the sweatshop job, they prefer it to not taking the job.Footnote 8 Therefore, if it is morally permissible for brands to choose not to transact with a worker at all and the worker is made better off by the transaction, it cannot be worse than morally permissible for the brand to transact with the sweatshop worker at all.
Since being outlined by Matt Zwolinski (Reference Zwolinski2007), attempts to both defend and rebut the nonworseness objection as it relates to sweatshops have captured considerable philosophical attention from both sides of the debate (e.g., Bailey, Reference Bailey2011; Barnes, Reference Barnes2013; Berkey, Reference Berkey2021; Faraci, Reference Faraci2019; Kates Reference Kates2023a, Reference Kates, Poff and Michalos2023b; Powell & Zwolinski, Reference Powell and Zwolinski2012; Sample Reference Sample, Ferguson and Zwolinski2024; Snyder, Reference Snyder2008). Michael Barnes calls the nonworseness objection the “typical defense of sweatshops” (Reference Barnes2013: 28). Snyder agrees with Zwolinski that “it is easy to see how the [nonworseness objection] if true, creates a problem” for criticisms of sweatshop labor like his (Reference Snyder2008: 402), and spends considerable effort trying to rebut the nonworseness objection in general. Kates’s recent summary of the topic of “Sweatshops and Exploitation” in the Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics calls an argument built around the nonworseness objection (but not given that name) “a powerful objection” to critiques of global sweatshop labor (Kates, Reference Kates, Poff and Michalos2023b). In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zwolinski, Wertheimer, and Ferguson state that the nonworseness objection “seems to pose an especially significant challenge to critics of sweatshop labor” (Zwolinski, Ferguson, & Wertheimer, Reference Zwolinski, Ferguson, Wertheimer, Zlata and Nodelman2022: 4.2; Zwolinski & Wertheimer, Reference Zwolinski, Wertheimer, Zlata and Nodelman2016: 4.2).
The standard framing of the nonworseness objection clearly involves a two-party transaction between an employer and an employee. Even if that framing is an erroneous depiction of the relationship between big buyers and sweatshop workers (as we show in the next section), rebuttals to it typically retain that structure. One clear example is Kates’s rebuttal (Reference Kates2023a). We detail Kates’s argument to illustrate how both sweatshop defenses and their rebuttals made under the vertical integration assumption fail to apply to cases of actual sweatshops.
Kates inherits Wertheimer’s vertical integration assumption by adapting Wertheimer’s example of two American firms: Apple and the hypothetical Mapple. While Mapple uses robots to make its products, “Apple manufactures its products under sweatshop conditions in China” (Reference Kates2023a: 682, [italics ours]). Kates also adds an editorial note to a quote by Powell and Zwolinski to claim that when Powell and Zwolinski use the term “MNE,” they too are referring to sweatshop owners (Reference Powell and Zwolinski2012: 688).Footnote 9
What—Kates asks—is the duty of “sweatshop owners” like Apple to sweatshop workers regarding their wages? “Sweatshop owners,” Kates agrees, “have a right … not to start a business in the developing world” (Reference Kates2023a: 689) which entails they can permissibly keep production domestically in the “developed world.” Against the nonworseness objection, Kates argues that sweatshop workers have a moral claim to the social surplusFootnote 10 generated by the production process and that, given their precarious position, their claim to the cooperative surplus is typically higher than the market clearing wage determined by a bargaining process.
To make this argument, Kates draws on an extended analogy of baking a cake. If A bakes a cake alone, A is entitled to the cake and can decide how it is distributed. However, if A provides the oven and ingredients, but B mixes the cake batter, tips it into the tin, and places it in the oven, both A and B have a claim to part of the cake in recognition of their respective contribution to the final product. To that, Kates adds that the position of A and B is entirely symmetrical and “there is no reason to assume that either one has a right to decide how much the other should get” (Reference Kates2023a: 686). Hence, B has a pro tanto moral entitlement to a portion of the cake “independently … of whether [B] can successfully bargain for it” (Reference Kates2023a: 687).
In Kates’s analogy, the sweatshop owner is like A, any given sweatshop worker is like B. Since workers like B typically have a moral claim to a greater share of the cooperative surplus than they receive in wages, Kates claims they should receive more than a market-clearing wage.Footnote 11 Thus, contrary to the nonworseness objection, mutually beneficial consensual transactions can still be morally worse than not interacting at all.
Whatever one makes of the debate over the nonworseness objection, it is clearly set up on both sides as concerning a two-party transaction between employer and employee. In what follows, we show how this framing is highly unrealistic in the kinds of supply chains most critics and defenders of sweatshops care about. Section 2 of this article asks what responsibilities big buyers have, once we relax the unrealistic assumptions that drive the nonworseness debate.
1.1.2. The Vertical Integration Assumption Is Typically False
In implying that large firms from high-income countries are the owners of sweatshops and employers of sweatshop workers, vertical integrationists follow the popular understanding of the structure of global supply chains. But such two-place, employer-employee relationships between large retail firms from high-income countries and sweatshop employees from low-income countries are very rare.
The focus on a two-place, exploitative relation between sweatshop owners and their employees might have been appropriate when thinking about workers’ struggles during the first wave of industrialization, but it is increasingly anachronistic. The current dominance of production models based on unbundling and offshoring (Antràs, Reference Antràs2003; Antràs, De Gortari, & Itskhoki, Reference Antràs, De Gortari and Itskhoki2017; Baldwin, Reference Baldwin, Feenstra and Taylor2013; Bonacich and Appelbaum Reference Bonacich and Appelbaum2000, Costinot, Vogel, & Wang, Reference Costinot, Vogel and Wang2012; Grossman & Rossi-Hansberg, Reference Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg2008; Rivoli, Reference Rivoli2015) requires a new lens to assess exploitative industrial relations and moral responsibilities.
