Socio-ecological value chain resilience and cleaning workers

ABSTRACT

Examining the ways that industries survived the COVID-19 pandemic can teach us a great deal about the resilience of value chains, the ways value chain dynamics shape worker resilience, and the measures states can adopt to support both. In this paper we critically examine the thriving body of theory known broadly as supply chain resilience and explore a branch that embraces socio-ecological perspectives. We first develop a theoretical model that takes what we perceive to be the most fruitful elements of these literatures for industrial relations scholarship and bring it together with approaches tangential to industrial relations concerned with value chain actor and worker agency and resilience. We then apply this model in an analysis of the Australian commercial cleaning sector during the pandemic. Finally, we assess federal and state measures to assist and “buffer” employment and the economy in Australia, including JobKeeper and JobSeeker. We find that these government measures, combined with earlier restructuring of the labour market and restrictive immigration policies, provided the institutional scaffolding for the failure of the cleaning industry during the pandemic, exactly when cleaning became an essential service for the resilience of the whole of society.

KEYWORDS:

• Supply chain resilience
• COVID-19 pandemic
• Commercial cleaning workers
• Front line workers
• Cleaning value chains;

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the term ‘value chain’ in preference to the term ‘supply chain’ in this paper, except where we are quoting others or referring to an existing term.

2. We conducted a search on Google Scholar to gauge the engagement with the concept of resilience in the supply chain literature and industrial relations literature. We used a simple Boolean search for the key words ‘supply chain’ AND resilience, ‘industrial relations’ OR ‘employment relations’ AND resilience, and ‘worker resilience’ OR ‘workers’ resilience’. The search was conducted on the 5^th of August 2022 and generated 139,000 results for all articles containing the words supply chain resilience. A total of 1,610 articles included the words supply chain and resilience in their titles and 882 of these were dated from 2019. The search found a total of 17,900 results for industrial relations articles, including employment relations, which included the word resilience, and 1,620 articles with the words worker resilience.

3. This is based on Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016 census data relating to ‘Building and Other Industrial Cleaning Services’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DE200101396].

Notes on contributors

Sara Tödt

Sara Tödt is a doctoral candidate at RMIT University in Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis considers the effect of the interactions of global value chains and local gender dynamics on the lives of garment workers in Myanmar.

Carla Chan Unger

Carla Chan Unger is currently a researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Nossal Institute. At the time this paper was authored, she worked as a research associate at the RMIT University Business and Human Rights Centre.

Ema Moolchand

Ema Moolchand is a Lawyer and a doctoral candidate at RMIT University in Melbourne. Her research explores the dynamics of modern slavery to provide an improved understanding on how they emerge and persist across meat and cleaning sectors in Australia.

Shelley Marshall

Shelley Marshall Associate Professor has worked in the field of corporate accountability as a lawyer and academic for around 25 years. Her research spans the fields of sociology, development studies and law. She is Director of the RMIT University Business and Human Rights Centre.