Explore the vast range of titles available.

The article presents a novel normative model of shared responsibility for remedying unjust labor conditions and protecting workers’ rights in global supply chains. While existing literature on labor governance in the globalized economy tends to focus on empirical and conceptual investigations, the article contributes to the emerging scholarship by proposing moral justifications for labor governance schemes that go beyond voluntary private regulations and include public enforcement mechanisms. Drawing on normative theories of justice and on empirical-legal research, our Labor Model of Shared Responsibility introduces three main claims: First, that responsibility for protecting and promoting labor standards in global supply chains should be shared by all private and institutional actors involved (whether directly or indirectly) in the production and distribution processes. Second, we offer a normative model for allocating responsibility among the various actors, based on five principles: connectedness, contribution, benefit, capacity, and power. Last, we demonstrate how the normative model could be implemented through various national and international institutional mechanisms.

This article examines the relations between workplace and local labor regimes, global production networks (GPNs), and the state-led creation of expanded markets as spaces of capitalist regulation through trade policy. Through an examination of the ways in which labor regimes are constituted as a result of the articulation of local social relations and lead-firm pressure in GPNs, the article examines the limits of labor provisions in European Union trade policy seeking to ameliorate the worst consequences of trade liberalization and economic integration on working conditions. The article takes as its empirical focus the Moldovan clothing industry, the leading export-oriented manufacturing sector in the country. Trade liberalization has opened up a market space for EU lead firms to contract with Moldovan-based suppliers, but in seeking to regulate labor conditions in the process of trade liberalization, the mechanisms in place are not sufficient to deal with the consequences for workers' rights and working conditions. Indeed, when articulated with national state policy formulations seeking to liberalize labor markets and deregulate labor standards, the limits of what can be achieved via labor provisions are reached. The EU's trade policy formulation does not sufficiently take account of the structural causes of poor working conditions. Consequently, there is a mismatch between what the EU is trying to achieve and the core labor issues that structure social relations in, and labor regimes of, low-wage labor-intensive clothing export production for EU markets.

Do purchasing practices support or undermine the regulation of labor standards in global supply chains? This study offers the first analysis of the full range of supply chain regulatory efforts, integrating records of factory labor audits with purchase order microdata. Studying an apparel and equipment retailer with a strong reputation for addressing labor conditions in its suppliers, the authors show that the retailer persuaded factories to improve and terminated factories with poor labor compliance. However, the authors also find that purchase orders did not increase when labor standards improved. If anything, factories whose standards worsened tended to see their orders increase. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this “missing middle” in incentives for compliance appears unrelated to any cost advantage of noncompliant factories. Instead, lack of flexibility in supplier relationships created obstacles to reallocating orders in response to compliance findings.

The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, led external stakeholders to insist on higher labor standards in apparel global value chains (GVCs). Stakeholders now expect MNEs to take ‘full-chain’ responsibility. However, the increased monitoring and enforcement costs of a large network of suppliers have been non-trivial. MNEs instead implement a ‘cascading compliance’ approach, coupled with a partial re-internalization. Elevated costs are further exacerbated in developing countries where the informal and formal sectors are linked, and cost competitiveness greatly depends on this duality. Monitoring actors in the informal sector is difficult, and few informal actors can achieve compliance. GVCs have therefore reduced informal sector engagement by excluding non-compliant actors and investing in greater automation. By seeking to strictly enforce compliance, MNEs are attenuating some of the positive effects of MNE investment, particularly the prospects for employment creation (especially among women), and enterprise growth in the informal sector. I discuss how these observations might inform other cross-disciplinary work in development, ethics, and sociology. Finally, I note implications for IB theory from the disparities between the ownership, control, and responsibility boundaries of the firm.

