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"The campaign to address severe forms of labour market exploitation in markets around the world has led activists, unionists, policymakers, and legislators to explore the role of corporations in driving human trafficking and modern slavery (LeBaron, 2020). Based on the understanding that lead firms are not merely complicit actors but active contributors – through their purchasing and sourcing practices – to violations of workers' human rights and labour standards, the focus on corporations seeks to expand corporate responsibility to working conditions throughout global value chains (GVCs) (Anner, 2015). In this chapter, we compare two labour governance models that have developed in the quest to combat modern slavery.
To better comprehend the structural aspects of efforts to eradicate modern slavery within GVCs and the dynamics created around them, as well as the measures pursued and their implications, we further develop and employ our analytical concept of ‘anti-trafficking chains'. This term refers to the provision of anti-trafficking services by both non-profit and for-profit entities to multinational corporations (MNCs), mirroring the logic and structure of supply chains (Barkay et al., 2024). The comparative analysis presented here focuses on two types of anti-trafficking chains: one that has proliferated following the enactment of State Anti-Trafficking laws in various countries and another that emerged from the deployment of the Worker Social Responsibility (WSR) model. This analysis seeks to discern the extent to which State Anti-Trafficking laws provide the expected hardening of soft-law anti-trafficking tools and to identify the conditions under which anti-trafficking chains may transform corporate behaviour and serve as drivers of change in human trafficking in GVCs. To this end, this chapter offers a structural analysis of the governance models behind State Anti-Trafficking laws and WSR and of the power dynamics created by each."

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"Modern Slavery and the Governance of Global Value Chains provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the links between Global Value Chains (GVCs) governance, regulation, and vulnerability to severe forms of labour market exploitation by focusing on governance initiatives that seek to induce corporate action to end or mitigate modern slavery. The book brings together chapters by scholars from developed, developing, and emerging economies and from various disciplines to explore the complex relationship between global and local patterns of production and consumption, and severe forms of labour market exploitation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core."

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"The Law of Global Value Chains
Global value chain (GVC) analysis captures how firms become the dominant organizational form in the coordination of global social relations of production (Baglioni et al., 2017: 315), breaking with state-centric approaches to understanding economic development. Changing patterns of global production and the prevalence of outsourcing mean that industrial capacity is owned by producers in developing countries but controlled to a significant extent by lead firms located in developed economies (Gereffi, 2018: 255). From this starting point, GVC analysis focuses on how global lead firms ‘drive' the actions of other firms in the chain (Gereffi et al., 2005; Gibbon et al., 2008). These dynamics of ‘drivenness' are undergirded by a legal infrastructure, which plays a crucial role for the governance and coordination of the chain and for the generation and distribution of economic value (The IGLP Law and Global Production Working Group, 2016; Danielsen, 2005). A key part of this legal infrastructure are mechanisms of contractual governance, which both ensure control over value chains and formalize power asymmetries among the different actors. For instance, suppliers might be pushed to assume disproportionate financial risk, while lead firms can disengage from their contractual relationships at their discretion (Anner, 2020; Hering, 2021). Yet implicit in the capacity of lead firms to control and drive the chain through mechanisms of contractual governance is also their potential to act as regulators of the production process, possibly guaranteeing labour, social, and environmental standards by pressuring suppliers. Lead firms export legal frameworks that eventually shape the law on the ground, functioning as proxies of legal homogenization and isolating economic activities from the contingent exercise of national public authority (Ferrando, 2014). This opens a door for a possible re-internalization of ‘externalities' of production – of aspects of the production process that have nothing to do with product quality standards, such as labour rights and environmental standards. In other words, while the fragmentation of global production initially enables divorcing value accumulation from liability for wrongdoing, the ‘drivenness' of value chains by lead firms entails at least the theoretical possibility that such firms assume broader forms of regulatory capacity with regard to distanced stakeholders – workers along the supply chains and various local communities."

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"Global value chains (GVCs) are a manifestation of the contemporary global political economy. Viewing them solely as economic constructs, however, obscures the role that law and the wider regulatory environment play in their development and facilitation. The issue of modern slavery within GVCs has been the subject of careful scrutiny from a variety of legal sub-disciplines, including labour, welfare, and immigration law. In this chapter, I examine the role of company law, and particularly the fiduciary duty of directors to act in the interests of the company, in creating conditions under which modern slavery flourishes in GVCs. I suggest that the ideology of shareholder primacy that helps shape board decision-making is flawed both normatively and as a matter of legal doctrine. The central argument advanced is that shareholders' interests are typically treated as a proxy for a company's interests due to the ambiguity in defining what it means to act in the interests of the company as a legal construct. Yet this focus on prioritizing the interests of shareholders can motivate lead companies' directors to make decisions that deliver investor returns at the expense of fundamental labour rights and human dignity. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential of incorporating principles of proportionality into board decision-making. It is suggested that this approach can enhance directors' knowledge and awareness of balancing competing interests, thereby avoiding the most egregious abuses of corporate power in the pursuit of profit."