Vertical integration versus unbundling and foreign direct investment versus offshoring describe different options to organize a supply chain. The first pair relates to whether the firm buys or makes its products (or parts). Under vertical integration, the same organization takes care of all production stages, while unbundling a production process refers to sectioning it in stages and outsourcing (some of) them by contracting independent firms to carry out the task(s). The second pair refers to two different ways for the supply chain to cross countries’ borders. Offshoring happens when trade in products or parts crosses countries’ borders, whereas foreign direct investment is the process of a company owning and operating business units in multiple countries, leading to multinational enterprises (Baldwin, Reference Baldwin, Feenstra and Taylor2013).
Although higher degrees of vertical integration were more common before the 1980s, pure vertical integration is extremely rare. A prominent exception is gasoline, where some oil companies own their entire value chain from extraction to refining, to transportation, to final sale (Ali, Zahoor, Saeed, Nosheen, & Thanakijsombat, Reference Ali, Zahoor, Saeed, Nosheen and Thanakijsombat2023), but even in the oil industry, some firms specialize in specific stages of the production or retail process. Higher degrees of vertical integration might be more common for products that require greater quality, precision, or control over the final product, like aviation or defense, but even then, intermediate products or parts can be sourced from specialized suppliers, formally independent (if often restricted by long-term contracts).
Higher degrees of unbundling and outsourcing are common when production is highly codifiable and does not require high levels of specialization. Consumer products are often on this list, like car manufacturing, apparel, electronics, toys, and furniture. Most often, companies decide to unbundle their production process but outsource only some of its stages—those that command lower revenues or strategic value. For example, many apparel companies own design and retail but outsource (sometimes offshore) manufacturing in order to focus on activities that build on their brand image (Aggarwal, Reference Aggarwal2017; Rungi & Del Prete, Reference Rungi and Del Prete2018). These brand-named firms, or firms like Inditex that produce various brands, can leverage a high degree of market power and organize decentralized production networks. Typically, they do so with a multitude of contractors and subcontractors often located in low-income countries (Antràs & Chor, Reference Antràs and Chor2013; Gereffi, Humphrey, & Sturgeon, Reference Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon2005) to take advantage of unique assets, like favorable climate, higher levels of competition, or cheaper labor.Footnote 12 While some larger suppliers with massive networks of factories, like Yue Yuen and Nien Hsing Textile Co. Ltd., have been emerging (Appelbaum & Lichenstein, Reference Appelbaum, Lichenstein, Appelbaum and Lichtenstein2016: 6–7), many-to-many relationships between big buyers and factories are the norm.
Table 1 gives a sense of the magnitude of outsourcing in publicly traded companies selling consumer products: the largest firms in the “Clothing” and “Tech” sectors according to companiesmarketcap.com. We excluded luxury companies (Hermès, Dior, LVMH, Prada, Kering),Footnote 13 retailers that do not design clothing (TJX, Ross, Burlington), and firms for which there is no data (Cintas). For technology, we included the only two firms that focused on consumer electronics.
Table 1: Examples of Supply Chains Behind Top Publicly Traded Firms in the Apparel and Technology Industries
Notes. The table lists firms with a top-fifteen market capitalization in the categories, excluding luxury goods, retailers, and those without supply chain data.
It is important to be clear. In no case do any of the brands in Table 1 own the factories, nor do they employ the workers in any common-sense understanding of what it means to employ them. They contract (typically in the short term, especially in apparel) with suppliers who agree to provide a certain product at a certain price. And it is not just big brands that take advantage of offshoring and unbundling. Prominent advice for consumer goods startups often focuses on contracting suppliers in low-income countries (Goldstein, Reference Goldstein2020). Throughout the paper, the term “production unbundling” (or simply “unbundling”) will refer to the fact that consumer products are typically produced by independent manufacturers that are not owned and operated by the firms that design and market the products.
If we replace the vertical integration assumption with recognition of unbundling, the arguments that vertical integrationists make about how employers are required or not required to treat their workers now apply, at least in a literal sense, to the local factories and factory complexes that do employ workers in low-income countries. Discussing how the owners and operators of sweatshops in low-income countries (who are usually co-nationals) should treat their workers might be valuable, but it is not the question that concerns us here, since we are discussing the responsibilities of international big buyers with respect to their supply chains.
However, even if big buyers do not directly employ workers in low-income countries, perhaps they still largely control the working conditions and wages of those workers. Hence, they can be treated as if they were employers, and the arguments of those who use it might be recovered and reused. It is to that idea we now turn and criticize.
1.2. The Control Assumption
The vertical integration assumption need not be particularly problematic if big buyers effectively control the wages and working conditions of the employees hired by the contractors they buy from. If that is the case, they are akin to a quasi-employer of sweatshop labor since they both reap the benefits and pay the costs of the way employees are treated, with the local factories and their managers acting as a sort of middle-man for labor. Call this assumption, that big buyers can effectively control the treatment of workers in global supply chains, the “control assumption.”
Before Snyder (Reference Snyder2008), philosophers writing on sweatshops typically made the control assumption, rather than the vertical integration assumption. Both sweatshop defenders and critics acknowledged that consumer products are typically designed and sold by firms that own few, if any, factories.