How do public and private labor governance regimes intersect in global supply chains and with what effects? Based on fieldwork in Bangladesh, including interviews with garment industry stakeholders, this article examines the main public and private regulatory reforms instituted in post-Rana Plaza Bangladesh: the Sustainability Compact and the Bangladesh Accord, respectively. Despite the Accord’s substantial achievements in improving workplace safety, particularly relative to the progress achieved under the Compact, findings show that government and industry actors in Bangladesh have resisted the Accord’s efforts to empower workers for fear that improved labor standards would threaten managerial control over one of the global garment industry’s largest and cheapest labor forces. Rather than being an example of complementarity between private and public governance, or an effective substitution of one by the other, post-Rana Plaza Bangladesh represents an undermining of effective private regulation by a state opposed to pro-labor reforms.

Regulations essential for improving labor standards are often ignored to the detriment of workers. In many countries, the agencies charged with enforcement lack resources and are subject to political interference. How can inspectors in flawed bureaucracies overcome these barriers and enforce labor regulations? In this article, based on case studies of subnational variation in Argentina, the author develops a theory to explain enforcement in places with weak and politicized labor inspectorates. The framework focuses on two factors: the strength of linkages between bureaucrats and allied civil society organizations, and the level of administrative resources in the bureaucracy. Linkages facilitate routinized resource sharing and the construction of pro-enforcement coalitions, and administrative resources determine whether bureaucrats use societal resources passively or strategically. By identifying pathways to enforcement that are obscured by dominant approaches to studying labor inspection, this research opens up new possibilities for crafting strategies to improve labor standards.

A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical takeaways via simple checklists. A variety of empirical settings illustrate key points.

Research on global programs to regulate labor standards has emphasized interactions between transnational and state regulatory institutions. If transnational initiatives can make state institutions more relevant, they have the potential to reinforce, rather than displace, state labor regulation. Through a study of the Indonesia-based program of a leading initiative to improve working conditions in the garment industry, Better Work, this article identifies the conditions under which transnational regulations reinforce domestic ones. Drawing on two case studies comparing regulations governing fixed-term contracts and minimum wage renegotiations in four Indonesian districts, the authors find that reinforcement is likely when two conditions jointly occur: unions mobilize to activate state institutions, and transnational regulators have support to resolve ambiguities in formal rules in ways that require firms to engage with constraining institutions. The authors further test the findings through a quantitative analysis of factory participation in state-supervised wage renegotiations. The findings reveal opportunities and constraints to designing global programs that can both improve factory-level standards and support the functioning of state labor market institutions.

Will advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning put vast swaths of the labor force out of work or into fierce competition for the jobs that remain? Or, as in the past, will new jobs absorb workers displaced by automation? These hotly debated questions have profound implications for the fortress of rights and benefits that has been constructed on the foundation of the employment relationship. This Article charts a path for reforming that body of law in the face of justified anxiety and uncertainty about the future impact of automation on jobs. Many of the forces that drive automation — including law-related labor costs — also drive firms' decisions about \"fissuring,\" or replacing employees with outside contractors. Fissuring has already transformed the landscape of work and contributed to weaker labor standards and growing inequality. A sensible response to automation should have in mind this adjacent problem, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the dominant legal responses to fissuring — which aim to extend firms' legal responsibility for the workers whose labor they rely on — do not meet the distinctive challenge of automation, and even modestly exacerbate it. Automation offers the ultimate exit from the costs and risks associated with human labor. As technology becomes an ever-more-capable and costeffective substitute for human workers, it enables firms to circumvent prevailing legal strategies for protecting workers and shoring up the fortress of employment. The question is how to protect workers' rights and entitlements while reducing firms' incentive both to replace employees with contractors and to replace human workers with machines. The answer, I argue, begins with separating the issue of what workers' entitlements should be from the issue of where their economic burdens should fall. Some worker rights and entitlements necessarily entail employer duties and burdens. But for those that do not, we should look for ways to shift their costs off of employer payrolls or to extend the entitlements themselves beyond employment. The existing fortress of employment-based rights and benefits is under assault from fissuring and automation; it is failing to protect those who remain outside its walls and erecting barriers to some who seek to enter. We should dismantle some of its fortifications and construct in its place a broader foundation of economic security for all, including those who cannot or do not make their living through steady employment.