Labor regimes
What explains variation in labor regimes and working conditions among supplier countries?
Labor regimes describe the organisational processes and institutional forms that are necessary to bring workers into places of production and make sure they have the rights skills, but also to motivate and control them. These regimes are profoundly shaped by GVC dynamics, including power relations, purchasing practices and governance mechanisms, which calls for a sector-specific approach to understand them. Apparel GVCs have particular features that intensify the asymmetrical power relations between buyers and suppliers and which shape labor regimes in apparel factories. However, apparel global supply chain dynamics intersect with characteristics that are specific to each country and even production locations within a country. Supplier country governments profoundly affect labor regimes and their impacts through formulating laws and regulations as well as wage setting mechanisms and interactions with factory owner associations and trade unions. We consider the importance of the structural and material conditions in supplier countries, in particular labor markets, for explaining labor regimes in apparel factories and change in labor regimes over time.
Our research examines the nature of labor regimes in the apparel export factories in Ethiopia and Kenya, focusing on labor outcomes and the extent to which they vary across supplier factories and countries. The nature and extent of variation can tell us about how much apparel GVCs shape labor outcomes and the room for maneuver at the national level, where capital-state-labor relations play out.
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Publications
Debates on labor regimes situate worker outcomes at the intersection of globalized production and specific social formations, but they do not specify how and why labor regimes change over time. This article presents a new approach to explaining how labor regimes change in the global apparel industry, the labor-led profit squeeze approach, combining insights from global production networks (GPN), development economics and labor studies. This approach argues that workers’ bargaining power is largely conditional upon processes of structural transformation. The article demonstrates this conceptual approach through a comparative analysis of the apparel export industries in Madagascar, Cambodia, and Vietnam.