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| Emre Eren Korkmaz |
Introduction
International Framework Agreements (IFAs) have become an increasingly important tool for the international solidarity of workers. Global Union Federations (GUFs) may convince Transnational Corporations (TNCs) together with the home country unions of these TNCs to recognise their responsibilities over the labour rights in other countries within their supply chains. Inditex[1] IFA has taken a step further and Spanish textile corporation Inditex has agreed to recognise local unions as their official partners in their supply chain.
IFAs are non-binding agreements signed between monopolistic TNCs and GUFs. They present new opportunities for the global labour movement to intensify solidarity. Global Unions apply pressure over TNCs via organising, campaigning and negotiating to sign IFAs which would suggest a base for continuous negotiations with TNCs and an opportunity to overcome the shortcomings of voluntary one sided Code of Conducts (Hammer, 2005).
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| Martina Hooper |
This article looks into the issue of labour rights violations in the electronics industry, using the example of a recent report on Dell production in Shenzhen factories in China. After some background information on the sector itself, it briefly introduces the report, the research methodology, and key findings, before going on to highlight how these make a mockery of local and international laws, ILO standards, Dell’s own Code of Conduct and that of the Electronic Industry Citizen Coalition (EICC). These initiatives are failing. If however there is collaboration between large public buyers, sufficient leverage could be created to encourage industry to act. The proposed solution, Electronics Watch, plans to establish a sound local monitoring system, with supply chain reform elements built into public contractual procedures, in order for this to happen.
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| Vasco Pedrina[1] |
Since the 1980s, we have witnessed the political breakthrough of neoliberalism with its massive wave of privatisations, deregulation of the financial sector and of employment relations, as well as the partial dismantling of social security systems. That wave was followed by the enormous expansion of financial markets, along with their speculative excesses. All of that was a result of severe economic crises; resulting in a catastrophic social impact and very ominous political consequences, marked by the upsurge of extreme right-wing populist parties. As a result, the European Union whose social model has suffered hitherto unimaginable blows is on the edge of collapsing. As predicted a few years ago, by the great historian Eric Hobsbawm before his death, we are going through a long cycle of world economic crisis. The consequence would be a great danger of a renationalisation of policy aims, leading to the extremes of the last century, which was deeply scarred by two terrible world wars and their human and social destruction.
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| Grant Belchamber |
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| Sylvain Schetagne |
A few months back, we raised issues regarding the revision by the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) - organised by the ILO - on what counts as a job and the re-consideration and reset of guidelines to measure work and the labour force[1]. This debate came about because of the need to better provide policy makers with accurate information on the state of work and the labour markets. This debate was further fueled by the stagnant key labour market indicators.
Thirty years ago, the main objective of employment statistics was to measure labour inputs in production, to calculate GDP and measure economic growth. The lens for measuring employment and unemployment was constructed to meet the needs of producing the National Accounts. Today, policy makers want to know about labour market trends, the effectiveness of labour market programs, labour underutilization, the participation of different sub-groups of the population and the engagement with the market economy.
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| Dennis Arnold |
The global apparel industry is characterised by low wages, poor occupational health and safety, and restrictions on freedom of association. These problems persist in spite of numerous corporate social responsibility initiatives, consumer campaigning for improved labour rights, and trade union organising in industrialising countries. In the wake of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh on April 24, debates over the ‘race to the bottom’ for cheap and flexible labour have re-emerged. For example, Disney corporate representatives, who terminated sourcing to Bangladesh in late 2012 in response to a spate of factory fires, were quoted in a recent article saying the company would consider allowing its licensees to produce in Bangladesh if the country implemented the ILO’s Better Work programme, which uses ILO monitoring of factories in Cambodia as its model (Greenhouse 2013). Dan Rees, director of Better Work, is quoted in the same article saying before his organisation would get involved in Bangladesh, the country needed to enact stronger labour protection and stop suppressing trade unions.
