Voice and silence in Global Value Chains

Sarah Kaine and Emmanuel Josserand

Workers lives in GVCs – an example

Voice and silence in Global Value Chains

• The treatment of workers in Global Value Chains (GVCs) is attracting the increasing attention and efforts of NGOs, the ILO, unions and also business actors

• Given the complexity of GVC operations efforts of traditional labour regulation not keeping pace and unable to address the complexity

• Extant research has started to explore non-traditional regulation and labour governance gaps in GVCs, it has yet to comprehensively relate these perspectives to the attendant question of worker voice and silence.

• Understanding voice and silence in GVCs is key to effective multi-scalar strategies of collective resistance to the quasi-hegemonic power of MNCs.

Regimes of Global Labour Governance (Donaghey et al 2014: 240)

The governance gap continued (adapted from Donaghey et al 2014)

Customer Power

Labour power &state regulation

Production and sales in non-democratic developing countries

International and national brands(Supply chain ?)

Democratic countries

Brands in democratic countries

The governance gapaggravating factors

• National and international fragmentation

• Non-democratic countries

• Unskilled migrant labour

• Local brands - unbranded goods

FROM FRAGMENTATION TO VICARIOUS VOICE OR SILENCE

Silence and new forms of labour regulation• New forms of regulation have emerged: International

Framework Agreements (IFAs), Private Social Standards (PSS), and multiple-stakeholder campaigns

• Such regulation does not necessarily imply that workers’ voice will be heard in the GVC

• The voice that is loudest is that of Western customers –a vicarious manifestation of voice. May provoke some change in the GVC, but does not address the most patent gaps in labour governance (Malaysian example)

Vicarious voice and workers’ voice in GVC

• Local practices – wildcat strikes, community unionism …….But state structuring of ‘silence’ in many cases

• Persistent gap between distant/indirect/vicarious voicing of workers’ concerns and the emerging direct voice channelled through risky and fragile local practices.

FROM VICARIOUS VOICE TO WORKERS’ VOICE, RESEARCH CONSOLIDATION

• Need to experiment with and document local organising attempts, (echoing Riisgard and Hammer (2011)) – to overcome weaknesses of IFAs and PSSs by embedding more direct voice

• Further research into collaboration between institutional actors and more agile civil society actors such as less institutionalized non-profits, informal networks and emerging activists or community union attempts to span the gaps created by the two-tiered fragmentation of production.

• Investigation of how workers’ and vicarious voices are expressed and how channels operate across these groups of actors.

• Examination of conflicting workers’ needs in different locations of the same GVCs, eg: migrant labour, workers in non-democratic countries.

Conclusion

• Need to move beyond the vicarious voice provided when Western morality and conscience are sufficiently affronted to provoke action.

• Prerequisite for the development of authentic local voice contributing to multi-scalar attempts to improve working conditions across the developing world.