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This chapter evaluates whether private regulation has brought about meaningful and sustainable improvements in labor standards and the lives of workers. It first looks at overall progress in terms of the number of violations recorded through more than twenty thousand reliable audits in multiple industries and countries over a seven-year period, before considering progress in specific factories that have been audited multiple times in India to see whether the improvement is being sustained. It appears reasonable to assume that a factory that is audited multiple times over a three-year period will register improvements (in terms of having fewer violations) after each audit. The data for these two examinations were provided by AUDCO, a global auditing company. The chapter then explores progress in specific factories, with data from the Better Work program. Finally, it examines the specific case of the supply chain of a global home products retailer, in which the factories have demonstrated remarkable progress in compliance over a short time frame.

Transnational private regulation has brought reforms to forests and factories but rarely of an empowering or transformative kind. This chapter draws out normative implications of the research in this book and highlights paths toward improvement. While not dispensing with supply-chain scrutiny altogether, the chapter calls for revising the rating of corporate responsibility, re-centering the state, and shifting toward “place-conscious” transnational governance. Some elements of this approach can already be seen in a new transnational timber legality regime, which has the potential to overcome the limits of private sustainability standards. The chapter explains the rise of this regime and considers the possibilities for extending the legality framework to labor.

Chapter 7 explores the formalisation of the Cambodian garment industry and the factors that have shaped and constrained the effectiveness of the combination of the US–Cambodia Bilateral Textile Agreement and the International Labour Organization’s Better Factories Project. Unlike the Mathadi Boards examined in Chapter 4, a great deal has been written about efforts to improve working standards in the Cambodian garment industry. The Chapter makes two important interventions in the already abundant literature on Better Factories Cambodia. Firstly, it focuses on the role of the trade agreement that led to the establishment of Better Factories Cambodia, as preferential treatment in trade played a critical part in encouraging investment in formal enterprises. It argues that trade incentives were just as important as the BFC in improving the labour standards of participating enterprises. Secondly, it examines the initiative in the context of Cambodia’s political economy showing how the Hun Sen government has used the initiative to its advantage and avoided investing in its own labour inspectorate. For this reason, the chapter asks whether Better Factories Cambodia has become a functional rival to the state labour inspectorate.