REINFORCING THE STATE AMENGUAL, MATTHEW; CHIROT, LAURA
Industrial & labor relations review,
10/2016, Letnik:
69, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Research on global programs to regulate labor standards has emphasized interactions between transnational and state regulatory institutions. If transnational initiatives can make state institutions ...more relevant, they have the potential to reinforce, rather than displace, state labor regulation. Through a study of the Indonesia-based program of a leading initiative to improve working conditions in the garment industry, Better Work, this article identifies the conditions under which transnational regulations reinforce domestic ones. Drawing on two case studies comparing regulations governing fixed-term contracts and minimum wage renegotiations in four Indonesian districts, the authors find that reinforcement is likely when two conditions jointly occur: unions mobilize to activate state institutions, and transnational regulators have support to resolve ambiguities in formal rules in ways that require firms to engage with constraining institutions. The authors further test the findings through a quantitative analysis of factory participation in state-supervised wage renegotiations. The findings reveal opportunities and constraints to designing global programs that can both improve factory-level standards and support the functioning of state labor market institutions.
Countries throughout the world have passed regulations that promise protection for workers and the environment, but violations of these policies are more common than compliance. All too often, ...limitations of state capacity and political will intertwine hindering enforcement. Why do states enforce regulations in some places, and in some industries, but not in others? In Politicized Enforcement in Argentina, Amengual develops a framework for analyzing enforcement in middle-income and developing countries, showing how informal linkages between state officials and groups within society allow officials to gain the operational resources and political support necessary for enforcement. This analysis builds on state-society approaches in comparative politics, but in contrast to theories that emphasize state autonomy, it focuses on key differences in the way states are porous to political influence.
•Provides an analysis of direct distribution by firms in response to political contestation.•Reveals how social structures and organizations provide incentives for firms to undertake distinct ...patterns of distribution.•Compares cases of four mines using qualitative data and an original household survey.
Social movements and interest groups in developing countries increasingly challenge large firms to influence their behavior and make direct claims for redistribution of the gains from economic activity. In response to such private politics, firms seek to maintain political support in the localities in which they operate so that they can avoid conflict and secure access to resources. To secure local support and defuse opposition, some firms take actions that expand access to essential public goods, services, and economic opportunities, while others use targeted clientelistic benefits that reward only a few. What accounts for this variation? Answering this question is key to identifying the development consequences of private politics. This article explores this question through a study of multinational mining firms operating in Bolivia, drawing on qualitative data from interviews as well as an original household survey. It shows that the political structures and organization in the localities in which firms operate create distinct incentives for firms to distribute benefits in targeted or inclusive ways. This finding contributes to studies of the local politics of natural resources and firm responses to social contestation.
Although the ultimate success of labor regulation in many economic sectors depends on a combination of state and private actors, to date, researchers have not studied the interaction between state ...and private regulation. What happens when these forms of regulation meet on the factory floor? Based on a case study of labor inspection and code of conduct implementation in the Dominican Republic, this paper argues that the comparative advantages of state and private actors can drive complementary state–private regulation. These findings suggest that private-voluntary initiatives can reinforce, rather than displace, state regulation.
Collective perceptions of harm and impropriety channel the evolution of capitalism, as shown by research on the moral boundaries of markets. But how are boundaries perceived when harms are distant ...and observers face competing claims from advocacy organizations and corporations? These conditions are particularly salient in global supply chains, where private voluntary initiatives have been formed to address labor exploitation and environmental degradation. We argue that state intervention is now on the rise and that popular judgments about state intervention carry new insights for the sociology of markets, morality, policy, and globalization. Analyzing data from a conjoint survey experiment, we find that distant labor and environmental problems (e.g., forced labor, natural resource depletion) provoke varied levels of interest in state intervention as well as different justifications for state intervention. We also find an asymmetry of influence by strategic actors: transnational advocacy frames shape judgments to some degree, but they fall flat or backfire among conservatives. Corporate promises of reform reduce the perceived importance of state intervention—across political-ideological divides and regardless of credibility. Moving beyond stylized pro-/anti-trade attitudes, these findings reveal implicit logics of a contested moral field and the legitimacy of state intervention at a formative moment.
