Addressing Workers’ Rights Violations in Apparel and Agricultural Supply Chains through Binding, Cost-Sharing Accords
Mark Anner
Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2019, vol. 8, issue 1-2, 93-114
Abstract:
Apparel and agriculture are two sectors historically marked by extreme levels of exclusion and abuse of worker rights. Global trade regimes have protected developed market economies at the expense of developing countries, and lead firm consolidation in agriculture and apparel supply chains has created downward pressure on wages and working conditions. However, it is precisely in these more precarious sectors of the global economy that an innovative strategy of binding cost sharing accords is emerging. This dynamic of the sourcing squeeze and a binding, cost-sharing accord to address the problem of exclusion of worker’s rights is illustrated by the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which is the focus of this article. The Bangladesh case is then briefly compared to working conditions in agriculture and the Fair Food Program in the United States. This article argues that these efforts have been more successful than other state and non-state initiatives because they bind lead firms in supply chains to share in the cost of better conditions of labour.
Keywords: Apparel; agriculture; Bangladesh Accord; Fair Food Program; corporate social responsibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2277976019838153 (text/html)
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:sae:agspub:v:8:y:2019:i:1-2:p:93-114
DOI: 10.1177/2277976019838153
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy from Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().