Decent Work in the Cross-Border Supply Chain: A Smart Mix of Legislation and Self-Regulation

Laagland Femke G.
Additional contact information
Laagland Femke G.: Femke G. Laagland is a professor of European labour law at the Radboud University in Nijmegen (the Netherlands).

European Company and Financial Law Review, 2023, vol. 20, issue 2, 336-357

Abstract: 336This paper deals with the problem of European companies trading with companies in developing countries where fundamental labour rights are being violated. For a long time, this issue was left to the responsibility of European companies on a voluntary basis. Recently, a shift towards hard law in the sense of legal obligations has become visible. The European Commission started a legislative process in 2021 and published a proposal for a due diligence Directive in February 2022 to which the European Parliament responded in first reading on 1 June 2023. In the meanwhile, France and Germany passed legislation, and in the Netherlands and Belgium a private member’s bill was submitted by members of Parliament. All in all, a lot is happening on this subject at both European and national level. Much has been written about the proposals as such but the issue of fundamental labour rights has been underexposed. This paper fills that gap. Central question is as to what extent legislation will lead to an improvement in compliance with fundamental labour rights in the cross-border supply chain. This paper will explore this question on the basis of the said European and national legislative initiatives. It will become clear that the solution lies much more in a mix of hard law and self-regulation and that in the search for a smart mix, lessons can be learned from the Dutch system of private sector-specific agreements.337

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ecfr-2023-0013 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:eucflr:v:20:y:2023:i:2:p:336-357:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ecfr/html

DOI: 10.1515/ecfr-2023-0013

Access Statistics for this article

European Company and Financial Law Review is currently edited by Heribert Hirte

More articles in European Company and Financial Law Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().