Back to Fundamentals: Organizing, Collective Bargaining and Promotion of a Decent Work Framework in Global Supply Chains

The Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh in April 2013 brought to the attention of the global community the appalling working conditions experienced by workers in global supply chains (GSCs). Taking place just a week before International Workers' Day - which on 1 May each year commemorates the Haymarket massacre of 1886 in Chicago - Rana Plaza, where more than 1,100 workers perished, put the question of the sustainability of supply chains at the top of the international agenda, as for instance when the German Presidency of the G7 in 2015 adopted it as a priority issue. It is therefore timely that a tripartite discussion of decent work in global supply chains is on the agenda of the ILO's 105th International Labour Conference in 2016.Other recent tragedies in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Pakistan remind us that the audit-focused social responsibility model adopted by most companies is inadequate even for addressing highly visible issues of health and safety. Unilateral action by companies is insufficient; decent working conditions in global supply chains must be built on sound labour relations. A constitutive element of decent work is the freedom of workers to express their opinions, to organize and to engage in collective bargaining. These rights have to be guaranteed throughout all the stages of GSCs.The role of the symposiums organized by the ILO's Bureau for Workers' Activities (ACTRAV) is to capture, analyse and anticipate major changes and challenges affecting the world of work, in most cases through analysing organizational and technological transformations that have had an impact on the distribution of labour, its quality and the consequent labour relations. Hie upcoming symposium. Decent Work in Global Supply Chains, will also try to capture these challenges.Well before the term "global value chains" came into use in the mid1990s, the labour movement had already experienced a historic change at the end of the 1970s and even more intensively in the 1980s. It was a change of paradigm, where "paradigm" means a change in the way production is organized.For the first time ever, technology made it possible to fragment the production cycle and disperse it through globally organized systems of production and in the interest of maximizing the profit of enterprises. Production systems moved to regions where cheap and non-unionized labour was available. Labour conditions were heavily affected, depriving workers of the high standards that had been previously achieved in industrialized countries.The global production chains and networks that were developed in this context completely redefined the composition of the workforce and the employment relationship worldwide. The spread of technological innovation and the relative decline of costs in transportation, telecommunications, information technology and automation enabled multinational enterprises (MNEs) to fragment and relocate single units of the production cycle. The classic self-contained plant was broken up into sub-units spread amongst different locations and territories. Production was de-territorialized, with new, highly mobile plants that had few linkages to the local backyard and were mainly attracted by incentives offered by territories and local communities competing with each other.This process has led to a "race to the bottom" where national and local governments create artificial and unsustainable comparative advantages by lowering labour standards, slashing welfare provisions and granting tax exemptions. Under this new pattern of production, flexible/mobile/global enterprises are able to modify their structures and functions rapidly through the relocation of production units and the extensive use of outsourcing and subcontracting in GSCs.Already in the 1990s, ACTRAV was working along three main dimensions related to globalization: trade, production and finance, and the overreaching challenge of governance on the labour side. …