(Anti-)trafficking for Labor Exploitation in Romania: A Labor Perspective

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jing Hiah
Keyword(s):  
Labor Exploitation

Rules without Rights

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Bartley
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Global Supply Chains ◽  
Transnational Governance ◽  
Private Regulation ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The World

Activists have exposed startling forms of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, leading many large retailers and brands to adopt standards for fairness and sustainability. This book is about the idea that transnational corporations can push these rules through their global supply chains, and in effect, pull factories, forests, and farms out of their local contexts and up to global best practices. For many scholars and practitioners, this kind of private regulation and global standard-setting can provide an alternative to regulation by territorially bound, gridlocked, or incapacitated nation states, potentially improving environments and working conditions around the world and protecting the rights of exploited workers, impoverished farmers, and marginalized communities. But can private, voluntary rules actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world being made into sustainable ecosystems and decent workplaces? Can global norms remake local orders? This book provides striking new answers by comparing the private regulation of land and labor in democratic and authoritarian settings. Case studies of sustainable forestry and fair labor standards in Indonesia and China show not only how transnational standards are implemented “on the ground” but also how they are constrained and reconfigured by domestic governance. Combining rich multi-method analyses, a powerful comparative approach, and a new theory of private regulation, this book reveals the contours and contradictions of transnational governance.

Modern Slavery and Supply Chain Transparency

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve New
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Weak Response ◽  
Modern Slavery ◽  
Labor Exploitation

The scourge of modern slavery has led to legislation in various countries requiring firms to engage in a particular form of supply chain transparency. However, these regulatory initiatives have been widely perceived to be, by themselves, a weak response to such a serious challenge. This chapter argues that assessment of these initiatives hinges on the interpretation of modern slavery itself: Are extreme forms of labor exploitation aberrations of an otherwise blameless system, or are they intrinsic to the functioning of contemporary global capitalism? If the latter, then new types of transparency might be needed that go beyond firms reporting on their policies and efforts. The chapter introduces the idea of interrogational transparency as a mechanism by which civil society actors (including consumers, activists, and researchers) can develop accountability dialogues with powerful corporations. To illustrate these points, the chapter examines emergent patterns of transparency within the food giant Nestlé.

scholarly journals Reversing Channels and Unsettling Binaries: Rethinking Migration and Agrarian Change under Expanded Border and Immigration Enforcement

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 228
Author(s):  
Richard L. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Central America ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Agrarian Change ◽  
Immigration Enforcement ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Agrarian Studies ◽  
Political Ecologies ◽  
Migrant Groups

Unauthorized migration under global regimes of border and immigration enforcement has become more risky and costly than ever. Despite the increasing challenges of reaching, remaining in, and remitting from destination countries, scholarship exploring the implications of migration for agricultural and environmental change in migrant-sending regions has largely overlooked the prevalent experiences and consequences of “failed” migration. Drawing from recent fieldwork in Central America with deportees, this paper demonstrates how contemporary migration at times reverses the “channels” of agrarian change in migrant-sending regions: instead of driving remittance inflow and labor loss, migration under contemporary enforcement can result in debt and asset dispossession, increased vulnerability, and heightened labor exploitation. Diverse migration outcomes under expanded enforcement also reveal a need to move beyond the analytical binary that emphasizes differentiations between migrant and non-migrant groups while overlooking the profound socioeconomic unevenness experienced among migrants themselves. With grounding in critical agrarian studies, feminist geographies, and emerging political ecologies of migration, this paper argues that increased attention to the highly dynamic and diverse lived experiences of migration under expanded enforcement stands to enhance our understanding of the multiple ways in which contemporary out-migration shapes livelihoods and landscapes in migrant-sending regions.

Female Victims of Labor Exploitation Vis-à-Vis Labor Courts in the Southern Tamil Nadu, India

2017 ◽  
pp. 171-181
Author(s):  
R. Rochin Chandra ◽  
K. Jaishankar
Keyword(s):  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Secondary Victimization ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Bonded Labor ◽  
Subsequent Effect ◽  
Legal Procedures

The exploitation of young female workers is rampant in the spinning and textile units of southern Tamil Nadu, India, under the notorious ‘Sumangali Scheme', which has features similar to bonded labor. Until now, an increasing number of studies have been conducted to examine the characteristics of this abusive scheme, including the patterns of victimization and its subsequent effect on the physical health of sumangali workers. Yet, very little is known as to how legal procedures, and the roles or actions of legal actors within industrial courts, commonly known as labor courts, impacts the emotional life and psychological well being of these female laborers. In this chapter, we claim that sumangali victims often experience ‘secondary victimization' as a result of their contact with labor courts, and most often, due to their relative failure to access labor courts. We aim to address these issues from TJ perspectives and provide suitable solutions that may reduce the incidence of secondary victimization (among the sumangali victims).

Community-Based Organizations and the Narrative of Resistance

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-114
Author(s):  
Erin M. Kamler
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Community Based Organizations ◽  
Rehabilitation Programs ◽  
Migrant Community ◽  
Migrant Laborers ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Female Migrant

In this chapter, I discuss migrant community-based organizations (CBOs) operating in Thailand that work to combat labor exploitation in wholly different ways. Run by ethnic women and operating “below the radar” of the anti-trafficking movement, these organizations address the issue of trafficking from a unique perspective. Rather than pressuring sex workers to enter “rehabilitation” programs, these groups operate in solidarity with female migrants, fostering participatory, rather than top-down approaches to combating trafficking. As a result, these CBOs engage an ethic of “horizontalism”—an organizational approach to social change that is based on partnership, trust, and mutual understanding between the organization and its beneficiaries. I show how, through offering female migrant laborers positive alternatives to the tropes of victimization commonly used by anti-trafficking NGOs, their work is generating more productive results.

The Colonial Mosaic of Indigenous New Spain, 1519–1821

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kellogg
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Core Region ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Cultural Survival ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Political Economic

From a geographically, environmentally, linguistically, and ethnically highly variable Mesoamerica, Spain created a core region within her American territories. But for New Spain’s indigenous inhabitants (Mexica or Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya), despite experiencing demographic catastrophe, political and religious subjugation, and labor exploitation during and after conquest, native cultural patterns and agency influenced the reshaping of governance and community (the latter into pueblos de indios), economy, and spiritual and social life during the period of colonial rule. Because environments, indigenous languages, patterns of political, economic, and spiritual organization, ways of structuring family life, varieties of cultural expression, and forms of interrelationships with Spaniards varied so much, indigenous people did not experience a single New Spain. Instead, a multiplicity of New Spains emerged. These indigenous New Spains would play different roles during the independence period, which led to a protracted struggle, further impoverishment, and growing isolation in the new nations of Mesoamerica but cultural survival as well.

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