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PurposeWorker welfare and modern slavery within the fashion industry remain a key supply chain challenge for many retailers, consumers, governments and advocacy groups. Yet, despite publicised worker-welfare violations, many fashion retailers continue to post record sales and profits, indicating that consumer concern does not always translate at the cash register. Research has shown that worker welfare is a less salient area of concern for fashion consumers, and the aim of this research is to investigate the reasons why this may be the case.Design/methodology/approachDue to the exploratory nature of the research, a qualitative methodology was deemed the most appropriate. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with Australian fast-fashion consumers to investigate the underlying reasons worker-welfare violations are less likely to elicit pro-social consumer behavioural change and are a less salient area of concern.FindingsThis study found that consumers perceive worker-welfare concerns at both a proximal and cultural distance to themselves, and therefore struggle to connect with the issues associated with modern slavery. Additionally, there was an underlying social consensus that exploitative practices are an accepted part of the fast-fashion supply chain to ensure the continuation of low-cost clothing. Despite an underlying awareness of exploitative practices and acknowledgement that modern slavery is ethically wrong, other consumer values often influenced purchase behaviour and the level of concern expressed towards garment workers.Originality/valueThis is the first study to apply psychological distance in a fast-fashion context to better understand consumer perceptions towards modern slavery. Responding to calls for further research into ethical consumption of apparel, this study develops an in-depth understanding of the reasons why worker welfare is a less salient area of concern for fast-fashion consumers. Extending on current literature, this study qualitatively investigates consumer sentiment towards worker welfare, identifying the greatest barriers to consumers' levels of concern. In addition to a theoretical contribution to the fashion, ethics and business literature, this article provides key insight to guide practice.

Brennan and Magness (J Bus Ethics 152:53–71, 2018, 2019) argue that adjuncts are not exploited. We are sympathetic to some of their points. We agree, for example, that certain ways in which adjuncts are compared to sweatshop workers are offensive. For, as Brennan and Magness point out, there are many respects in which adjuncts are much better off than sweatshop workers. However, we show that the core insights of their paper are compatible with the view that adjuncts are exploited. Furthermore, their more general views about exploitation expressed in Cracks in the Ivory Tower actually lend support to the claim that adjuncts are exploited.

How could it be wrong to exploit – say, by paying sweatshop wages – if the exploited party benefits? How could it be wrong to do something gratuitously bad – like giving to a wasteful charity – if that is better than permissibly doing nothing? Joe Horton argues that these puzzles, known as the Exploitation Problem and All or Nothing Problem, have no unified answer. I propose one and pose a challenge for Horton’s take on the Exploitation Problem.

While the literature on anti‐sweatshop campaigns has empirically rejected their negative impact on employment, this study shows that anti‐sweatshop activism had a negative impact on employment for multinational companies in Indonesia. This result suggests that the prior findings are a result of disregarding the differences in some dimensions of firm characteristics between the treatment and control groups.

Alessandra Mezzadri, The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), xii + 246 pp.

Mezzadri, Alessandra. 2017: The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 258 pp. £75. ISBN: 9781107116962 (Hardback).

Production in sweatshops entails an elevated risk of occupational injury and sickness due to accidents and exposure to dangerous working conditions. As most sweatshop locations lack basic social security systems, health problems have severe consequences for affected workers. Against this background, this article considers what obligations employers of sweatshop labor have to their workers, and how they should meet them. Based on core libertarian concepts, it shows that they are morally responsible for health problems caused by their management decisions, that they should compensate affected workers, and that they must prevent potentially irreversible health problems. In line with Nozick’s contractarian method, the article further argues that these obligations should be implemented through a compulsory employment injury insurance system. Such a system would impose industry-wide health and safety standards, in contrast to the view that libertarianism excludes any labor regulation for the protection of workers, as an illegitimate interference in voluntary labor contracts.

Why act when the effects of one’s act are negligible? For example, why boycott sweatshop or animal products if doing so makes no difference for the better? According to recent proposals, one may still have a reason to boycott in order to avoid complicity or participation in harm. Julia Nefsky has argued that accounts of this kind suffer from the so-called “superfluity problem,” basically the question of why agents can be said to participate in harm if they make no difference to it. This paper develops and responds to Nefsky’s challenge.

