Fairtrade labour certification: the contested incorporation of plantations and workers

Fair trade seeks to promote the well-being and empowerment of farmers and workers in the Global South. This article traces the contested growth and configuration of Fairtrade International labour certification, providing a multifaceted and dynamic view of private regulation. I explain why Fairtrade International began certifying large enterprises and how its hired labour strategy has developed over time, illuminating fair trade’s move from peasant to plantation sectors, stakeholder involvement in shaping the growth of Fairtrade labour certification, the internal and external balancing of farmer and worker concerns, and major innovations in Fairtrade’s ‘New Workers Rights Strategy’. My findings challenge the claim that recent market mainstreaming explains the rise of labour certification within fair trade and the more general argument that private regulatory programmes founded to foster empowerment evolve over time to prioritise a logic of control. As I document, Fairtrade International has recently moved to bolster producer power within its organisation and labour rights within its certification programme. My analysis reveals the dynamic nature of private regulatory programmes and the potentially influential role of diverse stakeholders in shaping the priorities of Fairtrade and other labour-standards systems.     

Racing to the bottom: international trade without a social clause

Linking trade concessions to compliance with internationally recognised labour standards is referred to as a ‘social clause’. The social clause is usually depicted as causing division between the (rich) global North and the less-industrialised global South. This article shows, however, that there is diversity of opinion among the labour movements of the global South and that contemporary labour-intensive manufacturing pits countries of the South against one another. The article raises the possibility of a race to the bottom in labour standards, where workers cannot enjoy the fruits of growth because their employers and governments hold on to the competitive advantage of cheap labour. Consider competition between China and Mexico for the North American apparel market: despite enormous employment growth apparel workers have not enjoyed wage growth and their conditions are often appalling. The race to the bottom can be prevented by South–South agreement to honour labour standards.     

Who Suffers the Penalty?: A Panel Data Analysis of Earnings Gaps in Vietnam

In spite of its predominant economic weight in developing countries, little is known about the informal sector earnings structure compared to that of the formal sector. Taking advantage of the rich VHLSS dataset in Vietnam, in particular its three wave panel data (2002, 2004, 2006), we assess the magnitude of various formal–informal earnings gaps while addressing heterogeneity at three different levels: the worker, the job (wage employment vs. self-employment) and the earnings distribution. We estimate fixed effects and quantile regressions to control for unobserved individual characteristics. Our results suggest that the informal sector earnings gap highly depends on the workers’ job status and on their relative position in the earnings distribution. Penalties may in some cases turn into premiums. By comparing our results with studies in other developing countries, we draw conclusions highlighting Vietnam’s labour market specificity.     

Walk the Talk: Private Sustainability Standards in the Ugandan Coffee Sector

We investigate the welfare and productivity implications of private sustainability standards in the coffee sector in Uganda. We use cross-sectional household survey data and an instrumental variable method with instruments that pass weak identification and over-identification restrictions. We find that triple Utz-Rainforest Alliance-4C certification increases income, and land and labour productivity, and reduces poverty. Double Fairtrade-Organic certification is found to be associated with higher producer prices but results in lower land and labour productivity, and thereby fails to increase producer income and contribute to poverty reduction. We conclude that private sustainability standards do not always live up the expectations they create towards consumers.     

Privatised Firms and Labour Outcomes in Emerging Markets

A recent large firm-level dataset is analysed to compare labour indicators of privatised, private, and public firms around the world, in particular differences relating to wages, benefits, labour composition, education and training, unionisation, and quality of management. We find that labour productivity and the ratio of permanent to temporary workers increase after privatisation.     

Linking Organizational Climate to Work Engagement: A Study in the Healthcare Sector

Using a two-level structural equation approach, this article investigates the links between organizational climate and work engagement in a sample of public hospitals in Italy. Drawing from the Job Demands-Resources model, the model posits a positive association between work engagement and a climate promoting worker’s autonomy, empowerment, and well-being, whereas it suggests that a climate based on efficiency and goal attainment is not favorable for engagement. Results support the hypotheses and suggest that performance based models implemented in recent years as part of public sector reforms are not conducive to engaged workers. Implications for research on work engagement in the public sector and for public management are drawn.     

