![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Widespread disappointment with compliance auditing in supply chains has led to a search for new governance solutions in global industries. Recent scholarship on labour standards in supply chains emphasises the need for complementarity between public and private forms of governance, and the importance of local contexts in shaping compliance outcomes. This paper, in contrast, argues that the distinction between public and private governance belies the complex interaction of regulatory forms and industry dynamics in global production networks. It develops this argument via an analysis of the International Labour Organisation Better Work programme, which, over the last decade, has metamorphosed from a country-specific monitoring programme into a unique model of hybrid governance that has been implemented in a half dozen countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Drawing from field research conducted on Nicaragua’s Better Work programme, it examines the achievements and limitations of hybrid governance, and proposes that these can best be understood when the global value chain for apparel is seen as a transnational field within which relational struggles between different stakeholders at the global and national levels shape the political contexts within which particular governance solutions are pursued.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jennifer Bair is associate professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She works at the intersection of global political economy and development studies, and her current research focuses on efforts to secure labour standards and workers’ rights in international subcontracting chains. She is the editor of Frontiers of Commodity Chains Research (Stanford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of Workers’ Rights and Labor Compliance in Global Supply Chains: Is a Social Label the Answer? (Routledge, 2013). Her journal publications include articles in Social Problems, World Development, Economy and Society, and Comparative Labor Law and Policy.
Notes
1. Although the TATA was signed in 1999, the ILO monitoring regime did not begin its work in the factories until 2001. Developing the specific protocol for the programme – such as the criteria on which factories would be monitored, how to determine ‘substantial compliance’ at the factory level and how to report the results of inspection – entailed protracted consultations between the US government and the ILO, and to a lesser extent, the Cambodian government and organised labour in the USA (Kolben Citation2004).
2. The IFC’s role in the Better Work programme is rather opaque; see, for example, http://betterwork.org/global/?page_id=304. The bulk of the programme’s staff and headquarters are located in Geneva at ILO headquarters.
3. Various laudatory assessments of BFC suggest how the programme’s perceived success breathed new life into the ILO’s long-standing mandate. For example, Sandra Polaski described BFC as ‘a breakthrough that pushed the ILO to move beyond its traditional public sphere’, thereby helping ensure a ‘continued relevance for the ILO, as global production chains increasingly elide the control of national labor ministries and labor inspectorates’ (Citation2006: 922). John Hall concluded that the ‘lessons Better Factories offers are significant for all stakeholders in the global labor market and suggest at least the outline of a practical blueprint for the future promotion of international labor standards globally’ (Citation2010: 427). Kevin Kolben singled out BFC as ‘one of the most innovative, perhaps the only innovative, experiment in using trade as a vehicle to improve labor rights enforcement’ (Citation2007: 236).
4. Better Work Jordan was launched as a voluntary programme in 2008, but the Jordanian government decided in 2010 to make it mandatory for all garment producers exporting to the USA and Israel. Haiti’s Better Work programme most closely resembles the original BFC blueprint insofar as it was implemented in the context of US legislation – specifically, the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Acts (known as HOPE I and HOPE II), which grants Haiti’s garment exports duty-free access to the US market, conditional on labour compliance.
5. For example, Better Work’s website describes the programme’s overarching objective as ‘driving sector-wide, sustainable improvement in adherence to national labour law and core labour standards, and strengthening business competitiveness in major garment producing countries’ (emphasis added); see http://betterwork.org/global/?page_id=300.
6. The cost depends on the number of reports being purchased. Companies that are purchasing reports for fewer than 10 factories pay $1400 per factory per year for online access to these materials, while companies purchasing reports for more than 60 factories in any combination of Better Work countries pay $1000 per factory per year.
7. Better Work website: http://betterwork.org/global/?page_id=361. The cost of being a Buyer Partner has two components. There is a flat membership fee paid annually based on company turnover. It ranges from $5000 for a company with annual turnover of less than $1 billion to $20,000 for companies with turnover of more than $10 billion. In addition, Partners pay an ‘operational component’ that helps subsidise the cost of factory-level monitoring and advisory services. Buyers sourcing from fewer than 20 Better Work participating factories pay $1000 per factory, while those sourcing from more than 50 factories pay $850 per factory per year.
8. See http://betterwork.org/about-us/governance/; accessed 25 October 2015.
9. As of October 2016, the companies serving as brand representatives on the Better Work Advisory Committee are Gap and H&M.
10. In 2014, Bangladesh became the eighth country with a Better Work programme.
11. However, there was disagreement between the government, industry and trade union officials that sit on BWN’s Program Advisory Committee, on the one hand, and the participating brands and factories, on the other. The latter reported being generally satisfied with the monitoring and advisory services provided by BWN staff, which they felt were helping to address non-compliance issues in a productive and effective way.
12. The analysis presented here draws from fieldwork that was conducted for two commissioned research projects carried out by the Duke Center for Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness (CGGC) at the request of Nicaragua’s CNZF. In addition to the author, the research team included CGGC director Gary Gereffi and CGGC researchers Ingrid Veronica Mujica and Stacey Frederick. Although BWN was not a major focus of this research, the programme was discussed during our interviews with stakeholders. As a result, I became interested in understanding how BWN’s implementation, which coincided with high-level efforts by the Nicaraguan government to secure an extension of trade benefits under the CAFTA, was viewed by public and private sector actors in the context of ongoing discussion and debate about how to maintain Nicaragua’s export competitiveness. My follow-up interviews in 2013 and 2014 focused specifically on this theme. For a more detailed description of data, methods and findings from the CGGC studies, see Bair and Gereffi Citation2013 and Frederick et al. Citation2015.
13. While the US government ultimately declined to grant an extension of the TPLs past 2014, this decision did not become clear until the early stages of BWN were well underway.
14. For a similar argument for the case of Better Work Lesotho, see Pike and Godfrey Citation2013.