Whether an action is morally right depends upon the alternative acts available to the agent. Actualists hold that what an agent would actually do determines her moral obligations. Possibilists hold that what an agent could possibly do determines her moral obligations. Both views face compelling criticisms. Despite the fact that actualist and possibilist assumptions are at the heart of seminal arguments in business ethics, there has been no explicit discussion of actualism and possibilism in the business ethics literature. This paper has two primary goals. First, it aims to rectify this omission by bringing to light the importance of the actualism/possibilism debate for business ethics through questions about the ethics of sweatshops. Second, it aims to make some progress in the sweatshop debate by examining and defending an alternative view, hybridism, and describing the moral and practical implications of hybridism for the sweatshop debate.

Many routinely argue that while the wages of sweatshop workers in develop ing countries are extremely low, higher ones would imply more unemployment, and less social welfare. Some also add that sweatshop workers willingly accept their work ing conditions and thus that to interfere with those conditions would imply disrespect ing their individual choices. I believe these arguments are often grounded on empirical and normative assumptions that we ought to question. To do so, in part 1, I discuss some of the literature on the impact of minimum wages on employment levels both in general and in developing countries more specifically. The main conclusion I draw is that the literature portrays the trade-off between higher wages and employment as a very limited one. In part 2 I accept, for the sake of argument, that there might be signifi cant trade-offs between higher wages for sweatshop workers and how many of them are employed and ask what we ought to conclude if we assess the issue from a welfare per spective. I contend that no definitive conclusion can be drawn if we look at the implica tions for the welfare of society as a whole or sweatshop workers as a group unless further information and/or controversial premises are added to the picture. Finally, in part 3, I tackle the question of the moral relevance of the choices made by sweatshop workers. There, I argue that it is unclear that sweatshop workers prefer their current predica ment to one that involves higher wages coupled with a higher risk of being unemployed.

Much has been written about the ability of global value chains to “upgrade” and provide genuine development opportunities to low-skilled and unskilled suppliers and workers. Although there are some...

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness. – Karl Marx On 23 April 2013, a national strike or hartal , called by the official opposition to Bangladesh's ruling Awami League, was in its third day and traffic in Dhaka was lighter than usual. Factory owners were under pressure to get their employees back to work. Only a few weeks earlier, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association had reported that the combined cost of recent hartal s was estimated at $500 million. Workers were scarce throughout the area's industrial corridors, but could still be found in Rana Plaza, a towering structure that loomed over the Dhaka-Aricha Highway. There, 20 miles from Dhaka in the town of Savar Upsala, on the main artery connecting the city to its garment districts in the suburbs, some five thousand workers worked on eight cramped floors, making clothes for Walmart, Primark, Mango, Benetton, and other Western brands. Like a Bollywood villain, the man who owned the place could be seen driving around the town on his motorcycle, ‘as untouchable as a mafia don’, accompanied by several paid heavies. His name was Sohel Rana and he had acquired the land for his five-factory complex – which he humbly named after himself – through threats and intimidation, obtained building permits through bribes and graft, and constructed its top floors with no regard to government regulations. His position as Secretary of the local student chapter of the Awami League had enabled him to exercise control over local strikes and use them as bargaining chips. Rumours about guns and drug smuggling on the side had long been circulated. The sound of an explosion echoed through Sohel Rana's third floor. Terrified workers ran outside and were told by supervisors to leave early. An engineer, Abdur Razzak, was called in to inspect the deep cracks that now appeared in the concrete pillars and walls. He warned that the building was structurally unsound, declaring it ‘vulnerable’. But Rana would not accept this verdict. As reporters arrived on the scene, he gestured at the damage, explaining, ‘This is not a crack … the plaster on the wall is broken, nothing more.

The ongoing controversy about sweatshop labor has mainly focused on economic, on the one, and ethical aspects, on the other side. While proponents of sweatshop labor have argued that low wages would attract foreign investments, would create new workplace opportunities and thus improve economic welfare in less-developed countries, opponents of sweatshop labor argue that such treatment of laborers would violate their dignity, and they prompt western buyers to stop this kind of exploitation. However, the arguments in this debate are not new. As we will show, they can be traced back to the early “sweatshop” debate between social reformers and classical liberals in the 19th century. Interestingly, the 19th century debate identified sweatshop labor not as an industrial system but as a social phenomenon which becomes more likely when several social preconditions are fulfilled. It will be shown that the social preconditions identified in this debate determine working conditions till today and can be used to identify industries were sweatshop labor is more likely than in others—even in western countries.

