Introduction

This chapter describes the global campaign for an ILO Convention as it continued between the first set of negotiations at the ILC in 2018 and the second and final negotiations at the ILC's 107th session in 2019. We document the progress with the campaign and the preparations carried out by the Workers’ Group for the 2019 negotiations. This is followed by a discussion of the ILO's preparation for and lead-up to the 2019 Standard-Setting Committee, including a questionnaire for member states contained in the ILO's “brown report” (ILO 2019a), and the results and draft text of the Convention and Recommendation, published in the ILO's two-volume “blue report” (ILO 2019b, 2019c). Finally, we delve into the negotiations for Convention 190 and Recommendation 206 in the 2019 Standard-Setting Committee, highlighting the specific issues of concern for workers, and the linkages and resonance of the negotiations with the campaign priorities.

In the second half of 2018 and early 2019 the global campaign gained a new dynamic. Many women in unions realized that, following the outcome of the 2018 negotiations, there was much at stake. This motivated workers to engage in intense campaigning and preparations for the 2019 Standard-Setting Committee; Martle Keyter, vice-president of the South African FEDUSA confederation, said in her interview:

Added to this was greater engagement in the campaign on the part of human rights and feminist and NGO allies.

Eric: Let's summarize the argument so far. We have discussed the rapid cultural changes in global business, and the ESG wave in financial markets. Europe appears to be advancing most rapidly in both these areas, but the effects are being felt globally, and are spreading. Politics is also catching up. China, under Premier Xi, the United States, under President Biden, and India, under Prime Minister Modi, are also shifting rapidly. There is a consensus that we all need to move faster. We have outlined a set of principles for smart policy-making to accelerate the transition.

Corinne: Yes, we have shown that the best policies are simple, effective and non-partisan. We have provided a framework for categorizing the challenges specific to climate change: simple maths, mini-Musks and herding sheep. We have also provided concrete proposals, such as contingent carbon taxes, EPICs aimed at the relative price of green substitutes, green sectoral trade agreements, all of which aim to tilt the playing field in favour of sustainable businesses that are driving the decarbonization of our economy. We have explained how to mitigate free-riding and greenwashing in financial markets. We concluded from these discussions that the effects of policy interventions will be amplified because financial markets and global business are primed to respond to EPICs and regulations.

Eric: In line with expert consensus, our diagnosis puts sustainable electricity at the heart of the global strategy to collapse carbon emissions. A rapid acceleration of investment in wind, solar and other alternatives, as well as infrastructure for energy storage and transmission is needed to get us close to 1.5°C.

Corinne: The evidence suggests that this is substantially a “simple maths” problem, an economic challenge. In other words, we have the technology and the physical resources, the challenge is to create an extreme incentive structure that rapidly changes behaviour. If the cost of capital can be reduced, and a smart regulatory framework put in place, halving emissions by 2030 is within reach. Although the private sector is best placed to deliver these new industries and investments, the EPIC levers we describe are almost entirely in the hands of the nation state.

Eric: Bill Gates apologises for using the word “policy” in his book. We maintain that any climate strategy that does not put national policies at the heart of its decarbonization objectives will fail. So, how do we supercharge the nation?

Overview

This book is about the remarkable global campaign that played a formative role in the adoption of a landmark global binding standard by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Violence and Harassment Convention No. 190 (known as C190), supplemented by Recommendation No. 206 (known as R206). ILO members overwhelmingly voted to adopt C190 and R206 on 21 June 2019 at the International Labour Conference (ILC). The ILO is the United Nations (UN) agency with a mandate to address and monitor international labour standards. It is, uniquely, a tripartite organization, with a governance structure made up of governments, employers’ organizations and workers’ organizations, which agree and monitor the implementation of international labour standards, centred on a set of core fundamental rights at work, and principles for decent work and for social justice. Established in 1919, the ILO was the first international organization to include gender equality at work within its founding constitution. For the past century ILO Conventions have played a strong normative role through the establishment of international labour standards. As with other human rights instruments, international labour standards have the potential to create new social norms, forge change and empower transnational and national advocacy networks (Brysk 2018). Despite patriarchal vested interests from ILO constituents, there has been a shift in perspective and, over time, an evolution in ILO policy, from a protectionist approach towards women's participation in work to an approach rooted in social justice, decent work and gender equality (Boris, Hoehtker & Zimmerman 2020; Boris 2019; Beghini, Cattaneo & Pozzan 2019).

