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Most forced labour takes place in business contexts, yet the business logics of exploitation are rarely explored empirically. This gap relates to the lack of researchers in the field with specific expertise in business and management, as well as the methodological and logistical challenges with researching the business dynamics of forced labour. This Chapter will argue that we need to take the business of forced labour seriously if we are to understand and address it in a meaningful way. We propose an analytical framework that can be used to understand the business and organisational dynamics of forced labour. Drawing on our own research on forced labour’s business models and supply chains, we reflect on how business methodologies can be strengthened to overcome the substantive gaps that exist in our knowledge about how forced labour works as a business.

Private commercial relationships constitute significant practical challenges for researchers analysing issues of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), such as forced labour in global supply chains. The private nature of commercial relations means that freedom of information requests are not available. One way for researchers to study forced labour in global supply chains, therefore, is to use information made available by the corporations themselves. This Chapter draws on empirical legal research methods to explore the value of publicly available documents on how companies address CSR issues. It argues that, despite some limitations, it is possible to use data that is available on company websites such as codes of conduct, terms and conditions of purchase and nonfinancial reporting to assess business practices. These documents can complement both traditional doctrinal legal research of cases and statutes and research from other disciplines, thus providing new opportunities for research on forced labour in global supply chains.

This chapter canvasses a long-term vision for improving the lives of poor and precarious workers who work in informal conditions. It proposes a bold, transnational initiative that aims to promote a global living wage and regulate supply chains. The chapter puts forward three interrelated regulatory pathways out of informality. First, the promotion of Global Living Wages through a multilateral instrument such as an International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention or United Nations treaty, which would also establish an International Living Wage disputes mechanism for enforcement of these minima; second, the setting up of National Living Wage Tribunals empowered to hear disputes concerning non-payment of living wages due to supply chain dynamics and to hold parties in the supply chain responsible for non-payment; third, the fostering of local pathways out of informality.

This introductory Chapter provides an overview of the political, methodological, and ethical challenges of researching forced labour in the global economy tackled in this Volume. It argues that in spite of these challenges, researchers are pioneering fresh approaches to understanding the business of forced labour that are anchored in strong empirical methods, rather than outdated theoretical propositions or sensationalist newspaper headlines. This burgeoning and interdisciplinary body of research challenges conventional narratives about the nature and role of modern slavery. It reveals that rather than an individualised, randomly occurring human rights issue caused by the moral shortcomings and greed of unscrupulous employers, severe labour exploitation is a coherent and predictable feature of many sectors and regions within the global political economy. The methodological reflections contained within this Volume offer a resource for academics and practitioners seeking to understand forced labour, the factors that shape vulnerability to this phenomenon, and the variegated mechanisms through which businesses systemically profit from labour exploitation.

The cases of global injustice any of us has in mind when thinking about the requirements of justice condition our take on justice and responsibility. Chapter 1 provides two cases of injustice itself: garment worker labor rights struggles and the global food crisis. Throughout the book, the author refers back to specifics in these discussions. The empirical and conceptual complexity of these problems illustrates the kind of problem she thinks is most challenging for global justice and responsibility. She introduces other approaches to responsibility with which just responsibility has an affinity: Larry May’s shared moral responsibility, Hannah Arendt’s political and collective responsibility, and Iris Marion Young’s connected responsibility. A comprehensive discussion of how the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity takes responsibility for injustice illustrates the kinds of practices that are part of a political approach to taking responsibility for injustice itself.

Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s biggest electronics contract manufacturer of Apple, used the labour of 150,000 student interns – 15 per cent of its entire million-strong workforce in China – during the summer of 2010. This Chapter looks into the quasi-employment arrangements of student interns, who occupy an ambiguous space between being a student and a worker in Apple’s global supply chain. The incorporation of vocational school teachers into corporate management can strengthen control over students, who are in effect unfree labourers during their internships, which could last from three months to a year. While male and female student interns are required to do the same work as other employees, their intern labour is devalued. With the loss of their capacity to control the timing, location and training content of the internships, student-workers vent their pent-up anger and grievances in the capital accumulation process, in which their fundamental rights to labour and education are scarified.

Economic growth is a precondition for the improvement of living standards and lifetime possibilities for the “average” citizen of the developing world. Can recent performance be sustained into the future, decisively reversing the “great divergence” that has split the world into rich and poor countries since the nineteenth century? Developing countries will face stronger headwinds in the decades ahead, both because the global economy is likely to be significantly less buoyant than in recent decades and because technological changes are rendering manufacturing more capital- and skill-intensive. Desirable policies will continue to share features that have served successful countries well in the past, but growth strategies will differ in their emphasis. Ultimately, growth will depend primarily on what happens at home. The challenge is therefore to design an architecture that respects the domestic priorities of individual countries while ensuring that major cross-border spillovers and global public goods are addressed.

