RESEARCH
Just Supply Chains
Led by Joshua Cohen and Richard Locke, the Just Supply Chains project explores the conditions under which a variety of public and private strategies might succeed in promoting a more just global economy.
Globalization, with its volatile mix of economic opportunity and social disruption, is reorganizing production, redefining work, and provoking fundamental changes in the institutions of economic governance. In a world of global supply chains - with links extending across cultural and political boundaries - corporations, unions, NGOs, national governments, and even international labor, trade and financial organizations are all casting about, searching for new strategic directions and/or novel institutional arrangements. But there is enormous uncertainty about their likely success - in particular, about their success in addressing three basic concerns about employment relations in the global economy: fair compensation, decent and healthy working conditions and rights of association. The concerns about fairness focus on three dimensions: wages and work hours, working conditions that ensure the health and safety of workers, and basic rights, including the right to organize collectively. These issues are considered in connection with supply chains in agriculture, apparel, electronics, and footwear.
Currently, the study seeks evaluate to different strategies for promoting more just labor conditions in global supply chains:
1. corporate codes of conduct and "private voluntary" efforts to monitor compliance with these codes
2. reorganizing national-level regulation so that it operates more effectively
3. collaborative efforts by the WTO, ILO, and other international organizations to bring labor standards together with trade rules in a new form of global rule-making
In addition, the Just Supply Chain project brings together scholars, managers, government officials and leaders of NGOs to discuss strategies and new research on labor and justice in a global economy.
2012 Just Supply Chains Conference | Regulatory Reform | December 13 and 14, 2012