We document the global campaign to end gender-based violence1 in the world of work through worker-led organizing strategies and coalition building deeply rooted in feminist and intersectional perspectives, historical divisions based on sex, class and race, and the voices of women and other marginalized workers who are disproportionately affected by GBV. We show how women's union leadership, especially from the global South, disrupted institutional patriarchy, leading to the adoption of an international binding labour standard that is unprecedented in its inclusiveness of all workers. In telling the story of the campaign and the formal negotiations, we document how women workers and activists used their collective power to build a global movement to end GBV at work.

This chapter reflects on the global campaign, how it was brought into the negotiations for an ILO Convention in the Standard-Setting Committees in 2018 and 2019 and what was important from the perspective of workers involved in both the negotiations and the global campaign. It hears from some of the campaigners and participants in the negotiations about their role, defining moments and activities to be prioritized looking ahead.

Reflections on the standard-setting process

As the reporter from the Standard-Setting Committee said to the ILC, discussions were often difficult and tense, but he notes: “The Committee's outcome is evidence of the enduring value and strength of social dialogue” (ILO 2019e: 2). As one worker member of the committee, Martle Keyter of MISA and FEDUSA, noted when interviewed, 2018 had been difficult and often conflictual, but the 2019 negotiations, although hard, consolidated the need for a Convention:

Credit was also given to the skilful role played by the chairperson of the committee, and to the courage needed to find solutions, sometimes through an “unorthodox approach to its proceedings in order to allow for the consideration of different, but related, parts of the text, thereby reaching better conclusions as to the overall impact of the proposed instruments” (ILO 2019e: 2). The Drafting Committee played an important role, often sitting well into the early hours of the morning. The representatives from governments, employers and workers in the Drafting Committee ensured the alignment of the two official final texts in French and English.

The workers’ spokesperson, Marie Clarke Walker, brought an energy and passion to the negotiations in 2018 and 2019. As a black woman, committed to ensuring “no one is left behind”, she skilfully crafted a feminist, inclusive and intersectional approach throughout the negotiations. Clarke Walker was a member of the ILO Governing Body and a senior trade union leader with the CLC in Canada.

There are many great books on climate change, but very few address what we need to do, in a convincing way. Personal “todo” lists suggesting we eat less meat, buy an electric vehicle, and fly less, seem trivial relative to the challenge of climate change. We need serious policies at the individual, corporate,national and global levels, which can rapidly accelerate the pace of change.

There is also a lack of clear thinking. A collapse in global CO2 emissions does not require a complete change in how we live our lives, or a huge increase in taxes. It requires ending our dependence on fossil fuels. This presents us with an enormous investment challenge. Most of the world's electricity, transport, buildings and industry are powered using fossil fuels. We need to power them with renewable energy. If electricity is generated with zero emissions, and transport, buildings and industry are all powered by electricity, global emissions would fall by around 75 per cent. This is the greatest reallocation of capital in human history. We should be doubly angry if we don't rise to the challenge – investment is the means by which we become wealthier.

The quote above from the economist John Maynard Keynes was written during the Great Depression. Keynes observed that mass unemployment was a “failure of the mind”. History has proven him right.

Preamble

Question 2: should there be a binding Convention supplemented by a Recommendation, or only a Convention or only a Recommendation, which would not be binding on all parties?

