Grounding Labour Governance In Global Production Networks

Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have invested growing hope in transnational labour governance initiatives that draw lead firms and unions into binding, enforceable commitments including the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Garment and Textile Industry, and Action, Collaboration, Transformation (ACT). These initiatives promise to address the decent work deficits that national institutions in producer countries have failed to resolve. Yet their capacity to deliver durable gains remains contested. Whether they gain traction depends not just on their global design but on how they are received, interpreted, resisted, and remade by national actors.

This stream invites papers that examine how labour governance in global production networks is grounded in specific national and workplace contexts. We welcome theoretically ambitious and empirically grounded contributions from any region, sector or methodological tradition that speak to this topic, including those that challenge prevailing assumptions about where power lies and whose agency matters in the governance of global production. Topics of particular interest include the agency of producer-country actors; conditions under which worker-driven and brand-backed initiatives succeed or fail; and their interaction with other transnational regulatory instruments (for example, Global Framework Agreements). We are especially eager to accommodate contributions that trace implementation over time, attend to factory-level industrial relations, or that compare trajectories across different countries. We also welcome papers that interrogate the broader conceptual foundations of the field.