It is widely thought that firms that employ workers in “sweatshop” conditions wrongfully exploit those workers. This claim has been challenged by those who argue that because companies are not obligated to hire their workers in the first place, employing them cannot be wrong so long as they voluntarily accept their jobs and genuinely benefit from them. In this article, I argue that we can maintain that at least many sweatshop employees are wrongfully exploited, while accepting the plausible claim at the core of many defenses of sweatshops, namely that engaging in a voluntary and mutually beneficial transaction with a person in need cannot constitute morally worse treatment of that person than doing nothing at all to benefit her. We can do this, I claim, by accepting that wealthy multinational corporations have positive duties to employ or otherwise benefit the global poor. I argue that these duties can be plausibly grounded in the fact that potential sweatshop workers are victims of global structural injustice, from which multinational corporations typically benefit.

I don't remember the very first time I watched The Wiz (1978). Growing up in a black household during the 1980s, the film was as much a part of my upbringing as the countless hours I spent removing my Jheri curl activator from the sofa, practicing the moonwalk, or listening to my mother and sister's annual Thanksgiving argument about how much salt should go into the collard greens. What I do remember is how much I enjoyed watching The Wiz. Each Thanksgiving Day my six sisters and I would gather around the television set and watch our heroine Dorothy (Diana Ross) travel from her aunt's Harlem apartment to the magical land of Oz. We celebrated the fact that Dorothy ultimately vanquishes her seemingly more powerful foe Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West (Mabel King). As young black girls, we identified with Dorothy's plight. While we were not battling powerful witches, we were constantly resisting our mother's attempts to socialize us into “respectable” young women. As such, we were fascinated by Evillene, the most oppressive force within Dorothy's life. The gargantuan size of Evillene's body, the hideousness of her face, and the force of her supernatural powers both excited and repulsed us. We eagerly anticipated her first appearance in the film, bursting through the doors of her sweatshop belting, “Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” We reveled in drawing comparisons between Evillene and our mother, hoping that one day we too could defeat her.

Since the mid-2000s, China has been transforming its industrial structure from a world sweatshop to a global manufacturing center. Many foreign small- and medium-sized factories that were engines of development in coastal China for the past two decades have recently been phased out due to the changing nature of macroeconomic policy, the labor market, and local interests. Unlike macroeconomic policy and the labor market, the subject of changing local interests has not been extensively investigated. This article explores an unclear political-economic logic and demonstrates the key counter-actions of the factories—legal liquidation, moving inland or to other countries, and illegal flight by night—in response to “phasing out” pressure from local politics. The micro-level struggles between foreign factories and local interests are indirectly conducive to China’s macro-level industrial transformation. This pattern will likely be repeated in China’s less-developed regions and other rapidly developing countries in the near future. This study is based on empirical data from fieldwork, primarily in Shandong province, from 2008 to 2016 as well as archival data from China, Korea, and other countries.

A. Mezzadri. 2017. The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 210 pp., ₹625, ISBN: 9781107116962.

The current research examines the effects of individualizing moral foundations (i.e., fairness and care) on consumer boycotts against the U.S. company that is entangled in an alleged sweatshop issue at a supplier’s factory in a developing country. On the basis of moral foundations theory, the current study tests six hypotheses that demonstrate the theoretical mechanism by which individualizing moral foundations have an impact on consumer boycott intentions through blame attributions and anger. Using a representative U.S. sample of 1,124 people, a national survey was conducted to test the proposed structural equation model. As predicted, results of mediation analysis showed that individualizing foundations, consisted of the fairness/care values, led to boycott intentions fully mediated by blame attribution and anger.