Most governments and workers’ organizations argued in favour of a Convention supplemented by a Recommendation, whereas a majority of employers’ organizations favoured a Recommendation. Most had a preference for a Convention supplemented by a Recommendation, preferring two separate instruments, enabling further guidance to be given and to enable those countries that had not ratified the Convention to have an instrument they could use and to “serve as a foundation for the normative changes, as well as for the design of public policies and dissemination of good practices” (ILO 2018b: 10). Of the 85 government replies, two supported a Convention, 30 supported a Recommendation and 48 both. Responses from employers were largely supportive of a Recommendation; out of 26 replies, one favoured a Convention, 11 a Recommendation and four both. Among workers, out of a total of 178 replies, nine supported a Convention, five a Recommendation and 164 both. This was a reflection of effective advocacy in the global campaign to end GBV, which had advocated for the need for a binding Convention, not just a Recommendation, for many years.

Question 5: should the preamble of the instrument or instruments state the right of everyone to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence?

Until this point there was no global binding treaty recognizing the right to be free from violence and harassment in the world of work. All but one of the workers’ organizations that submitted responses to the questionnaire took the position that it was particularly important for the preamble to address GBV because women and those who do not conform to societal perceptions of gender roles and norms are at greater risk. Reference to the 2016 meeting of experts underlined the importance of addressing the gender dimensions of violence and harassment in the instrument(s). There was significant support to include reference to GBV in the preamble of the proposed instrument(s) in order to take account of the “greater risks faced by women and those who do not conform to societal perceptions of gender roles and norms” (ILO 2018b: 14).

Introduction

This chapter brings the campaign for an ILO Convention centred on GBV into the next phase of the formal ILO institutional negotiations, leading to the tripartite Meeting of Experts on Violence against Women and Men in the World of Work (meeting of experts) in 2016. We show the formative role and influence that the campaign had on the preparations for the meeting of experts, and the subsequent standard setting at the ILC in 2018 and 2019 (discussed in Chapters 5 and 6).

By 2015 the global campaign “Stop Gender-Based Violence at Work!” was becoming increasingly visible and organized, with a growing number of national and sectoral union-led campaigns, coalitions, awareness-raising activities and negotiations with employers to end GBV, particularly on sexual harassment, and on newer issues such as third-party violence and domestic violence. In the collective experiences of women workers and trade union leaders there had never been such activism from women from all corners of the world on the issue of GBV at work. Domestic violence at work came on to the agenda in large measure as a result of the advocacy and campaigning of women in unions (Aeberhard-Hodges & McFerran 2017). Although the #MeToo revelations did not break until October 2017, other developments were at play, including the agreement in 2015 of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the related Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2015).

At a societal level, pressure was mounting for international action to end GBV. The global campaign “16 Days of Activism against GBV”, held annually from 25 November to 10 December, had not at this point focused specifically on GBV at work. However, its advocacy in raising awareness about domestic violence and other forms of violence against women had been an important focal point for women in trade unions. Feminists in national and global unions have been involved, since the inception of the campaign, in holding union events and actions to end violence against women, particularly domestic violence, often in partnership with feminist NGOs, and these campaigns increasingly became focused on GBV at work, including the impact of domestic violence at work.

In this final chapter we draw some conclusions about this important global campaign and how a women-led movement successfully influenced global policy-making by disrupting and changing the global and national institutional structures of decision-making, to the benefit of all workers. Through the campaign, workers gave expert insights into the world of work, with the twin effects of raising the profile of women in trade unions as effective and respected actors in the world of work and reigniting activism around an issue that has united women across the world.

The global campaign contributed in no small way to ensuring that tackling violence and harassment in the world of work, and a strong focus on GBVH, become firmly embedded in global governance. There is critical learning about the claims made by women workers, and the role of trade union activism and advocacy, alliance building, tripartism and how these processes of change have impacted and will continue to impact on global and national policy formation. Sustaining the momentum of the campaign, and global and national leadership and advocacy for the implementation of progressive national public policies and legal frameworks, is critical. For many women involved in the global campaign, there is no going back. With recognition of a new human right to work in freedom from violence and harassment, expectations are high about the possibility of transformational change through strategies for the prevention of GBVH and securing accountability and gender justice.

