Channels for Workers' Voice in the Transnational Governance of Labour Rights?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12465 |
| Author | Sabrina Zajak |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
Channels for Workers’Voice in the
Transnational Governance of Labour Rights?
Sabrina Zajak
Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr-University Bochum
Abstract
This article examines the neglected question of workers’voice in the transnational governance of labour rights. While gover-
nance studies often neglect worker’s agency and labour studies focus on strikes or collective bargaining, this article takes the
theoretical lenses of recursivity to explore and compare new channels for worker participation that developed in the context
of transnational governance schemes. Taking the example of the Fair Labor Association, a prominent multistakeholder initia-
tive in the garment industry, the article distinguishes between three channels: workers’surveys during audits, complaint pro-
cedures, and local grievance mediation. Despite the fact that such opportunities count as key innovations for the participation
of labour in transnational governance, statistical and qualitative data from FLA’s factory audits and self-conducted interviews
show that locally situated actors, especially workers, are only occasionally able to make their voice heard in formally open
channels. The article identifies two main sources of constraints: the first is workers’lack of knowledge of these channels and
distrust towards these procedures. This is tied, secondly, to the more fundamental problem that business continues to have
interpretative power over the nature of the problems and solutions in transnational labour governance.
Policy implications
•Information and legitimation politics: transnational governance institutions need to develop more effective information
politics to raise awareness about possibilities for participation.
•Localizing complaints: including local trade unions and civil society organizations can create trust and makes complaint
procedures easier accessible. However, local mediators might also fear repression or get coopted in particular in non-
democratic regimes and transnational regulators should think about possibilities of protection.
•Labour strategizing: national and international trade unions and activist groups should think about how to integrate these
new channels in their joint strategizing, so that workers can profit from them in collective (not only individual) ways.
1. Worker participation through complaint
making
Working conditions in global supply chains remain problem-
atic, and many labour rights violations continue to exist at
production sites, despite numerous efforts to regulate them.
These efforts have led to an increasingly dense web of regu-
lations including international rules, national law, private
regulation and local custom practices (Pries and Seeliger,
2013). As part of this web of rules, transnational private
forms of regulation, including codes of conduct, interna-
tional organizations’voluntary initiatives (e.g. UN Global
Compact) and standards of multistakeholder initiatives have
proliferated over the last few decades. They are intended to
address deficits of public regulation in emerging economies
by enforcing decent labour standards in factories producing
for global brands through auditing and certification. But
how can workers, directly or indirectly, bring their voice into
those transnational governance schemes?
Research on transnational governance highlights the fact
that regulatory institutions are often dominated by
business actors from advanced economies in Europe and
the US and that the participation of workers and trade
unions is weak or lacking altogether (Dingwerth, 2008;
Egels-Zand
en and Merk, 2013; Fransen, 2012). In this con-
text, studies address worker participation either from the
perspective of the top-down enforcement of rules by
auditing and the effects this can have on worker participa-
tion at the factory level (Anner, 2012; Locke, 2013); or from
an activist perspective which discusses strategies of resis-
tance against exploitative working conditions in global sup-
ply chains. The latter focuses on extrainstitutional tactics, in
particular on strategies of disruption via strikes or transna-
tional mobilization (Chan, 2014; Selwyn, 2013; Zajak et al.
2017).
So far, little attention has been paid to whether and
how workers use opportunities for participation that are
linked to transnational regulatory schemes. In particular,
complaint procedures have not gained much academic
attention. This seems surprising, as the introduction of
such transnational grievance channels counts as a key
innovation in governance institutions (Ruggie, 2016), which
©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2017) 8:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12465
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 4 . November 2017
530
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