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"For over a decade, scholars have documented forced labour among low-wage migrant workers in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries such as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia (Blaydes, 2023; Fernando and Lodermeier, 2022; Iskander, 2021; Parreñas, 2021). A broad understanding within this literature is that among the root causes of this phenomenon in the GCC are abuses perpetrated during workers' recruitment from their home countries, such as extortionate fees, misinformation, and coercion. Recruitment is conducted by intermediary firms in workers' home countries, known as ‘recruiters' or ‘recruitment firms'. Eighty per cent of low-wage migrant workers in the GCC migrate through these channels (Mendoza, 2012).
Yet, despite the proliferation of this method, the scholarship on forced labour in the GCC contains few studies on recruitment and even fewer that include interviews with the recruiters themselves (Gardner, 2012; Kern and Müller-Böker, 2015). This gap in the literature is particularly notable since scholars of forced labour have renewed their focus on recruitment as a driver of forced labour of migrant workers globally (Crane et al., 2021; Crane and LeBaron, 2018), including as a structural feature of contemporary global capitalism (Crane and LeBaron, 2018; Mantouvalou, 2023; Shamir, 2012) and with colonial origins (Buckley et al., 2023; Iskander, 2021; Wright, 2021). Within this scholarship, a growing number of studies suggest that the recruitment of low-wage migrant workers should be understood as a ‘human supply chain', a concept developed by Jennifer Gordon as an analogy to product global value chains (GVCs) (Gordon, 2017; Buckley et al., 2023; Farbenblum and Nolan, 2020; LeBaron, 2020; Pittman, 2018; Hernández-León, 2021; Milkman, 2020).
According to this framing, employers are seen as lead firms at the top of the human supply chain, mirroring the portrayal of lead firms at the top of product supply chains within the GVC literature (Gordon, 2017). Empirical studies have shown that many product supply chains are, in fact, lead firm- or buyer-driven – meaning that the lead firm holds the greatest bargaining power, as well as the greatest ability to influence the terms of its contracts with suppliers (Gereffi, 2018)."

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"As many have warned, the expansionism or ‘exploitation creep' (Chuang, 2014) that characterizes discourses around ‘modern slavery' has only succeeded in clouding the issue, both legally and politically, rather than rendering it more visible (see also Miers, 2003; O'Connell-Davidson, 2015; Quirk, 2018). As Chuang (2014: 611) explains, this ‘exploitation creep' has entailed the consideration of an ever-broadening range of practices as falling under the ‘modern slavery' umbrella term. Chuang centres her attention on two related paradigmatic shifts that have allowed this to happen: the reframing of all forced labour as trafficking and the labelling of trafficking as, by definition, slavery (2014: 611). ‘Modern slavery' has therefore become a catch-all and highly malleable term, which can include practices as disparate as selling sexual services online, generational bonded labour in India, low-level drug distribution in the UK, and forced marriage.
This ‘exploitation creep' has produced two broad policy responses. On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of a hegemonic position referred to in the literature as ‘modern slavery abolitionism' (Chuang, 2014; O'Connell-Davidson, 2015). This locates the source of these ostensibly exploitative labour practices in deviant/criminal entities (organized crime groups and/or rogue multinational corporations). Under the abolitionism paradigm, preventative policies have included the banning or restriction of migration for ‘vulnerable' populations, often women from the Global South (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Doezema, 2002; Kapur, 2005; Andrijasevic, 2007; Agustín, 2007); the ‘rescue, protection and rehabilitation' of individual victims identified in contexts of destination; and the prosecution of perpetrators. Abolitionism invests in moral crusades along an axis of evil, presenting ‘modern slavery' as an exceptional problem to be driven-out (Bunting and Quirk, 2014) and characterized by methodological individualism (LeBaron and Ayers, 2013: 874). Conceptualizing ‘modern slavery' as the result of evil criminals or rogue companies, abolitionist policies thus invisibilize the very conditions in which such exploitative and unfree relations thrive. This unnuanced, ‘one-size-fits-all' approach fails to consider historically determined systems and relations of power that underpin exploitative and unfree labour."

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"This discussion of the Cross-Border Merger Directive and its implementing legislation in each Member State of the European Union and the European Economic Area provides companies and their advisors with useful insight into the legal framework applicable to, and the tax treatment of, cross-border mergers throughout the European Economic Area. Analysis of the Community rules laid down in the Cross-Border Merger Directive and the Community rules on the tax treatment of cross-border mergers is complemented by chapters on the implementing legislation in each Member State, prepared in accordance with a common format and contributed by a practitioner from each state. Annexes contain the Cross-Border Merger Directive (Annex I), the Parent-Subsidiary Directive (Annex II) and a list of the implementing legislation in each Member State (Annex III)."

"Anticipating risks has become an obsession of the early twenty-first century. Private and public sector organisations increasingly devote resources to risk prevention and contingency planning to manage risk events should they occur. This 2010 book shows how we can organise our social, organisational and regulatory policy systems to cope better with the array of local and transnational risks we regularly encounter. Contributors from a range of disciplines - including finance, history, law, management, political science, social psychology, sociology and disaster studies - consider threats, vulnerabilities and insecurities alongside social and organisational sources of resilience and security. These issues are introduced and discussed through a fascinating and diverse set of topics, including myxomatosis, the 2012 Olympic Games, gene therapy and the financial crisis. This is an important book for academics and policy makers who wish to understand the dilemmas generated in the anticipation and management of risks."

"Climate change is a grave and urgent threat to human and other life, Earth's ecosystem, and global security and economic well-being. The global community increasingly understands that business as usual is no longer an option. Debate about states' legal obligations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions is still in its infancy. This seriously hinders progress through the political process or the courts. A group of legal experts has sought to fill this gap by drafting the Oslo Principles on Global Climate Change Obligations. The Principles identify states' reduction obligations and articulate a series of related obligations aimed at prevention. An extensive commentary further explains the Principles and their legal underpinning. The members of the expert group are: Antonio Benjamin, Michael Gerrard, Toon Huydecoper, Michael Kirby, M.C. Mehta, Thomas Pogge, Qin Tianbao, Dinah Shelton, James Silk, Jessica Simor, Jaap Spier (rapporteur), Elisabeth Steiner and Philip Sutherland."