Enforcement of Private Transnational Labor Regulation: A New Frontier in the Anti-Sweatshop Movement?
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Description
Anti-sweatshop activists, now veterans in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, have been working for decades to improve wages and working conditions in the factories of the developing world, where most of the world’s clothing, toys, and electronics are now produced. While public law, domestic and international, plays an important role in those efforts, its focus is on developing mechanisms of private, voluntary regulation by the large branded multinational corporations (MNCs or ‘lead firms’) at the top of the supply chains that link poor workers in the developing world to affluent consumers in the developed world. Critics of those efforts abound. Some see a misguided assault on the salutary fl ow of desperately needed capital to impoverished people and communities. Others, including many trade unionists, view CSR as meaningless at best and harmful at worst in its tendency to divert energy and attention from the more useful projects of strengthening public enforcement of labor standards and supporting independent trade unions. In the meantime, many within the CSR community struggle daily to push corporations along the path from promise to performance, and from the bare commitment to promote decent labor standards among suppliers to increasingly ambitious mechanisms for realizing those standards. Environmental and human rights activists are traveling that same path, and are confronting similar issues in promoting effective private transnational social regulation. The topic at hand is ‘enforcement’. Enforcement has many dimensions, even in the context of this one particular kind of private transnational regulation. Much of the history of the anti-sweatshop movement has been about one kind of enforcement: pressing firms to improve enforcement of labor codes of conduct against their suppliers by instituting better monitoring procedures, training, and other procedures to improve supplier compliance. On the horizon is another more challenging set of enforcement issues: the ability of workers or their advocates to enforce code provisions against suppliers or lead firms. Legal enforcement of CSR commitments by or on behalf of the workers they are intended to benefit might be the next frontier in CSR. To get the measure of the challenge facing demands for enforcement, it will be helpful to look back at the history of the struggle to induce lead firms to enact and enforce private, voluntary codes of conduct against suppliers. Through that history runs a recurring dilemma that follows from the voluntariness that is a defining feature of private transnational social regulation. Regulated entities must be induced to submit to private regulation. Stakeholders’ efforts to ratchet up the strength and efficacy of regulatory regimes are thus in tension with their efforts to induce voluntary submission to those regimes. That tension is bound to constrain efforts to secure enforceable commitments in this as in other arenas of private transnational social regulation.
Source Publication
Enforcement of Transnational Regulation: Ensuring Compliance in a Global World
Source Editors/Authors
Fabrizio Cafaggi
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Estlund, Cynthia, "Enforcement of Private Transnational Labor Regulation: A New Frontier in the Anti-Sweatshop Movement?" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 438.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/438
