Documents value chains 341 results

"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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"What Trajectory for the Regulation of Transnational Corporate Responsibility?
The framework for transnational corporate responsibility along global value chains (GVCs) is in flux. While the legal mechanisms have generally become tighter in recent years, the development follows no uniform trajectory. With scattered, disparate, and overlapping initiatives and regulatory regimes currently coexisting, it seems an open political question which regulatory paradigm will prevail in the medium and longer term. This chapter zooms in on specific transitional moments in the regulatory evolution of corporate responsibility. The dominant narrative portrays this evolution as roughly two decades of linear progress from ‘voluntary' (deemed ‘ineffective') corporate social responsibility to ‘mandatory' (and hence deemed more ‘effective') instruments, with each stage reacting to deficits of the previous one by imposing tighter standards, leaving fewer gaps, and allowing stricter enforcement. While this sequential understanding of corporate responsibility with each stage implementing selective improvements indeed captures an important dynamic within corporate responsibility, it paints an incomplete picture. First, it stresses rupture over continuity and thereby distracts attention from shared and structural deficits of the regulation of corporate responsibility across its different ‘stages'. Second, it assumes regulatory discourses of corporate responsibility to be largely self-referential and isolated from broader regulatory developments in other fields. These two limitations have deflected the debate from exposing certain structural difficulties in regulating complex value chains, as well as the deeper political dynamics at play in framing regulatory ‘innovations'.
Against this background, this chapter examines the example of reporting regulation as deployed to address different dimensions of corporate responsibility, including modern slavery. Among the substantive goals on the agenda of corporate responsibility, curbing modern slavery is arguably the most intricate. Intrinsically linked to and sustained by the business model of offshore capitalism, modern slavery forms a ‘viable management practice for many enterprises' (Crane, 2013: 49)."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Despite international instruments on trafficking and forced labour that stipulate the importance of ensuring rightsholders can access effective remedy, instances of remediation for harms including forced, bonded, and child labour, as well as trafficking, have been rare. While remedy is also a common feature of strategies to address modern slavery adopted by nation states and multinational businesses, in practice workers who have been subject to severe forms of labour exploitation in global value chains (GVCs) continue to face significant obstacles to securing redress from those who have violated, or contributed to violation, of their rights.
Obstacles to remedy are multifarious and well-documented (OHCHR, 2016; ICAR et al., 2013). GVCs are complex, involving multiple actors and crossing multiple jurisdictions, rendering it challenging to assign accountability and secure appropriate remedial measures, and most legal systems have not adapted to the reality of service and production within GVCs. Even where powerful (‘lead') companies in the value chain shape the terms of supply and working conditions and are in the same jurisdiction in which the harm arising from their actions or omissions has occurred, remedial action is often stymied by labour law systems that only allow claims against direct employers. Where claims of joint employment or accessorial liability are possible under labour law, such claims are infrequent because of the stringency of tests of control or contribution, and the costs of such litigation (Marshall et al., 2023). In rare cases where litigants are successful in their legal claims, they often struggle to secure enforcement of any court order. Where the lead company that is influencing working conditions in the value chain is in another jurisdiction to where the harm has occurred, the chances of such claims succeeding are even lower (Fudge and Mundlak, 2023). Key principles underpinning private international law – such as those pertaining to jurisdiction and choice of law – largely operate to the benefit of businesses rather than those affected by their activities."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"This article explores the effects of corporate organizational structure and of subsidiary discretion within multinational companies (MNCs). It draws on a representative survey of the most senior HR practitioner in foreign- and domestic-controlled subsidiaries in Canada. Key findings point to the importance of subsidiary discretion, especially discretion over human resource management. Greater subsidiary discretion is associated with a range of positive outcomes: securing international product and service mandates; greater subsidiary influence within the MNC; the promotion and protection of subsidiary employment (increased headcounts, less offshoring, more onshoring); and enhanced engagement with domestic institutions. These results highlight the strategic importance for union, civil society and public policy actors, as well as MNC subsidiary managers themselves, to focus on the drivers of subsidiary discretion, as opposed to the ‘hollowing out' of corporate structures, and to weave that discretion into larger policy narratives to promote local economies."

"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."

"This article analyses, from a constitutionalism perspective, the ubiquitous ‘due-diligence human rights framework' that aims to hold multi-national corporations accountable for the decent work deficits in their supply chains. The analysis draws on the theories of three scholars: Gunther Teubner, Ruth Dukes and Nancy Fraser. The article's objectives are three-fold. First, the analysis illustrates the value of Dukes' idea of a global labour law constitution, augmented by Fraser's theory of justice, as an analytic to identify who is excluded from participating, and the implications of their exclusion. Second, the article makes a theoretical contribution to debates on constitutionalizing labour rights in a post Wesphalian world, using outworkers/homeworkers to ground the discussion. Finally, it is hoped that the article will contribute to the social, and ultimately the legal recognition of homework as legitimate work. "

"The growth of emerging market firms with a global presence highlights the need to better understand how supplier strategy influences global value chains (GVCs). We respond to this need by applying corporate strategy and technology strategy to improve the predictive and prescriptive power of GVC theory. Under what circumstances can suppliers in GVCs shape governance and profit from upgrading? Using corporate strategy, we argue that supplier strategy concerning make-or-buy decisions and buyer diversification can effect a change in governance mode. Using technology strategy, we identify appropriability regimes and complementary assets as essential preconditions for suppliers to capture value from upgrading. Our central contribution is in developing an integrative theoretical framework for analyzing how suppliers alter governance over time, and how they capture the value they create by upgrading, resulting in shifts in value chain polarity. This framework has significant implications for economic development."

"This report funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers highlights how indirect, cross-border climate risks, known as transboundary climate risks, impact the Nordic countries – and what governments can do to advance action to adapt to these risks.
Climate change is projected to have devastating impacts on people and ecosystems if the world does not reach the goals set in the Paris Agreement – and significant impacts even if it does. Traditionally the focus in public discussions and policy has been on direct climate impacts such as extreme weather events.
However, there is a growing recognition that many of the more serious impacts may be indirect, cascading and cross-border. This is especially the case in Nordic countries that are both less vulnerable to direct impacts and more exposed to international connections than many other countries."