BEERG: Annual ILO Meeting to Explore Legally Binding Conventions Applicable to Global Supply Chains

In an extended, thought-provoking comment in its Global Labor Newsletter this week, BEERG sets the stage for the upcoming annual International Labor Organization meeting, in which the global unions and the NGOs "have turned up in force to press the case for legally-binding, see you in court, new conventions."  BEERG reports that the Clean Clothes Campaign is seeking a way "to replicate and implement initiatives such as the Bangladesh Accord by establishing an institutional framework that enables cross-border negotiations and develops effective remedy and prevention programmes without waiting for a scandal that triggers them, and with the ability to scale up; and establish an enforcement framework that can ensure those programmes will be legally binding and therefore can be implemented and sustained."  The International Trade Union Confederation has a similar goal, "emphasi[zing] the power of social dialogue, including a framework for truly transnational bargaining.  This could push industrial relations finally into the 21st century."  Yet, as BEERG notes:

Who is to do the negotiations?  Let's be blunt about this.  For the most part, unions are non-existent throughout global supply chains.  Five percent membership here.  Ten percent there.  At most.  The idea that western-based global union federations are going to negotiate with western-based multinationals about wages and conditions in emerging markets is a non-runner. . . . And the unions have no leverage to force them to do so.  And, even if they had, host governments would take it as an affront to their sovereignty that outside parties were determining such matters.  That the Bangladesh government has already said that the Accord will not last beyond 2018 says it all.