Labor Regulation In A Global Economy

This work categorizes and comprehensively analyzes all of the practical aspects of international labour regulation for researchers and students of human resource management (HRM). It offers realistic policy guidelines for non-academic HRM practitioners, non governmental organizations (NGOs), trade unions and governments. The book focuses primarily upon the issues, organizations and individuals in the US that influence labour regulation - NAFTA, the US GSP programme, trade unions, activists and "grass roots" movements. Major attention is also given to corresponding European Union and International Labour Organisation issues, organizations and individuals.

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Law - Civil / Private / Trade / Anti Trust Law / Business Law, King s College London (School of Law), course: International Labour Law, language: English, abstract: The phenomenon of globalisation has triggered various trends and changes world-wide, affecting almost every part of life. One of the most heavily influenced realms has been labour and its legal framework. Globalisation has transformed the nature of work as well as the organisation and way in which work is performed nowadays. Due to the technical progress, Multinational Corporations have been equipped with an immense ability to relocate their business wherever and whenever they want to any part of the world, powerful enough to dictate their demands to national governments. National governments have, simultaneously, been weakened and especially developing countries are competing with each other in order to attract MNCs, often by adopting and maintaining low labour standards with the result of a feared "race to the bottom". Additionally, the International Labour Organisation, historically the main standard-setting institution, has experienced enormous problems in the implementation process and has therefore undergone a paradigm shift. Moreover, other actors have entered the arena of "standard-setting" such as NGOs etc. This essay tries to analyse the challenges of globalisation posed to international labour standards, especially experienced by the ILO. It then continues by examining the various private measures, which have been used so far, covering both public and private measures, and reaching from e.g. codes of conducts to international framework agreements. It is argued that public and private implementation have become increasingly interdependent, and that developing and fostering this interdependency will be crucial for the prospective success and effectiveness of international labour standards in an ongoing globalising world.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the new methods of transnational labour regulation that are emerging in response to globalisation.

The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production. Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains—such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads—generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

The implications of globalization for labour are more often asserted than analyzed. This collection, and its companion volume Globalization and Patterns of Labour Resistance edited by Jeremy Waddington, seek to remedy this deficiency by presenting contemporary research on the relationship between the globalization of production and the regulation of labour. It considers the ways in which national and supra-national regimes of labour regulation are being actively reconstructed in the context of the internationalization of production. The contributors analyze the implications of changes in different national labour regimes for relations between state, capital and labour, and for class and gender segmentation, and discuss the scope and limits of recent initiatives in the implementation of international labour standards.

How are national and international labour laws responding to the challenge of globalization as it re-shapes the workplaces of the world? This collection of essays by leading legal scholars and lawyers from Europe and the Americas was first published in 2006. It addresses the implications of globalization for the legal regulation of the workplace. It examines the role of international labour standards and the contribution of the International Labour Organization, and assesses the success of the European experiment with continental employment standards. It explores the prospects for hemispheric co-operation on labour standards in the Americas, and deals with the impact of international labour standards on the rights of women and migrant workers. As the nature and organization of work around the world is being decisively transformed, new regional and international institutions are emerging that may provide the platform for new labour standards, and for protecting existing ones.

This book examines and evaluates various private initiatives to enforce fair labor standards within global supply chains. Using unique data (internal audit reports and access to more than 120 supply chain factories and 700 interviews in 14 countries) from several major global brands, including NIKE, HP and the International Labor Organization's Factory Improvement Programme in Vietnam, this book examines both the promise and the limitations of different approaches to actually improve working conditions, wages and working hours for the millions of workers employed in today's global supply chains. Through a careful, empirically grounded analysis of these programs, this book illustrates the mix of private and public regulation needed to address these complex issues in a global economy.

The emergence of voluntary corporate codes of conduct since the early 1990s is both a manifestation of and a response to the process of globalization. They have been part of a more general shift away from state regulation of transnational corporations towards corporate self-regulation in the areas of labour and environmental standards and human rights. This work provides a critical perspective on the growth and significance of corporate codes with a particular focus on working conditions and labour rights. It brings together work by academics, practitioners and activists.