Just Supply Chains

Joshua Cohen and Richard Locke plan to explore the conditions under which different strategies, either separately or in conjunction, might suceed in promoting a more fair global economy.

We focus our concerns about fairness on the three dimensions mentioned earlier: wages and work hours, working conditions that ensure the health and safety of workers, and basic rights, including the right to organize collectively. And we will consider these issues in connection with supply chains in agriculture, apparel, and electronics.

The meetings will include practitioners engaged in various institutional experiments (from firms, NGOs, labor ministries, international organizations) and scholars studying global supply chains, corporate responsibility, comparative and international political economy, and global distributive justice. Our hope is to create a setting in which scholars and practitioners alike can meet, speak openly about their experiences, and explore together how best to promote a shared goal of achieving just working conditions in global supply chains.

Our aim in the workshops is to explore three large questions:

1. What kinds of experiments and innovations are now underway in the worlds of private voluntary codes and audits, national level regulation, and global rule-making;
2. What are the results of these different efforts for wages, working conditions, and rights of association, and for more conventional measures of firm success;
3. Are there alternative ways to regulate firms in supply chains that might plausibly have greater success than current efforts?

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