Shaming or Shamming? Transnational Private Regulation of Labor Conditions in the Global Apparel Industry.

As part of a broader wave of private regulation and "corporate social responsibility" initiatives in the 1990s, several private associations emerged that claim to certify companies as complying with international labor standards. In the U.S. the existing programs are the Fair Labor Association, Social Accountability International, and Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production. (A fourth initiative, the Worker Rights Consortium takes a different approach than the others.) This paper describes these labor standards certification and monitoring initiatives. The paper is organized in five main parts: 1. Institutional structure and scope: In general labor standards certification initiatives take the form of non-profit associations that develop a set of standards (or a code of conduct) for factory conditions and accredit external auditors to assess compliance. The programs differ somewhat in structure and content, but there are some preliminary reasons to think they may not differ so much in practice. 2. Political constituency and support base: A subset of companies and labor and human rights NGOs have been the main support base of certification and monitoring. In the U.S. organized labor was initially at the table, but pulled back in protest and remains highly skeptical. 3. Relationship to state governance: In contrast to the popular wisdom, the emergence of labor standards certification systems is strongly tied to the state, which provided decisive early leadership and funding. 4. Impacts: The impacts of certification and monitoring associations have been limited. No radical transformation of the apparel industry has occurred, although both horror stories and success stories exist. It appears that any significant impact of these programs is likely to come in combination with activist campaigns and government policy. 5. Broader perspectives and questions: A fuller understanding of transnational private regulation can be developed by comparing multiple types of certification and developing theoretically informed accounts of their emergence and significance. Here I briefly compare labor standards certification and forest certification, and suggest that the varieties of institutional theories in the social sciences offer a promising set of analytic lenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]