Revisiting the themes running through the book

Our first theme addressed the power of diverse women's voices, and the recognition of intersecting forms of discrimination, which led to the global campaign for an international globally binding labour standard to prevent and address GBVH. The campaign was deeply rooted in women's experiences of multiple forms of discrimination, and this came directly into the corridors and meeting rooms of the ILO. In Chapter 2 we documented how the diverse voices of women workers led to inclusive organizing for a campaign centred on the needs of workers who have historically been excluded from decision-making, and in Chapter 7 through the campaign for the ratification of C190. Fundamental to the campaign was the prioritization of awareness raising, education and building women's voice and agency in unions at the grassroots.

Introduction

Consumer-facing firms in affluent countries have become de facto regulators of working conditions around the world. Through ethical sourcing policies, codes of conduct, compliance auditing and capacity-building initiatives, large retailers and brands in the apparel, electronics, food and home furnishing industries routinely “push” rules for safe and decent work through their GPNs. Although this began in the 1990s as a strategic response to high-profile scandals and anti-sweatshop activism, it has become a well-institutionalized feature of transnational corporations and GPNs. For instance, all the world's 25 most valuable brands (as ranked by Interbrand in 2020) have rules pertaining to labour conditions in their GPNs. Some firms rely on their own policies, while others use standards developed by industry groups such as the Responsible Business Alliance or multi-stakeholder initiatives such as the Ethical Trading Initiative or Fair Labor Association (FLA).

These rules are rarely implemented fully (Amengual, Distelhorst & Tobin 2020; Locke 2013) and are far from sufficient guarantees of safe and decent work (Anner 2019; LeBaron, Lister & Dauvergne 2017). Nevertheless, they represent a form of transnational private regulation (TPR) in which lead firms in GPNs adopt, and to some degree enforce, rules for suppliers’ employment practices. Supplier factories and farms are the targets of this type of regulation, and they are typically asked to demonstrate compliance or face the risk of losing orders.

For many proponents, TPR has the potential to establish norms of decency in otherwise cut-throat industries, bypass captured or corrupt governments and create an alternative to inter-governmental organizations that have been reluctant to set international labour standards (Abbott & Snidal 2009). Many of these optimistic accounts are animated by what one of us (Bartley 2018) calls a “hope of transcendence”. This hope rests on the idea that market demands can, essentially, lift particular sites of production out of their local contexts and up to the level of global best practices. If this is true, then TPR could represent a profoundly important structuring force in the global economy, introducing alternative norms and production practices, even if these are not always fully implemented.

In this chapter, we illustrate one way in which this “hope of transcendence” is mythical.

Introduction: Questions, Framing and Methodological Implications

This chapter discusses some of the methodological challenges in undertaking labour regime research and analysis. It draws upon the research design and process deployed in a four-year research project: Industrial Development, Construction and Employment in Africa (IDCEA). The main focus of the research was a comparative analysis of differences in labour outcomes across leading firms of different national origins, including Chinese, domestic and other foreign companies in two sectors that have been growing or emerging in different parts of Africa, with Angola and Ethiopia exemplifying contrasting cases.

The research questions of this study were organized around three blocks. First, there was a desire to ascertain contributions to direct job creation, and particularly the extent to which Chinese firms “localized” their workforces or not and why – an issue that has attracted much attention in the Africa– China literature (Lee 2017; Oya & Schaefer 2019). Second, the project aimed to ascertain whether wages and work conditions differed between the leading firms operating in the infrastructure construction and manufacturing sectors in Angola and Ethiopia, with particular attention to comparisons between Chinese firms, other foreign firms and leading domestic firms. In this regard, this study probed the popular claim (especially but not only in media reporting) that Chinese firms “exported” their “exploitative” labour practices as an expression of a continuous “race to the bottom” (Gadzala 2010; Bah & Jauch 2009), which is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it assumes that labour regimes in China and in Chinese firms are intrinsically more exploitative than labour regimes in African countries. Second, it implicitly assumes Chinese exceptionalism in labour relations, an issue already questioned by a growing body of research on labour in China (Chan 2015; Lee 2017; Lüthje, Luo & Zhang 2013). Third, such claims thrive in approaches driven by “methodological nationalism” and its concomitant empirical reductionism, which gives primacy to national characteristics in exploring socio-economic outcomes, including labour outcomes (Lee 2017; Silver 2003). In short, the study worked with the hypothesis that Chinese firms did not or could not simply “export” labour practices from whatever concrete sector and geographical setting in China that they operated in.