For example, sweatshop critics Arnold and Bowie (Reference Arnold and Bowie2003) explicitly refer to the large amount of unbundling/outsourcing and offshoring in consumer products industries. However, they give a control-based argument for why MNEs are “responsible for the practices of their subcontractors and suppliers” who actually run sweatshops. They argue that “the relationship of power between MNEs and their subcontractors and suppliers is significantly imbalanced in favor of MNEs” (2003: 226). This power imbalance, Arnold and Bowie argue, means that big buyers can effectively control how the employees of its suppliers are treated: “MNEs are well positioned to help ensure that employees of its business partners are respected” (Arnold & Bowie, Reference Arnold and Bowie2003: 227 [italics ours]). They repeat this claim in a later paper, adding explicitly the assumption that because big buyers “dictate” terms such as price, quality, quantity, and timing of deliveries, big buyers also “have the ability to hinder or enhance the ability of factory managers to respect employees” (2007: 135). Other work spells the control assumption out more explicitly. For instance, Chris Meyers claims that “though [big buyers] do not set the wages or pay the workers directly” they have near total control over the employment practices of their suppliers. Indeed, Meyers refers to suppliers as “agents” of the big buyer who “operate the sweatshops for” the big buyer (Meyers, Reference Meyers2004: 329 [italics ours]).Footnote 14
More recently, Brian Berkey (Reference Berkey2021) makes the control assumption. He states that “highly profitable MNCs that contract with … local firms … are in a much better position [than the local firms themselves] to improve the conditions in which sweatshop employees labor.” Berkey states that “they could, for example, offer to pay more for the goods produced, on the condition that wages for the lowest paid workers are increased proportionately” (2021: 53).
1.2.1. Against the Control Assumption
The actual ability of big buyers to influence the wages paid by sweatshop owners to their workers is typically not as direct as this control assumption assumes. While big buyers often have the market power to determine the prices they pay suppliers per piece, they have far less control over the way pieces are made (including how much workers are paid). Since at least the 1990s, big buyers in the apparel and footwear, and later electronics, have tried to ensure social upgrading in their supply chains to defend their reputation and brand image. These attempts based on codes-of-conduct and brand-led auditing have largely failed (see, e.g., Appelbaum & Lichenstein, Reference Appelbaum, Lichenstein, Appelbaum and Lichtenstein2016; Bartley, Reference Bartley2018; Bartley, Koos, Samel, Setrini, & Summers, Reference Bartley, Koos, Samel, Setrini and Summers2015; Esbenshade, Reference Esbenshade2012; Locke, Reference Locke2013). One explanation is that the individual big buyers were never appropriately concerned with social upgrading to begin with. But even if their intent was genuine, there are reasons to think that they lacked the power to individually bring about social upgrading: structural and epistemic barriers that should lead us to deeply question the control assumption.
Begin with the structural barriers. First, we should not assume that individual big buyers have significant power to influence the working conditions in individual suppliers because those suppliers will serve many other firms. Given the volatility of offshored manufacturing contracts and the gains from specializing in a very narrow product line, like cargo shorts, it would be foolish for factories in manufacturing supply chains not to supply to multiple different big buyers. There is good evidence that this many-to-many relationship between factories and suppliers is the norm in most supply chains for consumer goods (Lijbaart, Reference Lijbaart2023; Locke, Reference Locke2013; Mezzadri, Reference Mezzadri2016; Reinecke & Donaghey, Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023: 31). Because one factory will make (e.g.) cargo shorts for multiple big buyers, a single buyer will typically be unable to dictate terms of employment at any given factory (Reinecke & Donaghey, Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023: 32).
A second structural barrier concerns the ability of factories to pass on the benefits of any price increases made by big buyers to the workers themselves. Where individual factories are pressured by powerful local industry associations to maintain low wages or resist working condition improvements, factories might not be able to accept Berkey’s suggested offer of increased prices for increased wages even if they wanted to (Fontana & Dawkins, Reference Fontana and Dawkins2024: 1018). Factories themselves face pressure from other factories. The manufacturing industry in producing countries has an incentive to prevent factories from breaking the norm and offering much higher wages or better working conditions to maintain low-cost trade relationships with big buyers. We see industry associations like BGMEA (Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association) advocating against Bangladeshi factories making unilateral wage raises, often based on nationalistic appeals to protect the garment industry from foreign interference (Fontana & Dawkins, Reference Fontana and Dawkins2024; Reinecke & Donaghey, Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023: 76–77). Finally, big buyers’ promises to increase prices per piece in return for better working conditions are often met with general lack of trust on the part of manufacturers (Ashwin, Kabeer, & Schüßler, Reference Ashwin, Kabeer and Schüßler2020a; Locke, Reference Locke2013: ch. 5).
Epistemic barriers to big buyer control over social upgrading in supply chains add to these structural barriers. Big buyers or their contracted auditors typically lack the power to enter factories without the consent of the factory management, and even if they stipulated that right to enter as part of a contract, it might not be enforced by the local government. Factory self-reports or third-party auditors often provide the only data to evaluate wages and working conditions. As one author puts it, “Practitioners have long recognized the cat-and-mouse game that even honest and dedicated auditors get trapped in: auditors chase the elusive “real” data, managers offer suspicious or partial records” (Bartley et al., Reference Bartley, Koos, Samel, Setrini and Summers2015: 165). Another refers to further collective action problems that arise when auditors rely on the cooperation of workers. Workers often fear recriminations from management for revealing their real working conditions (Claeson, Reference Claeson2015) or losing their jobs when a big buyer abandons a noncompliant factory.
The control assumption leads philosophers to conclude that big buyers are like de facto employers and thus gain both the responsibilities of employers and the power to individually enact those responsibilities (Arnold & Bowie, Reference Arnold and Bowie2003, Reference Arnold and Bowie2007; Berkey, Reference Berkey2021; Meyers, Reference Meyers2004). In place of the control assumption, we suggest “constrained influence:” big buyers (especially collectively) have some influence over the working conditions and wages of the factories in their supply chains, constrained by the structural and epistemic features of the industry.
In line with the literature we are addressing, we focus only on consumer-goods manufacturing, rather than other global supply chains such as agriculture or mining, or the outsourcing of services. Most of the research we cite in support of constrained influence comes from case studies in the highest-profile sectors: apparel, textiles, footwear, electronics, and toys, which match the examples given by supporters of the control assumption (Arnold & Bowie Reference Arnold and Bowie2003, Reference Arnold and Bowie2007; Meyers Reference Meyers2004). However, it is plausible that constrained influence of buyers arises in the presence of even one of the mechanisms we identify above: many-to-many supply chains, collective or regulatory ceilings on worker treatment by individual factories, lack of trust between factories and buyers, and the infeasibility of accurate verification by buyers of social upgrading. These conditions might occur in manufacturing supply chains that are marked by production unbundling and global outsourcing: most sectors where production is highly codifiable and does not require high levels of specialization (see Section 1.1.2).Footnote 15
One upshot of accepting constrained influence is that defenders of sweatshops can no longer appeal to the nonworseness objection, and critics need not respond to it. We explain this point below.