Can a developing democracy benefit from labour repression? Evidence from Sri Lanka

While a growing body of academic literature casts doubt on the wisdom of authoritarian responses to labour in developing democracies, few empirical studies demonstrate the adverse effects of excluding organised labour from the policy arena or repressing trade unions in the industrial relations arena. This paper draws on the recent history of state–labour relations in Sri Lanka to help fill this gap. Beginning in the late 1970s, the Sri Lankan government adopted a labour-repressive export-oriented strategy of development. The author shows how the repression of private sector unions during this period destroyed the legitimacy of traditional left unions and the structure of institutionalised bargaining that was in place prior to Sri Lanka's authoritarian period. This erosion of the system of institutionalised bargaining eventually led workers to shift their support to more radical, ‘new left’ unions and culminated in a wave of extreme and violent forms of protest that chased away much needed foreign direct investment. The chaotic consequences of the labour repression suggest two primary conclusions: (a) that prior democratic mobilisation may make labour repression untenable over the long term; and (b) that repression may backfire, creating bursts of highly visible and destabilising protest that undermine the developmental objectives of neoliberal reforms.     

Household Entrepreneurship and Social Networks: Panel Data Evidence from Vietnam

Using a unique panel of household businesses for Vietnam, this paper sheds light on the links between households’ and entrepreneurs’ social networks and business performance. We address two related questions. The first question asks if we can find evidence of a differentiated effect of employment of members of the family versus hired workers on the business performance. A second question tackles the respective effects of various dimensions of social networks on business technical efficiency. The hypothesis is that, beyond the channel of labour productivity, entrepreneurs that are confronted with an unfavourable social environment may produce less efficiently and realise a lower output than what could be possible with the same amount of resources. We find evidence of a marginal productivity differential between family and hired labour and highlight results consistent with the presence of adverse social network effects faced by households running a business, in particular ethnic minorities. We also stress the importance of professional networks for successful entrepreneurship.     

ASEAN’s governance of migrant worker rights

Temporary migrant workers in Southeast Asia are subject to various abuses in recruitment, work and repatriation. A decade ago ASEAN governments committed to developing an Instrument governing migrant worker rights, but a series of deadlocks have stymied this agreement. Prevailing accounts explain this impasse as the consequence of incompatible national interests, norms of non-interference and consensus, a lack of institutional capacity and the limits of rights advocacy in ASEAN. Conversely, utilising a political economy framework, this article demonstrates this impasse in regional governance reflects societal-level conflicts among migrant workers, civil society organisations, business groups and state-based actors, generated by the latter’s adoption of migrant labour as both a livelihood and development strategy.     

Street‐level bureaucrats,rule‐following and tenure: How assessment tools are used at the front line of the public sector

Studies on street‐level bureaucracy examine actions of frontline workers within the public sector. In this literature, there is a lack of evidence on how job tenure affects how frontline workers respond to formal steering. We contribute to prior research by studying the nationwide introduction of an assessment support tool to be used by caseworkers to assess clients’ needs under the Swedish active labour market policy. We examine the potential effects of tenure on how caseworkers use this tool. The empirical analysis is based on quantitative and qualitative data. We show that as tenure increases, street‐level bureaucrats, especially male caseworkers, tend to act in accordance with policy signals to a lesser extent. The qualitative analysis shows that this pattern can partly be explained by the fact that increasing experience with meeting clients face to face increases caseworkers’ perceived confidence and skills.     

How Resilient are Labour Markets to Natural Disasters? The Case of the 1998 Bangladesh Flood

Natural disasters devastate economies as they impede capital accumulation. The resilience of labour markets is crucial for the poor who rely on labour to reduce risk. We evaluate how the 1998 ‘flood of the century’ affected wages in Bangladesh. We find short-term declines in agricultural and non-agricultural wages. Agricultural workers who moved towards non-agricultural employment to cope benefitted through a lower percentage reduction in short-term wages. Endowed with human capital, salaried workers were unable to mitigate income risk. Extending the eligibility of credit access or relief programmes may preserve local businesses and their employees in the years following a flood.     

Chinese Eastern Industrial Zone in Ethiopia: unpacking the enclave

Abstract

This paper examines China’s engagement with Africa through economic zones (EZs). It moves beyond the conceptualisation of EZs as undifferentiated enclaves of foreign investment to a dynamic perspective on the locally negotiated process of zone development. Such a perspective entails critical unpacking of the specific zone regime to understand the diverse and evolving relationships among different state and non-state actors. Drawing upon empirical research on the Eastern Industrial Zone (EIZ) in Ethiopia, we explore the complex process of learning and adaptation by government, developers, investors, and workers throughout the development of a zone regime, with specific attention to capital–labour and expatriate–local relations. We find that despite the EIZ being a state-level cooperation project, private Chinese developers work diligently with the Ethiopian government to improve the institutional support for EZs. Chinese investors also collectively generate a management regime to enhance their overseas operational capacity and experiment with various tactics to transform local recruits into an industrial workforce. Local workers, with limited protection by official labour unions, turn to individual- and group-based agency to improve their working conditions. Despite the momentum created by multiple stakeholders, there are concerns regarding the long-term contributions of EZs to engender sustained industrial transformation and skills development.     

