The most obvious answer is a fine start: to pressure Joe Fresh and Loblaws to demand higher safety and labour standards in the overseas factories they use. The companies have already vowed to be a “force for good” in Bangladesh by working with authorities in that country to ensure that building safety codes as well as labour laws are upheld in the factories making its goods. If Canadian consumers remain active in reminding Joe Fresh of that commitment, it can only help.
But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that consumer activism – or even the most sincere regulatory efforts of private firms contracting with overseas manufactures – are the solution to preventing future building collapses or other worker abuses. That’s the main message of a forum in the latest Boston Review, in which academics, researchers and activists lucidly debate whether global product brands can create just supply chains. According to the lead article by MIT professor Richard M. Locke, the past 15 years of well-intentioned private regulation haven’t succeeded: “Regardless of the mission, good will, leadership, organizational design, and even resources underlying private initiatives, they have all produced limited or mixed results.”
As usual, the reason for this state of affairs is that things are complicated. The locations, actors, incentives and pressures involved in today’s global supply chains are so diverse and complex that uncoordinated action from any number of angles isn’t enough to make a major difference.
As Locke notes, other approaches are being tried to compensate for the limited effectiveness of corporate standard-setting. These include “capability building,” through which global buyers try to help developing-country factory-owners gain the technical skills needed to run their factories both more efficiently and more justly for workers. Although such buyer/supplier approaches produce some gains in some factories, they’re not enough to overcome the factors tending to entrench awful working conditions. Commercial pressures – such as the demand by global brands for fast-changing, small-batch manufacturing runs, for instance – will always create incentives for factory owners to exploit workers in order to meet pricing and timing pressures.
If private voluntary initiatives aren’t enough to produce consistent results, another solution is to weave them more closely together with governmental regulation. Getting government involved with buyers and suppliers across a given commercial field has the potential to ensure that all firms abide by common rules. Accordingly, new kinds of public-private partnerships are emerging. In some, national or regional governments work with the private sector to develop goals and metrics for compliance with environmental and labour standards. In other cases, a government might encourage corporate compliance with regulations by offering lighter penalties for violations in return for corporations’ transparency and disclosure.
Though in their infancy, such partnerships are producing impressive results. They are successful, says Locke, because they involve “not traditional command-and-control government regulation (deterrence) but rather a mix of carrots (capability building and technical assistance programs) and sticks (threatening sanctions and closing off ‘low road’ options).”
So what does this mean for Canadians anguished by the Bangladesh factory disaster, and by other ways in which Canadian companies are implicated in abusive practices worldwide? If “laws and government institutions are critical to the success of private initiatives seeking to improve labour conditions in global supply chains,” what scope does this insight offer for ethically concerned consumers to act?
The available scope for action won’t be as simple as a boycott, to be sure. It starts by switching hats from consumer to engaged citizen, and then noticing how such public-private partnerships (a term that in Canada we associate chiefly with city infrastructure projects) are absent from our national discussion today. They’re being pioneered in the United States and Europe, as well as in developing countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia and India, according to Locke. Why not in Canada? The Canadian garment industry may not be large enough to warrant such innovations here, but the huge Canadian mining industry surely is. It’s bound up with well-documented labour and environmental abuses in developing countries – and yet our government continues to insist that voluntary self-regulation by Canadian firms is the only way to go.
If citizens want to make a difference in the ethics of our nation’s global enterprises, insisting on change here is one front for engagement. There’s no shortage of innovative policy thinkers in our federal civil service. What’s missing is the will on the part of Canada’s political leaders to take complex policy seriously, and to deal with our mining companies in a mode other than boosterism. Engaged citizens might make a difference on this front.
No, citizen pressure for public-private partnerships to address environmental and labour standards in the mining industry won’t help directly Bangladeshi garment workers. But it can add to the models and examples available, and place Canada where it should be: in the forefront of countries exploring solutions to complex global problems.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Natalie Brender
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