1.2.2. The Nonworseness Objection and Kates’s “Making With” Argument Under Constrained Influence
The nonworseness objection struggles to apply to the role and actions of big buyers if we avoid the vertical integration assumption and the control assumption. The debate around the nonworseness objection stems from the tension between an objective benefit and an intuitive wrong arising from the same agreement. According to nonworseness advocates, an advantaged party is benefitting a vulnerable party a little when others are not benefitting them at all, even though the advantaged party’s behavior intuitively seems worse than the others’. It challenges those who would criticize the advantaged party to explain why the advantaged party’s conduct is worse than that of a bystander who does not interact with the vulnerable party at all. The whole force of the nonworseness objection in the case of global supply chains is to argue for the permissibility of a transaction between a powerful buyer of labor and a vulnerable worker. But the objection fails to apply if the only party the big buyers transact with are factories (or intermediaries who contract with factories).Footnote 16
As we discussed earlier, Kates’s “making with” argument is intended to respond explicitly to the nonworseness objection. If the nonworseness objection does not apply to big buyers, Kates’s reply is not needed. However, one might still wonder to what extent Kates’s argument that employers might owe more than market-clearing wages still holds. But rejecting the vertical integration assumption not only makes the idea that big buyers play the same role as employers difficult, it is also less clear that any worker is as indispensable to the big buyers’ final product as depicted in Kates’s simplified baking scenario.
The standard approach of many philosophers in discussing the duties of big buyers is beset by inaccurate assumptions. When those assumptions are replaced by more realistic assumptions, the arguments of sweatshop defenders and critics alike lose their bite. But we certainly do not mean to imply, as big buyers themselves did in the 1990s, that replacing the vertical integration assumption or the control assumption with the recognition of unbundling and constrained influence lets the big buyers off the moral hook. In Section 2, we take a closer look at the potential moral duties and responsibilities of big buyers in global supply chains.
2. BIG BUYERS’ RESPONSIBILITIES UNDER CONSTRAINED INFLUENCE
If recognition of constrained influence and unbundling replace the vertical integration and the control assumptions, what is the responsibility of big buyers for social upgrading in global supply chains?Footnote 17
Our treatment of the existing philosophical discussion implies that big buyers have the responsibility to advance social upgrading in their global supply chains. Social upgrading has been defined as “the process of improvement in the rights and entitlements of workers as social actors and the enhancement of the quality of their employment” (Barrientos et al., Reference Barrientos, Gereffi and Rossi2011). Social upgrading typically encompasses features of the ILO Decent Work framework: “employment creation, social protection, rights at work, and social dialogue” (see Gereffi & Lee, Reference Gereffi and Lee2016).Footnote 18
In what follows, we first survey the sources of responsibility for social upgrading in global supply chains under the constrained influence and unbundling assumptions. We then explore how big buyers might fulfill these responsibilities, given the difficulties of having only constrained influence over the working conditions in global supply chains. While some might see unbundling and offshoring as attempts by big buyers to evade moral responsibility (rather than simply seek efficiency), we remain agnostic. Instead, we offer a vision of big buyers fulfilling their responsibilities in a way that might appeal to realistic optimists and cynics about corporate social responsibility (CSR) alike. Guided by “federated corporate social responsibility” (Caulfield & Lynn, Reference Caulfield and Lynn2024) and “agonistic corporate social responsibility,” (Dawkins, Reference Dawkins2021), we stress the importance of legally enforceable agreements to share the costs of social upgrading in systems that are marked by giving genuine voice to the concerns of workers and factories. We conclude by exploring what these agreements might look like in practice, using as a model the International Accord and the growing ACT (Action, Collaboration, Transformation) initiative on wages.
We refer to the moral requirement to contribute appropriately to social upgrading in global supply chains as a “responsibility.” The notion of a “responsibility” is context-sensitive and gives the responsible agent more flexibility and discretion than a “duty” would (Feinberg, Reference Feinberg1966; Richardson, Reference Richardson1999; Young, Reference Young2010), thus fitting the complex and ever-shifting environment of global supply chains under global outsourcing and the constrained influence assumption.
2.1. Multiple Sources of Responsibility
There are multiple reasons why a big buyer might face a responsibility to contribute appropriately to social upgrading in supply chains—either individually or as one firm within an industry. First, we look at sources of responsibility that can arise for an individual firm.
2.1.1. Individual Sources of Responsibility for Social Upgrading
Joint exploitation. Very many philosophical accounts of exploitation start with a dyadic structure, where a single exploiter takes unfair advantage of a single exploited (e.g., Kates, Reference Kates2023a; Snyder, Reference Snyder2008; Wertheimer, Reference Wertheimer2011). Assuming production unbundling and constrained influence means the portrayed role of big buyers as exploiters of sweatshop workers is a poor starting point for social upgrading. The relationships between individual big buyers and individual workers are too complex, and big buyers’ influence is too constrained for a dyadic relationship to represent the moral details of the interaction. However, other non-dyadic accounts of exploitation could be a more helpful grounding for big buyers’ responsibilities for social upgrading. We discuss some accounts of what could be called “structural exploitation” in Section 2.1.2. Another approach, the joint exploitation approach, retains the individual as the core unit of analysis, but explores non-dyadic ways in which individuals can be involved in exploitation.