A third set of research questions concerned the contributions of different firms to skill development, and, more broadly, to labour force upgrading.

Introduction

This book has sought to explore and develop the potential of the labour regime concept for understanding the position and latent power of workers within the contemporary global economy. This is an analytical-cum-olitical project that involves placing workers centrally in our analyses of global production, without underestimating the challenges for workers’ prospects in the context of the intersecting dynamics of capital, state and society in which they are embroiled. In Chapter 1, we started our journey through the antecedents and the early and current development of labour regime analysis by asking a series of questions. How can we theorize labour regimes in the context of long-run historical processes of capitalist globalization? To what extent do labour regime concepts enable the development of comparative analyses across industries and places? How do labour regimes develop differentially in relation to contrasting global production systems? How do we make sense of the reproduction and control of specific labour processes in discrete places and industries? And to what extent can labour regime analysis provide a synthetic framework for understanding the political economy of contemporary capitalism?

The chapters in this volume have made considerable headway in tackling these questions. In developing the idea of labour regimes as temporary, place-specific stabilizations of capital– labour relations embedded in wider, multi-scalar dynamics, they have served to sharpen our understanding of what constitutes such regimes, and our knowledge of how and why they vary across industries, space and time. We have also seen how labour regimes both shape and are reshaped by the variegated landscapes of labour agency across the global economy, and how they are constituted beyond the traditional workplace by processes of social reproduction and household economies that are, typically, highly gendered. In turn, the chapters have also offered methodological reflections on how to undertake grounded labour regime analysis.

In this concluding chapter, our goal is not to synthesize and summarize the contributions of all the preceding chapters. Labour regime thinking is clearly a work in progress, and the commonalities across the chapters are also accompanied by important differences – concerning, for instance, which spatial scales and actors to foreground – that will continue to be debated and refined as the agenda develops.

Introduction

At the end of the 2010s Amazon became the most valuable corporation on the planet (La Monica 2019) and the company's CEO, Jeff Bezos, was the richest person in the world – with a net worth peaking at US$165 billion (Frank 2018).

A company that started in 1995 as an online bookseller has metamorphosed into the world's largest online retailer and the world's most powerful corporation. By 2023 Amazon is projected to overtake Walmart as the world's largest employer (Shendruk 2020). Amazon's meteoric rise in the global economy is indicative, in part, of a broader shift in contem-porary global capitalism (Alimahomed-Wilson & Reese 2020), namely the “logistics revolution”, or the transformation in the way goods are produced and transported around the world, which has increased retail power in today's neoliberal just-in-time economy (Bonacich & Wilson 2008). Today Amazon is now widely considered one of the world's largest logistics corporations (Moody 2020). Unlike other logistics firms, Amazon is also one of the world's largest retailers, but, unlike most retailers, Amazon controls its own massive logistics network. Therefore, Amazon's agenda-setting logistics and supply chain management practices are transforming global commerce, including the ways consumer goods are transported and consumed around the world (Alimahomed-Wilson & Ness 2018).

Increasing consumer demand for same-day, next-day or two-day “free shipping” has created a significant impact on logistics and warehouse and delivery workers (see Newsome & Moore 2018), creating a global “speed-up” in both the pace of work and the digital surveillance of labour processes (Newsome & Moore 2018). Product-to-doorstep consumerism, driven in large part by over 150 million Amazon Prime members globally, is also producing distinct changes in warehousing and fuelling the rapid growth of the “last mile” logistics sector. By 2020 Amazon's global subcontracted delivery driver labour force exceeded 500,000 drivers (Weise 2020). Although important research has documented Amazon's detrimental impact on labour and work around the world, the racial character of the company's rise in the contemporary world capitalist system has remained largely absent in critical analyses of Amazon. In this context, this chapter locates Amazon's global corporate ascendancy as a constituent element of racial capitalism.