GLOBAL PURCHASING AS LABOR REGULATION AMENGUAL, MATTHEW; DISTELHORST, GREG; TOBIN, DANNY
Industrial & labor relations review,
08/2020, Letnik:
73, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Do purchasing practices support or undermine the regulation of labor standards in global supply chains? This study offers the first analysis of the full range of supply chain regulatory efforts, ...integrating records of factory labor audits with purchase order microdata. Studying an apparel and equipment retailer with a strong reputation for addressing labor conditions in its suppliers, the authors show that the retailer persuaded factories to improve and terminated factories with poor labor compliance. However, the authors also find that purchase orders did not increase when labor standards improved. If anything, factories whose standards worsened tended to see their orders increase. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this “missing middle” in incentives for compliance appears unrelated to any cost advantage of noncompliant factories. Instead, lack of flexibility in supplier relationships created obstacles to reallocating orders in response to compliance findings.
Public pressure is essential for providing multinational enterprises (MNEs) with motivation to follow the standards of human rights conduct set in soft-law instruments, such as the United Nations ...Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. But how does the public judge MNE involvement in human rights violations? We empirically answer this question drawing on an original survey of American adults. We asked respondents to judge over 12,000 randomly generated scenarios in which MNEs may be considered to have been involved in human rights violations. Our findings reveal substantial gaps between public judgments and the standards set in soft law and the normative literature. We identify the attributes of episodes of human rights violations involving MNEs that influence public judgments, including the relationship between the MNE and the perpetrator, the practice of due diligence, and the type of abuse. These results provide insights as to when we might expect public pressure to drive MNE compliance with soft-law instruments, and they direct attention to specific standards that will likely require stronger, ‘hard’ law approaches or broader efforts to shift the public’s view.
Labor inspection is a central response to the tremendous gap between formal regulations and outcomes for workers throughout the world. Scholarly and policy debates on labor regulation have focused on ...improving the targeting of enforcement, changing strategies of street‐level agents, and creating private alternatives to state regulation. This paper argues that these proposals, while important, fail to systematically incorporate the potential contributions of worker organizations and, as a result, overlook opportunities for co‐enforcing labor standards, a key element of labor inspection. By contrast, we develop a framework to analyze the relationships between worker organizations and state regulators that underpin co‐enforcement. We ground this framework empirically in comparative cases, set in Argentina and the United States, presenting two cases of co‐enforcement in highly different institutional contexts. In so doing, we seek to illuminate key attributes of labor inspection and guide attempts to enhance enforcement by forging partnerships between regulators and worker organizations.
Regulations essential for improving labor standards are often ignored to the detriment of workers. In many countries, the agencies charged with enforcement lack resources and are subject to political ...interference. How can inspectors in flawed bureaucracies overcome these barriers and enforce labor regulations? In this article, based on case studies of subnational variation in Argentina, the author develops a theory to explain enforcement in places with weak and politicized labor inspectorates. The framework focuses on two factors: the strength of linkages between bureaucrats and allied civil society organizations, and the level of administrative resources in the bureaucracy. Linkages facilitate routinized resource sharing and the construction of pro-enforcement coalitions, and administrative resources determine whether bureaucrats use societal resources passively or strategically. By identifying pathways to enforcement that are obscured by dominant approaches to studying labor inspection, this research opens up new possibilities for crafting strategies to improve labor standards.
Private, voluntary compliance programs, promoted by global corporations and nongovernmental organizations alike, have produced only modest and uneven improvements in working conditions and labor ...rights in most global supply chains. Through a detailed study of a major global apparel company and its suppliers, this article argues that this compliance model rests on misguided theoretical and empirical assumptions concerning the power of multinational corporations in global supply chains, the role information (derived from factory audits) plays in shaping the behavior of key actors (e.g., global brands, transnational activist networks, suppliers, purchasing agents, etc.) in these production networks, and the appropriate incentives required to change behavior and promote improvements in labor standards in these emergent centers of global production. The authors argue that it is precisely these faulty assumptions and the way they have come to shape various labor compliance initiatives throughout the world—even more than a lack of commitment, resources, or transparency by global brands and their suppliers to these programs—that explain why this compliance-focused model of private voluntary regulation has not succeeded. In contrast, this article documents that a more commitment-oriented approach to improving labor standards coexists and, in many of the same factories, complements the traditional compliance model. This commitment-oriented approach, based on joint problem solving, information exchange, and the diffusion of best practices, is often obscured by the debates over traditional compliance programs but exists in myriad factories throughout the world and has led to sustained improvements in working conditions and labor rights at these workplaces.
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