In this context, the joint exploitation approach asks what responsibilities are generated by an actor knowingly contributing to, or acting jointly with, a factory that is exploiting a worker. According to Erik Malmqvist and András Szigeti (Reference Malmqvist and Szigeti2019), an individual who encourages exploitation can be a “culpable cooperator” even without being in direct control of the exploitative terms of the transaction. Culpable cooperators in exploitation routinely gain the responsibility to “redress the negative consequences of that exploitation” to the extent possible. Applied to global sweatshop labor, most big buyers are at least knowing “cooperators” to cases of exploitation in global supply chains, even if constrained influence prevents them from rising to the level of joint agents with factories. As culpable cooperators in exploitation, big buyers gain a responsibility to promote social upgrading in global supply chains.Footnote 19
Benefitting from injustice. Even assuming that big buyers have limited or no influence over their suppliers’ labor standards, they might benefit from broader injustice and thus gain a responsibility to discharge some of those benefits appropriately (Goodin, Reference Goodin2013; Preiss, Reference Preiss2014; Sample, Reference Sample2003, Reference Sample, Ferguson and Zwolinski2024). What injustice big buyers are benefitting from depends on the readers’ moral assessment of the situation. Candidates could include unjust exploitation, violation of human rights, the lack of appropriate labor and health and safety regulations, or more broadly, colonial/neocolonial extractive practices or structural global economic policies. Discharging such benefits requires the big buyer to improve the lives of those whose unjust deprivation it benefits from. Thus, big buyers gain the responsibility to take feasible measures to contribute appropriately to social upgrading, as a way of responding to their benefits from broader injustice.
European Union (EU) law. EU law is turning big buyers’ moral responsibility to address social upgrading in global supply chains into a legal requirement. The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) requires many large global firmsFootnote 20 to “identify and assess” (8.1), “prevent … or … adequately mitigate” (10.1) “adverse impacts” of the operations of their “business partners, … where related to their chain of activities” (8.1).Footnote 21 These “adverse impacts” include human rights impacts, and the EU takes “just and favourable conditions of work, including a fair wage and an adequate living wage” as a human right (Annex 1, 6). Since many workers in big buyers’ global supply chains do not have just and favorable conditions of work, the directive clearly holds big buyers to a legal standard of responsibility for social upgrading in these supply chains.
The sources of responsibility—joint or contributory exploitation, discharging benefits from injustice, and EU law—can be understood to apply to individual firms. Taking a broader view, there are other sources of responsibility that are better understood as applying to big buyers as a group, and by extension, to individual firms within that group. We now turn to those sources of collective responsibility.
2.1.2. Collective Sources of Responsibility for Social Upgrading
Participating in structural injustice. One prominent idea based on collective responsibility is that big buyers must further social upgrading because they participate in unjust social structures. The idea can be found in the work of the group we call “structural theorists.” Gabriel Wollner (Reference Wollner2019) lays it out in his account of “anonymous” exploitation. Maeve McKeown (Reference McKeown2018) focuses on the concept of individuals “reproducing” structural injustice. Perhaps the most influential account of responsibility for social upgrading in global supply chains is in work by Iris Marion Young (Reference Young2004; 2011). Young attempts to “make sense of the claims of the anti-sweatshop movement” assuming what we call constrained influence and unbundling. Young notes first that factory owners and the states that house sweatshop factories typically have direct moral responsibility for what Young calls the “superexploitative” conditions under which their workers labor. But those “egregious” working conditions, Young states, are enabled and sustained by “complex structural processes” and thus are difficult for any single agent to change (2004: 381). According to Young, factory owners and states have direct responsibility for poor working conditions, understood by Young as moral “liability.” Still, big buyers, along with other agents, gain forward-looking “political responsibility” for improving the lives of sweatshop workers due, in part, to the depth of their connections to those workers in a manner that transcends national boundaries.
More recently, Mirjam Müller adds to Young’s concept of structural injustice the point that workers will often be suffering structural vulnerability which is “mediated” (2024: 81) by gender, race, and migrant status, which in turn marginalize sweatshop workers and threaten to make them “disposable,” as evidenced by treatment in the pandemic and the Rana Plaza collapse (2024: 100).Footnote 22 Both Young and Müller understand responsibility for social upgrading to be bound to the roles that different groups of actors play in the structures that enable and sustain the demeaning conditions in which sweatshop workers labor. Young claims, and Müller cites approvingly, that responsibility for social upgrading in global supply chains tracks agents’ relative connection to the victims of injustice—and that big buyers share in that responsibility by virtue of their indirect connection. Müller specifies, drawing on the work of Maeve McKeown, that the relevant connection is one of taking actions that “produce and reproduce” the economic practices that lead to the structural injustice that sweatshop labor represents.Footnote 23
Due to the diverse and diffuse nature of structural injustice, Young claims she “cannot provide a set of rules or even a method of deciding what to do” (2010: 144) regarding big buyers’ responsibilities. Müller adds that the “complexity of sweatshop labor relations” means that determining the “specific content” of big buyer responsibility will require “detailed empirical research” (2024: 112). Despite their reticence to articulate the contours of political responsibility for structural injustice, Young and Müller do make several remarks aimed at big buyers. Young notes that it has “been difficult for the large corporations to ignore or reject” the claims of the anti-sweatshop movement that they could collectively pressure factories to “improve working conditions, monitor those conditions, and directly subsidize plant improvements” (2010: 144–45). Müller notes that “powerful actors like MNEs/TNEs often have considerable room to maneuver” especially if they have “a dominant position in the global market.” Both stress that whatever political responsibility firms have for social upgrading has to be understood, like all forms of responsibility to remedy structural injustice, as collective responsibility for social upgrading (Young, Reference Young2004: 387; 2010: 146–47; Müller, Reference Müller2024: 113–14).
Mere capacity. While individual big buyers have constrained influence, the capacity of big buyers, as a group, to contribute to social upgrading in their supply chains seems relatively strong, especially compared to other groups, such as factories, supply chain workers, and consumers.