Is There a Social Kuznets Curve? The Influence of Labour Standards on Inequality

This study empirically investigates the impact of core labour standards on income inequality for a range of 90 countries from 1990–2000. A synthetic index of labour standards is computed by means of a Multiple Correspondence Analysis and no significant correlation is found with the Gini index. One of the reasons pointed out is that the effective implementation of core labour standards depends on the quality of the country's political and legal systems. Using instrumental variables in a TSLS model, we found an inverse ‘U’ shaped curve between the new endogenous index of core labour standards and income inequality.     

Understanding the Complexities of Private Standards in Global Agri-Food Chains as They Impact Developing Countries

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of private standards governing food safety, food quality and environmental and social impacts of agri-food systems has raised concerns about the effects on developing countries, as well as the governance of agri-food value chains more broadly. It is argued that current debates have been ‘clouded’ by a failure to recognise the diversity of private standards in terms of their institutional form, who develops and adopts these standards and why. In particular, there is a need to appreciate the close inter-relationships between public regulations and private standards and the continuing ways in which private standards evolve.     

Joint Land Certification Programmes and Women’s Empowerment: Evidence from Ethiopia

This paper connects two important development policy issues: women’s empowerment and land certification. We use propensity score matching to study the impact of the Ethiopian joint land registration and certification programme on women’s empowerment. Data are collected using surveys and a field experiment, enabling construction of complementary indices for empowerment. Our main result is that joint land certification has significant effects on women’s empowerment, particularly on dimensions that indicate female participation and roles outside the home. This result is robust to various sensitivity checks and alternative model specifications.     

“Elusive natives”: escaping colonial control in the Leverville oil palm concession,Belgian Congo, 1923–1941

Throughout the inter-war period, in the Belgian Congo's largest oil palm concession, thousands of colonised workers and their families managed to escape administrative surveillance and authority through schemes of dissimulation and elusiveness. The shared nature of sovereignty imposed on this territory, distributed between private and public agents, along with a sparse territorial occupation, left extended areas unsupervised by Western actors and indirect rulers. In these remote places, palm-fruit cutters, with the blessing of their employers, could settle without having to answer to authority. After exposing the specific policies enforced in the concession, this paper highlights how natives were able to maximise their autonomy regarding both the production imperatives imposed upon them and their obligations to the public authorities. The last part details the administration's consecutive failures in its endeavours to tackle workers’ elusiveness. The conclusion challenges the notion of “resistance” as an appropriate concept to recover the fruit cutters’ adaptation to the imperatives of colonial rule and large-scale manual labour within the rainforest.     

Women’s Empowerment and Wellbeing: Evidence from Africa

We use household survey data from Senegal to model the effects of empowerment within the home on married women’s wellbeing. The estimated effects of empowerment are at least as large as more conventional development indicators, such as household income. The size of the empowerment effect is robust to alternative estimation techniques, including an Instrumental Variables estimator.     

Sewing their way up the social ladder? Paths to social mobility and empowerment among Sri Lanka’s global factory workers

Studies on global assembly line workers showcase how gains women make are counteracted by physical, social and psychological problems stemming from long hours of working, low wages and the precarity of work. Few studies analyse these workers’ experiences after they terminate factory work. Using life histories collected over 12 years and in-depth interviews, this article highlights the different paths former workers pursue to achieve social mobility and identifies key work and life experiences that contribute to social mobility and empowerment. I argue that contrary to popular belief global factory work does lead to forms of social mobility and empowerment.     

AM I A PUBLIC SERVANT OR AM I A PATHOGEN? PUBLIC MANAGERS' SECTOR COMPARISON OF WORKER ABILITIES

Political rhetoric in the United States is rife with condemnations of public sector workers. The assertion that public sector workers are less creative, talented, or autonomous than those working in businesses pervades in both academic studies and public opinions. Facing constant criticisms, do public managers also perceive that government workers are less able than their private sector peers? If so, and more importantly, does the perceived inferiority of worker abilities shake their confidence, thereby undermining their work attitudes? The present study employs social comparison theory to answer these questions. Based on state government managers' responses in the United States, the results indicate that a clear majority of public managers perceive public sector inferiority with respect to worker creativity, talent, and autonomy. The findings also show that perceived inferiority is related to lower job satisfaction, job involvement, and pride in working for the current organization. Based on the findings, we provide suggestions to both researchers and practitioners.