Globalization and the diffusion of industry supply chains to developing countries have provoked a fierce debate over how best to improve labor standards in these emerging centers of production. Child labor, hazardous working conditions, excessive working hours and poor wages continue to be a problem at many factories in developing countries, creating scandal and embarrassment for the global brands that source from those factories.1 Given the limited capacity of many developing-country governments to enforce their own labor laws,2 multinational corporations have developed their own “codes of conduct”3 for suppliers, as well as a variety of monitoring mechanisms aimed at enforcing compliance with these codes. Monitoring for compliance with codes of conduct is currently the principal way that both global corporations and labor rights nongovernmental organizations address poor working conditions in global supply chain factories.
Corporate codes of conduct and various efforts aimed at monitoring compliance with these codes have been around for decades. While initially these efforts focused primarily on corporate or supplier compliance with national regulations and laws, over time they have become increasingly concerned with compliance with private, voluntary codes of conduct, especially as they apply to labor and environmental standards.4 Information is central to this model of private, voluntary regulation. The underlying assumption is that information collected through factory audits... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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