This chapter, which yanks the reader from mid-twentieth-century Detroit to early twenty-first-century Guangdong Province, recounts the author's discovery that the labor question can have many different configurations, especially when some of the most important and characteristic enterprises of our day are the big-box retailers, whose employee rolls and annual revenues now far outrank those of the largest manufacturing companies. It appears that the essence of the twenty-first-century labor question no longer resides at the point of production in a struggle between workers and the owners of the factories in which they labor. Instead, the site of value production is found at every link along a set of global supply chains, in which the manufacturer and the warehouse operator, the ports and the shipping companies, as well as the retailers and their branded vendors jockey for power and profit. In this disaggregated system, legal ownership of the forces of production has been divorced from operational control, making accountability for labor conditions diffuse and knowledge of the actual producers far from transparent.

The search for employment is one of the major drivers behind migration. Globalization processes have had profound impacts on the world’s labour markets, creating opportunities for some (through out-sourcing) while dislocating work for others. This global redistribution of labour is not motivated by concerns for the livelihoods of workers so much as by the pursuit of profits by transnationally liberated capital. Net effects include increases in precarious work, declines in labour’s share of global economic product, and a continuous ‘flexibilization’ of labour markets excused by competitive pressures. Such changes bring new health risks associated with insecurity for many and downwards pressure on wages for some. International policy discourse lauds efforts to improve social protection measures for affected workers, while the growing gap between productivity and wages is giving rise to a call for universal basic incomes to compensate for globalization’s victory of capital over labour.

Workers in developed economies have not been immune to the dynamics of global trade and economic liberalization that have stranded vulnerable workers in poorer countries. This chapter tracks the informalization of apparel production in Australia throughout the 1980s and 1990s, asking how national and international factors converged to leave a migrant group stranded, without the employment conditions and protections that Australia prided itself on providing to its working population. It then examines the subsequent attempts to re-formalize work by the creation of innovative legislation and ethical initiatives that add levers and regulatory agents. This study is important because Australia’s novel regulation combines market and non-market forms of regulation, with a successful ethical labelling system at the heart of the model.

For the majority of sub-Saharan Africa’s young population, the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative has translated as growth without jobs. While it may seem axiomatic that engagement with global markets forms part of the remedy to this malaise, it is far from evident that previous development pathways remain open. This chapter discusses the example of the cotton, textiles, and apparel sectors—sectors which have played a major role in the economic history of each of BRICS countries—currently seen as a conduit through which sub-Saharan Africa can generate labour-intensive growth. The sector is symptomatic of the continent’s development profile: low production yields; small manufacturing presence; persistence of poverty. The chapter endeavours to take a holistic approach combining global with local; supply side with demand side; technical with institutional; and contemporary with historical—and analyses how these drivers interact with dynamic loci of power that frame shifting rules of the game that govern sub-Saharan Africa countries’ entrance to the arena.

This chapter examines what it is about freedom makes it possible for poor people to embrace privatization and war. It focuses on a popular culture of freedom: commercial mushroom picking in the national forests of the US Pacific Northwest. It shows how political and entrepreneurial commitments to freedom are productively mixed at one margin of US society. At the heart of the discussion is the continuing importance of the US–Indochina War, and the conflicts that emerged from it, in shaping contemporary social forms. Most of the pickers are veterans or refugees from that time of war, and they carry landscapes of war wherever they go. It is argued that “popular neoliberalism” becomes possible as war dislocations draw people into risky entrepreneurial niches. The perverse political economy of global supply chains depends on the continual mobilization of labor for such niches.

This chapter introduces a further element to our review and discussion of economic–geographical thought surrounding globalization by building on the concept of “variegated capitalism” through a perspective focused on the firm. This approach focuses on the temporality and spatiality of uneven capitalist development across political economies, viewing capitalism in the singular, and more importantly, as a dynamic polymorphic process whose development is uneven and “variegated”. In this respect, capitalist variegation is understood as a more explicitly relational conception of variety, recognizing the strong and complex interdependencies present in global capitalist structuration and contingent institutional convergence among different so-called varieties of capitalism. As such, it provides a more nuanced appreciation of the place of firms in a global political–economic conjunction marked by the globalization of financial markets and the globalization of supply chains.

In the early 21st century, women still found in home-based labor a private solution to their need to earn income while looking after children and other family members. Even as the ILO embraced gender mainstreaming and gender-neutral standards (except for maternity), it re-inscribed care work as part of the problem of the woman worker on the eve of its 2019 Centennial. Building a new care economy emerged as the solution to winning equality and transforming paid household labor into decent work. To encourage women’s labor force participation, the ILO would remake the workplace through flexi-time and flexi-space. It continued to promulgate best practices for improving working life, adding assistance with monitoring global supply chains and encouraging corporate social responsibility. It debated a new instrument on gender violence and sexual harassment at work, including harms to LGBTQ people. Nonetheless, the unraveling of labor standards and the onslaught against worker rights spread conditions once associated with women in the Global South to men as well as women in the industrialized North. As the gig economy and computerization increasingly positioned the home as a site of commoditized work, economic justice in all worksites became bound ever more intimately to justice in the home.

This chapter explores the initial efforts by the Indian army to improve its transport system. Reforms were linked to a belief that mules might be a more appropriate pack animal to build the new transport scheme around. The problem, however, was that there were few mules in India. Donkey studs were imported from Europe to resolve this issue, but when the results were inadequate, the army turned to the Americas and East Asia in order to fulfill its mule requirements. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Indian Army had established a global supply chain for trafficking in mules and donkey studs.

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.