Purpose Perceived brand entitativity, or the extent to which a collection of brands signifies a group to consumers, differentiates luxury vs non-luxury brands such that luxury brands are perceived to be more entitative than non-luxury brands. Framed by the concept of brand entitativity and the implicit theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether this difference in the perceived brand entitativity of luxury and non-luxury brands impacts how consumers respond to sweatshop allegations in context to these brands. Design/methodology/approach Two separate experimental studies employing between-subjects designs were conducted among a total of 162 and 276 student consumers from a Southern university of the USA. The authors operationalized sweatshop allegations at two levels, brand-specific allegations (the stimulus brand itself is accused) and industry-specific allegations (other brands of the same industry are accused) to examine the role that brand entitativity plays in these two types of allegations. Findings Experiment 1 demonstrated that industry-specific allegations hurt consumer attitudes for luxury brands to a greater extent than non-luxury brands, whereas brand-specific allegations hurt non-luxury brands more so than luxury ones. In experiment 2, the authors find that the above results hold true only for consumers who are more prone to social perceptions of entitativity (entity theorists), but not those who represent an incremental mindset (incremental theorists). Practical implications The results can help brand managers understand the negative downstream consequences of brand- and industry-specific allegations for their brand type (luxury vs non-luxury). Originality/value This study fills an important gap in understanding consumer reaction to brands’ sweatshop allegations by addressing the role of consumers’ perceived brand entitativity and how it differs for consumers holding different implicit beliefs.

How might participatory creative praxes make visible a politics of critical care and new imaginaries for resisting the ‘school-to-sweatshop pipeline’? Drawing upon arts-based participatory action r...

Extant accounts of exploitation typically focus on either an exchange or interaction between persons, or on exploitative systems (i.e., global capitalism). We propose a new account of exploitation that focuses instead on the benefits an exploiter enjoys which are had at the expense of another, the exploited party. This account is developed by considering the benefits enjoyed by consumers (e.g., inexpensive sweatshop-made goods) and the manner in which those benefits are produced (e.g., the loss of dignity suffered by sweatshop workers). On our account, an exploitative relationship need not involve any interaction or exchange between exploiter and exploited. Neither is exploitation a property of systems or institutions. Instead, we argue that a consumer who buys a shirt produced under near slave-like conditions engages in a moral wrong by exploiting the worker who made it even though the two may be far-removed in space and time.

“Crunch”— the cyclical labor practice used to ensure delivery of content for commercial release within a certain time frame—is an unregulated and unconscionable convention. While common in a variety of industries, it is particularly disruptive in, and the root cause for, many of the video game industry’s shortcomings. Crunch in the video game industry is most commonly comprised of excessive, and often lengthy, durations of mandatory unpaid-overtime hours and an unspoken stigma for any who condemn a studio’s policies on a rushed production. Video game crunch is a direct result of the limited labor protections currently afforded to individuals within the industry and the rapid expansion of video games as a form of mainstream entertainment globally. Thus far, only one other scholarly article addresses the labor concerns facing the video game industry, and that article has a very narrow focus on how a recent development in California’s approach for classifying an individuals’ employment status would affect the video game workforce’s ability to unionize in that state. Currently, there is no other academic literature specifically addressing crunch labor conditions, and my Article fills this substantial gap by providing readers with a much broader analysis of the issues. This Article provides a general background into the rise of the video game industry into a global phenomenon and a detailed understanding of what crunch entails to capture the significance of its consequences. It then provides an analysis of the relevant federal and state labor provisions for which any redress must be relied upon. As Texas is the second-largest hub for video game development in the United States and its industry reach is growing in response to the economic incentives provided by Governor Abbott, this Article takes a targeted approach for addressing the industry-wide problem. This Article advocates against the use of unionization as a means of redress for the industry’s workforce, arguing it would be largely ineffective given the current state of the industry. This Article alternatively advocates for Texas to pass the substantive provisions of a labor act developed in the Article in order to address the core issues behind crunch. Specifically, this Article argues that the Texas state legislature should be tasked with expanding upon the minimum labor protections already afforded to its citizens by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act by passing provisions that include the following: (I) limiting the amount of overtime that can be mandated from an individual, (2) introducing the applicability of overtime pay provisions beyond who is currently considered under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and (3) expanding anti-retaliation provisions beyond internal complaints from an individual. The State must make this legislative push. Without it there will be no sustainable path for unionization to become a viable option for approaching labor concerns in the industry’s future. The economic benefits provided to the State by the success of this industry and the Texas legislature’s worker-centric ideology warrant this moderate legislative intervention.