I’m off to the European University Institute in Florence for a conference on Transnational Business Governance 
Interactions: Theoretical Approaches, Empirical Contexts and Practitioners’ Perspectives.
I’ll be talking about my draft paper that explores how norms of behaviour emerge within the debates and contestations between multi-stakeholder organizations concerned with supply chain labour practices, including the Fair Labor Association, Workers’ Rights Consortium, Fair Wear Foundation, the Ethical Trading Initiative and Social Accountability International. All of these organizations attempt to influence how multinational corporations manage labour practices within their global supply chains. They all have designed model codes of conduct, and offer various ways of monitoring compliance and reporting on results. In fact, they compete with one another for credibility and support. My paper explores how that competition takes place, and how some standards emerge and become embedded new norms through that contestation.
I focus in particular on the development of the “living wage” standard from a radical outlier in the labour codes debates to its current position as a normal expectation. All of the major multistakeholder codes require some form of compliance with a living wage standard, except the Fair Labor Association, but even the FLA is about to adopt the standard into its revised code. At York University, where I work, a new vendor code was just adopted that requires all companies supplying York branded items to pay their workers a “living wage”. That that living wage is is not explained, but to give you an idea, the Centre for Policy Alternatives recently pegged the living wage for Toronto at $16.60 per hour. The minimum wage is $10.25. If that calculation is accepted, this means that the York Code requires Ontario suppliers to pay their workers more than the legal minimum wage.
Do you think the suppliers from Ontario on this list are complying with this requirement? How do you think York is checking? How does York know if a supplier from India or China is paying a “living wage”? Do you think that York should be dictating the price of labour to its suppliers? These are the sorts of questions I’m looking at this project.
Won’t be posting much in the next week. Hopefully I’ll be able to get around: there are threatening public transit strikes in Italy and Air Canada strikes in Canada. The joy of labour relations. Ciao.