Global supply chain workers’ labor conditions can be seen as a (very) bad situation that requires a “remedial responsibility” based on a range of criteria, one of which is mere capacity (Miller, Reference Miller2001). The idea is that, when hearing of disasters like the Rana Plaza collapse, and more generally the harsh conditions and low pay of workers in global supply chains, the sense that “something must be done” naturally arises. The question then arises—done by whom? Here, big buyers, as a group, appear well-placed to contribute appropriately to social upgrading in supply chains. This is less controversial in the philosophical literature than it might sound. Even sweatshop “defender” Matt Zwolinski points out that big buyers “are often in the best position to know about what needs to be done to improve labor conditions, and often have the power to make positive and creative changes” (2007: 713).
We have identified a significant range of plausible candidates for the source of big buyers’ responsibility to promote social upgrading in their supply chains. These provide what Amartya Sen calls a “plural grounding” for that responsibility, that is “using a number of different lines [of ethical argument] without seeking an agreement on their relative merits” (Sen Reference Sen2010: 2). Such responsibility to improve the lot of workers in global supply chains is agreed upon by most in the philosophical debate who acknowledge unbundling with constrained influence. In the next section, we touch on how it might be discharged in practice.
2.2. Concrete Content of Responsibility
One of our aims in this article is to bring some concreteness to the typically abstract way philosophers have discussed the responsibilities and duties of big buyers.
Many of the theorists who recognize unbundling and constrained influence are understandably reticent to spell out the responsibility of big buyers regarding social upgrading in global supply chains. We saw above that Young and Müller shy away from providing concrete suggestions for big buyers, focusing instead on the role that consumers play. Similarly, Malmqvist and Szigeti emphasize that their approach “offers no shortcut to evaluating exploitative practices in the real world” (2019: 296).
We agree that any strong recommendation on how big buyers should discharge responsibilities will be highly context-sensitive and requires significant empirical research. However, retaining the structural theorists’ emphasis on the nature of constrained influence as a barrier to simple actions, along with new work addressing political dimensions of global supply chains and their governance, can help us make somewhat more concrete suggestions about how big buyers might contribute to social upgrading in global supply chains.
2.2.1. Requirements from Constrained Influence
Constrained influence means that structural and epistemic barriers handicap even highly motivated big buyers’ attempts to improve their suppliers’ labor standards (see Section 1.2.1). Still, these barriers are not necessarily insurmountable, and we can draw a range of opportunities for big buyers to contribute to social upgrading as per their responsibilities. Table 2 summarizes these constraints and available responses. The responses should not be interpreted as magic bullets but as attempts to contribute to social upgrading in big buyers’ supply chains that have met widespread (although not unanimous) approval.
Table 2: Features of Supply Chains That Constrain the Influence of Big Buyers Acting Unilaterally and Possible Responses
a See Ashwin et al. (Reference Ashwin, Oka, Schuessler, Alexander and Lohmeyer2020b) and Fontana and Dawkins (Reference Fontana and Dawkins2024). Relatedly, Carnovale (Reference Carnovale2019) provides an account of environmental standards not leading to price premiums for upstream suppliers in global supply chains when suppliers are at a relative competitive disadvantage compared to big buyers.
b See Fontana and Dawkins (Reference Fontana and Dawkins2024).
c See Claeson (Reference Claeson2015) and Bartley et al. (Reference Bartley, Koos, Samel, Setrini and Summers2015).
Big buyers’ collective action and commitment appear prominently in Table 2. In recommending that big buyers limit their opportunities by joining collective action agreements or engaging in legally binding commitments, we are drawing from the related theories of agonistic corporate social responsibility (Dawkins, Reference Dawkins2021) and federated corporate social responsibility (Caulfield & Lynn, Reference Caulfield and Lynn2024), which we discuss below.
Matthew Caulfield and Andrew Lynn argue that the centralization of power in massive corporations, like in any political system, leads to predictable threats of self-serving behavior. Without self-imposed constraints, big buyers lack the appropriate redress for vulnerable members in their supply chains. Just as constitutions constrain responsible states and decentralize power, Caulfield and Lynn maintain, big buyers have a responsibility to seek restraint and support appropriate countervailing powers. This is “federated CSR.” The state and other legitimate civil society organizations (like multi-stakeholder initiatives, third party accreditation agencies, unions, worker-driven social responsibility initiatives, professional and trade associations, and activist groups) are examples of institutions to which big buyers can make binding commitments (2024: 46–47).
Similarly, Cedric Dawkins’s idea of “agonistic CSR” points out that powerful corporations will take advantage of the very governance gaps that require multi-stakeholder initiatives in the first place (Dawkins, Reference Dawkins2021). Therefore, those initiatives must involve the explicit threat of coercion as a fallback, and the creation of countervailing power.Footnote 24
Dawkins’s and Caulfield and Lynn’s emphasis on firms making agreements that bind them to the demands of third parties (suppliers, workers, states) counteracts the worrying concentration of power by the collectivization of buyers. Although (we argue) big buyers must act collectively to improve the working conditions of global supply chain workers, at the heart of this collective action is a ceding of power to other agents (suppliers, workers, states, civil society) to make legally binding demands. This power is both formal—giving workers and factories voice in how social upgrading is to be achieved—and material—committing to provide resources to factories attempts to upgrade.Footnote 25
2.2.2. Principles in Action: The International/Bangladesh Accord
The principles of collective action among buyers ceding power via legally binding commitments to materially support collectives of workers, factories, and unions in social upgrading might sound overly ideal. However, there is at least one supply chain governance regime that contains all of these elements, if in imperfect form. It is the International Accord (nee the Bangladesh Accord) for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry. This agreement between factories, workers, and big buyers contains the elements that help big buyers fulfill their responsibilities for social upgrading, despite their individual constrained influence.
The Accord involves collective action by big buyers. At the time of writing, 260 big buyers have signed on to the initiative (International Accord, n.d.). The Accord companies collectively face less constrained influence regarding social upgrading than they do alone: factories will not risk losing orders from the 200+ big buyers simultaneously (Reinecke & Donaghey, Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023: 156). The Accord also formally empowers workers and factories.