Introduction

Why labour regime? To speak of a regime, according to the Oxford English Dictionary definition, is to refer to a “method or system of rule, governance, or control”, or a mode of regulation, perhaps; but the word also indexes a given order or normalized operating environment, “a system of organization”, as well as a received culture: “a way of doing things”. This array of meanings and significations represents a decent enough place to start when it comes to an assessment of the work that the word “regime” does in the field of labour studies, in which usage varies from the generic and somewhat nebulous to the analytically precise. Concerned primarily with the latter, this chapter traces an arc from Michael Burawoy's pioneering exploration of “factory regimes” through to more expansive and context-specific deployments of the regime concept in labour studies. This concept, following Marion Werner's (2021: 183) succinct formulation, is taken here to “describe the multiscalar articulation of state, capital and labor relations that determine how labor is managed and surplus distributed”.

Reflecting this distinctive methodological optic, the chapter charts a course between a pair of adjacent keywords in the evolving, interdisciplinary lexicon of labour studies, labour “process” and labour “market”, the first of which refers to the social and technical organization of work at the workplace or point of production, while the second relates to the terrain on which the buyers and sellers of labour power engage and interact, including the diverse circumstances under which wage labour is mobilized, remunerated and reproduced. A distinctive contribution of research on labour regimes, it will be suggested, has been to open up the spaces between the workplace-focused tradition of labour process theory, on the one hand, and the eclectic domain of labour market studies, on the other – tracing a path between the methodologically claustrophobic and the methodologically diffuse. If a limitation of conventional labour process studies is that, in explanatory terms, just about everything tends to be collapsed into the proximate context of workplace social relations and struggles, bracketing out the sphere of social reproduction, the role of the state, and so on, labour market studies often confront the opposite problem: that of including just about everything, from wage-setting and cultural norms to boundary institutions such as the school and the prison.

Introduction

The labour regimes of the Bangladeshi apparel industry are seen as primarily characterized by the hyper-competitiveness of the global apparel industry and associated despotic labour market conditions (Anner 2015). This chapter, however, argues that they are equally driven, if not more so, by (a) strong state– manufacturer alliances against organized labour; (b) the structural deficiencies of national trade unions and contested labour politics; and (c) the interventions of international civil society organizations. I make these arguments by narrating the dynamics of both labour governance and labour agency at the national level, with relations among and between labour, capital, the state and ICSOs delimited as the key characteristics shaping Bangladeshi labour regimes. In so doing, the chapter pays special attention to ICSOs, as global representatives of labour (e.g. IndustriAll and Global Union Federation), as well as to other international non-governmental organizations and collectives campaigning for labour rights at the global level (e.g. the Clean Clothes Campaign and the Worker Rights Consortium). Given the transitory nature of these ICSO interventions, the chapter argues that labour regimes are temporal in nature as they evolve across time and space. Although labour regimes are innately multi-scalar (for example, see Chapter 14 by Campling and Smith), I focus primarily on labour regimes at the workplace. This is because it is at the workplace that the outcomes of the state– capital– labour– ICSO intersections are most legible.

This chapter is based primarily on empirical research using face-to-face interviews and focus group discussions. Overall, 94 interviews and ten focus group discussions were carried out between January and April 2019 in and around the Dhaka garment cluster. Interview participants included lead firm representatives, ICSOs, international regulatory bodies, government representatives, national trade unions, national civil society organizations, manufacturers and their associations, and workers. In addition, 13 garment factories were visited, consisting of a mix of large, medium-scale and subcontracting factories. I complemented primary data collection with information derived from secondary sources such as archives, corporate and government websites, state policy documentation, published information related to the apparel industry and government and industry statistics.

In the next section I briefly review recent work on labour regimes, with ICSOs flagged as a key element that needs to be incorporated into current debates. The section that follows describes the research context: the Bangladeshi apparel industry.