Professor Secunda Reviews Doorey's Article on Transnational Domestic Labor Law on Jotwell

My thanks to Professor Paul Secunda of Marquette Law School for reading and taking the time to write a thoughtful review (er, critique) of a paper I published last year in  the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law.  My paper is available for free download on my SSRN page.   The paper is called “In Defense of Transnational Domestic Labor Regulation”. In it, I set out the arguments for and against governments in Canada and the United States using domestic regulation to try and influence labour practices in foreign states, including the economically developing states of the Global South.  Ultimately, I conclude that such an approach can be a useful to the challenge of improving labour practices in global supply chains.  However, the laws need to be carefully designed with the objective of empowering workers in those foreign countries.
Professor Secunda’s review was just published on Jotwell’s Worklaw webpage, and is available here. You can read his review, which is relatively short.  In the end, he makes the not unreasonable assertion that my proposals are too optimistic, including the benefits I attribute to “private labor regulation”, the work done by NGOs, unions, journalists, and activists of all stripes targeting poor working conditions in developing countries.  Paul observes too that perhaps North Americans should get their own acts together rather than focus on working conditions abroad, noting that working conditions in the apparel industry here are not much better than in developing countries and our governments don’t see to care very much about that.