At its beginning in 2013, the Accord was an agreement brokered largely by global union federations between workers and big buyers, with the Bangladesh government and supplier factories invited to play only an advisory role (Reinecke & Donaghey, Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023). This had a concrete impact on workers’ voice and power in the system, including the creation of joint worker-management Occupational Safety and Health committees in all factories, a right of workers to refuse unsafe work, genuine worker inclusion in inspection visits, and an independent complaints mechanism (Reincke & Donaghey, Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023: 84). The current structure of the prominent Bangladesh arm of the International Accord also involves buyers ceding power to factories. It includes tripartite governance, with big buyers, factories, and workers represented on the Ready-made garment Sustainability Council, or RSC.Footnote 26
Crucially, big buyers who sign the Accord agree to materially support factories and workers with respect to social upgrading. They pledge to conduct business in a way that makes it “financially feasible for the factories to maintain safe workplaces” (Art. 31). They also pledge to make “reasonable efforts” to ensure that workers who lose their jobs if a factory is terminated for safety concerns can find work with “safe suppliers.” More generally, they commit “to maintaining a long-term sourcing relationship” with the host country (Art. 46), mitigating some risk that big buyers will flee after factories invest in costly upgrading.
While in the first instance, disputes are to be resolved within the Accord’s internal systems, the agreement is legally binding and is explicitly governed by Dutch law. Indeed, cases “have been brought in 2016 and settled for millions of dollars (in 2018 and 2019) against unnamed big buyer companies for failing to meet the Accord terms including Article 31 which requires big buyers to negotiate commercial terms that make health and safety upgrading feasible” (Reincke & Donaghey, Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023: 83). Enforcement by the Hague lends a distinct power to the agreement that mere voluntary codes of conduct and accreditation schemes have lacked.
With over 200 big buyers collectively setting standards and legally committing themselves to fund the cost of meeting them, the Accord has been at least a moderate success.Footnote 27 By many accounts, the Accord has been much more successful than other voluntary auditing compliance programs, with, by some accounts, 140,000 documented health and safety improvements funded by US$70 million in investments from big buyers (UNI, 2023). Some raised concerns that the Bangladesh Accord might be a way for big buyers to limit their liability (Salminen, Reference Salminen2018). Supporters counter that the chance that big buyers will be held liable for supply chain conditions without the Accord are slim (Reinecke & Donaghey Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023: ch. 5). The Accord is a work in progress, but it does represent a concrete approach to big buyer responsibility for social upgrading that takes production unbundling and constrained influence seriously.
2.2.3. Could There Ever Be an International Accord on Wages?
The International Accord is narrowly concerned with health and safety in the ready-made garment industry. However, many see pay as a component of social upgrading in supply chains as well. Remedying low pay also seems to require incorporating collectivization, ceding power, and legal bindingness, but is likely to be more difficult than an Accord on health and safety. Indeed, some observers suspect it was limiting the Accord to less controversial health and safety issues, as well as the dramatic and publicly visible Rana Plaza collapse that led to much of its success (Hyde Reference Hyde and Nagy2021, Reincke & Donaghey, Reference Reinecke and Donaghey2023: 84).
Nonetheless, the Accord has generated “spillover” efforts that refer to living wages (Ashwin et al., Reference Ashwin, Kabeer and Schüßler2020a) with the Action, Transformation, Collaboration initiative (ACT). ACT is a legally binding bipartite agreement between big buyers and one of the key players in developing the Bangladesh Accord—the global union federation IndustriALL. The agreement outlines an overall process by which big buyers and the global union federations involved commit to seeking “living wages for workers in the global textile and garment industry supply chains” via “mature industrial relations, freedom of association and collective bargaining” (ACT n.d.[a]).
The ACT MoU contains significant, although still nascent, collective action by brands. At the time of writing, it has been signed by nineteen global buyers, including Inditex, PVH, and H+M, representing perhaps around 7 percent of the global apparel market by revenue.Footnote 28
The agreement incorporates some of the principles of federated and agonistic CSR, particularly corporations binding themselves to commitments and supporting countervailing powers. It does exclude a key player in that local factories are left out of the memorandum of understanding, as was the case with the first iterations of the Bangladesh Accord (Fontana & Dawkins, Reference Fontana and Dawkins2024). However, the ACT MoU is just a framework—the real work comes through the bargaining processes between brands, factories, and workers at the country level. To that end, ACT reports initial success in Cambodia, where all three parties came to an agreement to support both genuine collective bargaining and long-term sourcing agreements that big buyers remain committed to source from Cambodia even as wages rise (ACT, n.d.[b]).
ACT is not universally welcomed as an appropriate concretization of brand responsibility to contribute to better wages for global supply chain workers. Justine Coneybeer and Rowena Maguire (Reference Coneybeer and Maguire2022) call the ACT approach merely “feigning” collective brand action on living wages (Reference Coneybeer and Maguire2022: 24) because the “resolution of a living wage” is “conveniently pushed into some utopian future” which includes widespread genuine collective bargaining between workers and factories.Footnote 29 Coneybeer and Maguire prefer the approach of the Fair Wear Foundation (FWF), by which individual buyers attempt to include an appropriate price for labor in the prices they pay to factories. However, the FWF to date has only had limited uptake, primarily small buyers, and seems to be focused on multi-stakeholder initiatives to support brands in their Human Rights Due Diligence required by the EU legislation, therefore tying itself to the binding nature of EU laws. For brands that do not fall under EU law, other systems might be more appropriate.
Given the constrained influence that buyers have, and the relative success of the International Accord in addressing decades-old challenges of securing adequate worker health and safety in global supply chains, we think the similarly structured ACT should not be dismissed so quickly.
3. IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION
In this article, we question two implicit assumptions that distort much of the philosophical literature on sweatshop ethics. Many philosophers have stated or implied that big buyers of consumer goods employ sweatshop workers in their supply chains or that big buyers can at least directly influence their suppliers’ labor practices. We refer to empirical evidence on unbundling that suggests big buyers have less direct control over workers’ conditions, which we call constrained influence.
As structural theorists such as Mirjam Müller and Iris Marion Young point out, big buyers rarely own the manufacturing facilities where their products are made, preferring to unbundle the production process and outsource it to independent suppliers where labor rights abuses may occur. This is especially common in the nonluxury apparel, footwear, and electronics industries, where the prospects of and responsibility for social upgrading in global supply chains have been debated for decades, and might extend to most consumer goods supply chains. Drawing conclusions on big buyers’ responsibilities for labor abuses based on an incorrect set of assumptions often leads scholars to misidentify the rationale and form of big buyers’ responsibilities for social upgrading. This is the negative implication of our work.
More positively, we hold that constrained influence does not absolve big buyers of responsibilities for social upgrading. Instead, there are plural grounds to conclude that big buyers still have significant responsibility to improve workers’ rights and enhance the quality of their employment. Concrete ways of fulfilling this responsibility require collective action from big buyers. While structural theorists writing on responsibility for social upgrading have tended to focus on collective action by consumers, we draw on new ways of conceiving corporate social responsibility in “agonistic” or “federated” terms that emphasize the importance of powerful firms forming binding commitments to achieve social goals.
In this case, appropriate collective action under the constrained influence assumption includes ceding power to third parties in formalized and accountable ways. We show that nascent initiatives like the International Accord and ACT are examples of such efforts.
Our tentative proposals place little emphasis on the state as a mechanism by which the epistemic and collective action problems inherent in current supply chains can be solved. This might seem puzzling, especially in light of ongoing concern about the legitimacy of purely private regulation of labor and sustainability issues (Bartley, Reference Bartley2018; Seidman, Reference Seidman2009: ch. 6). This article focused exclusively on the responsibility of big buyers, and we leave a discussion on the responsibility of sovereign governments to future work.
Our proposals do leave room for states to (continue to) play a significant role in social upgrading. While we emphasize the importance of buyers making collective commitments to factories and their workers, nothing prevents governments from mediating and governing these commitments. Even if the state is not directly involved, as is the case in the International Accord, collective self-binding approaches can and should reference domestic laws and regulations as a default standard for factories to meet, if not exceed (Locke, Reference Locke2013: 180). This is mirrored in the International Accord, where minimum safety standards for factories are developed in consultation with national governments and frequently refer to existing laws.Footnote 30 Indeed, big buyers joining the International Accord effectively provide enforcement power to Bangladesh’s existing building codes, strengthening rather than weakening state power in this respect (Bair, Anner, & Blasi, Reference Bair, Anner and Blasi2020: 979). This seems especially relevant, given that Rana Plaza’s collapse was in part due to four floors being constructed without a building permit (Bergman and Blair, Reference Bergman and Blair2013; Goos and Hoppe, Reference Goos, Hoppe and Sultan2013), a failure of enforcement, not legislation.Footnote 31
By contrast, market advocates might argue that by advocating that firms bind themselves to supporting social upgrading, social upgrading proponents distort the power of the market to deliver efficient outcomes that help the worst off (Powell & Zwolinksi, Reference Powell and Zwolinski2012). Following this rationale, our recommended solution pushes big buyers to harm workers. Either big buyers will abandon countries where collective action is forming, or they will remain and support inefficient reforms that are likely harmful to the marginal worker.
In response, as noted above, our view is compatible with multi-stakeholder agreements binding participating firms to existing democratic laws rather than paternalistically imposing social upgrading. While Powell and Zwolinski go so far as to argue that big buyers should also ignore de jure labor laws since they distort the labor market, their argument disregards the higher-level duty of companies to respect the local rule of law (Muchlinski & Arnold, Reference Muchlinski and Arnold2024).
We are not arguing for the obstruction of big buyers, rather that market incentives alone will not identify all relevant mutually advantageous actions required of big buyers, especially given global unbundling and constrained influence. One such win-win action is to join collectives of buyers making long-term commitments to factories to foster social upgrading. Just as market advocates in the debate support the freedom of workers to associate and bargain collectively (Powell & Zwolinski, Reference Powell and Zwolinski2012: 467), they should support our encouragement of big buyers to collectively cede some power to those associations, in the service of seeking solutions that benefit workers, factories, and buyers alike.Footnote 32
There is far more to say on these issues, and our main hope for this article is that it refocuses the attention of those interested in philosophical accounts of sweatshop ethics away from oversimplified versions of global supply chains, and towards the equally complex questions about the details of feasible social upgrading efforts and how states, unions, factories, employees, consumers, and big buyers ought to interact. Taking a cue from structural theorists and new approaches in federated and agonistic CSR, we highlight the promising ways in which big buyers might collectively commit to their responsibilities to help bring about social upgrading in global supply chains.
Acknowledgements
Helpful comments on early versions of this project were provided by Wayne Norman, Allen Buchanan, Allen Hyde, Maimon Schwarzschild, Thomas Christiano, and the attendees at the Exploitation Workshop at the University of San Diego, March 2020. We are grateful to Michael Santoro and Carrie Pan for recent advice and encouragement, and to Benjamin Ferguson for assistance at multiple stages. Feedback from Associate Editor Cedric Dawkins and several anonymous reviewers improved this paper considerably.
Ewan Kingston (ekingston@scu.edu, corresponding author) is an assistant professor in the Management and Entrepreneurship Department at Santa Clara University. He received his PhD in philosophy from Duke University. He works on the ethics and governance of sustainable business with a practical orientation. He pays particular attention to global supply chains, consumer ethics, climate change, and industry-threatening controversies.
Maria Carnovale is a teaching assistant professor in the Public Policy Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD in public policy from Duke University. Her work focuses on environmental standards in global supply chains and technology policy.
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