Description
Supply chains are frequently characterised by vast inequalities between actors. Their dominant governance mechanisms, such as corporate social responsibility programmes, fail to deliver purported benefits to workers who often experience low pay, poor conditions and abuse of rights. Yet alternative supply chain governance initiatives may present a way forward for the future promotion of worker rights. This paper draws on field-based qualitative research on a worker-driven social responsibility programme in Florida’s tomato industry, a global framework agreement and a conventional CSR programme, both in Costa Rica’s banana industry, to explore the potential for alternatives to CSR to address exploitation and the abuse of worker rights. Empirical, comparative analysis of these cases leads to a conceptualisation of supply chain governance as a site at which the interests of labour and capital come into tension with one another in contemporary capitalist production, entailing a struggle over power and the distribution of resources in favour of their respective interests. Alternatives to CSR hold the potential to both overhaul and reproduce the poor conditions and abuse of rights associated with ineffective CSR, though this may entail compromises, conflicts and co-optation.
