Reassembling social defragmented responsibilities: the indecent labour footprint of US multinationals overseas

Abstract

Multinational corporations (MNEs) have been at the forefront of the geographical disintegration of production chains in search of lower salaries, among other reasons, which led to a global race to the bottom in labour standards. Therefore, significant amounts of indecent work are currently embodied in MNEs’ global value chains, compromising not only the brands’ corporative image but also the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. In this work, we shed light on this matter by estimating the indecent-work-conditions related impacts linked to the foreign activities of MNEs from the United States. Using a socially extended MRIO model that integrates three social indicators (forced labour, fatal and nonfatal occupational injuries), we found that these activities show increasing trends between 2009 and 2013 on indecent labour, contributing with 1.1%–1.3% of the global cases. United States affiliates located in India, China and Brazil, show the highest ratios per unit of value-added.

KEYWORDS:

• Multinational enterprises
• MRIO model
• social footprint
• international trade
• indecent labour

Acknowledgement

All authors thank Fabio Monsalve for his advice regarding the development of the MATLAB code and the Hispanic-American Input-Output Society (SHAIO) for having awarded this work the 6th Emilio Fontela Research Prize in Input-Output Analysis.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

All the data are from public databases. The social dataset used in the analysis is deposited on a publicly accessible repository and is freely available (https://doi.org/10.17632/6h5msdfjk2.1). Code availability: The authors in a separate file provide the Matlab code used in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

J. Zafrilla and G. Arce thank the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain (MEC) for funding the research project “ECO2016–78938-R” that led to this paper. Á. García-Alaminos, M. Ortiz and J. Zafrilla thank “Plan Propio de Investigación” from University of Castilla-La Mancha (Reference 2019-GRIN-27108). Á. García-Alaminos acknowledges financial support both from the European Social Fund (ESF) and University of Castilla-La Mancha through the Regional FPI Program and from the Spanish Ministry of Universities trough the National FPU Program (Grant ref. FPU18/00738). M. Ortiz thanks the MEC and ESF for the funding BES-2017-079618.