Estlund, Cynthia --- "Enforcement of Private Transnational Labor Regulation: A New Frontier in the Anti-Sweatshop Movement?" [2012] ELECD 496; in Cafaggi, Fabrizio (ed), "Enforcement of Transnational Regulation" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Enforcement of Transnational Regulation

Editor(s): Cafaggi, Fabrizio

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781003725

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: Enforcement of Private Transnational Labor Regulation: A New Frontier in the Anti-Sweatshop Movement?

Author(s): Estlund, Cynthia

Number of pages: 26

Extract:

8. Enforcement of private transnational
labor regulation: a new frontier in the
anti-sweatshop movement?
Cynthia Estlund


1. INTRODUCTION
Anti-sweatshop activists, now veterans in the corporate social responsibil-
ity (CSR) movement, have been working for decades to improve wages and
working conditions in the factories of the developing world, where most of
the world's clothing, toys, and electronics are now produced. While public
law, domestic and international, plays an important role in those efforts, its
focus is on developing mechanisms of private, voluntary regulation by the
large branded multinational corporations (MNCs or `lead firms') at the top
of the supply chains that link poor workers in the developing world to
affluent consumers in the developed world.1
Critics of those efforts abound. Some see a misguided assault on the
salutary flow of desperately needed capital to impoverished people and
communities.2 Others, including many trade unionists, view CSR as mean-
ingless at best and harmful at worst in its tendency to divert energy and
attention from the more useful projects of strengthening public enforce-
ment of labor standards and supporting independent trade unions.3 In the

1
MNCs' own employees' labor conditions may become a source of controversy.
But our focus here is the more complicated business of regulating labor conditions
in factories that are not operated by the MNCs, but that contract with them to
supply goods or components.
2
See, e.g., Nicholas D. Kristof, In Praise of the Maligned Sweatshop, N.Y.
Times (6/6/ ...