Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy
Description
Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains-such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads-generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.
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Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy seeks to understand why sweatshops continue in the apparel industry despite the 20-year-long investment in private regulation (monitoring corporate codes of conduct) by major brands and retailers.... In sum, Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy is an important book that is particularly useful as a textbook for students learning about the barriers to effective improvements in labor standards, as well as for useful pathways to explore for the future. In addition, practitioners will gain from the discussion of potential avenues forward.- Matthew Fischer-Daly (ILR Review) Fourteen papers analyze the system of world capitalism under which the majority of workers labor, explaining how corporate social responsibility (CSR) has failed to achieve its professed objectives, different approaches to the governance of global suply chains, the prospects for workers' rights in China, and the way forward for labor rights.
(JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE)
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Introduction: Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy
Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein
Part I SELF-GOVERNANCE: THE CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
1. Outsourcing Horror: Why Apparel Workers Are Still Dying, One Hundred Years after Triangle Shirtwaist
Scott Nova and Chris Wegemer
2. From Public Regulation to Private Enforcement: How CSR Became Managerial Orthodoxy
Richard P. Appelbaum
3. Corporate Social Responsibility: Moving from Checklist Monitoring to Contractual Obligation?
Jill Esbenshade
4. The Twilight of CSR: Life and Death Illuminated by Fire
Robert J. S. Ross
Part II GOVERNANCE OF GLOBAL PRODUCTION NETWORKS
5. The Demise of Tripartite Governance and the Rise of the Corporate Social Responsibility Regime
Nelson Lichtenstein
6. Deepening Compliance?: Multistakeholder Communication in Monitoring Labor Standards in the Value Chains of Brazil's Apparel Industry
Anne Caroline Posthuma and Renato Bignami
7. Law and the Global Sweatshop Problem
Brishen Rogers
8. Assessing the Risks of Participation in Global Value Chains
Gary Gereffi and Xubei Luo
Part III PROSPECTS FOR WORKERS' RIGHTS IN CHINA
9. Apple, Foxconn, and China's New Working Class
Jenny Chan, Ngai Pun, and Mark Selden
10. Labor Transformation in China: Voices from the Frontlines
Katie Quan
11. CSR and Trade Union Elections at Foreign-Owned Chinese Factories
Anita Chan
Part IV A WAY FORWARD?
12. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition and Higg Index: A New Approach for the Apparel and Footwear Industry
Jason Kibbey
13. Learning from the Past: The Relevance of Twentieth-Century New York Jobbers' Agreements for Twenty-First-Century Global Supply Chains
Mark Anner, Jennifer Bair, and Jeremy Blasi
14. Workers of the World Unite!: The Strategy of the International Union League for Brand Responsibility
Jeff Hermanson
