Abstract
AbstractLabour in Global South countries often has meagre social security protections and almost no representation in domestic legislatures. To address this deficit, labour law’s clear orientation towards “distributive justice” and emphasis on constitutionally protected freedom of association and collective bargaining rights have been core values for workers and labour movements in the South. Over the course of the last century, labour law has increasingly sought to assure “distributive justice” by departing from the confines of “corrective justice” and the slippery “ethical” basis of private law in both civil and common law systems. This chapter asks how both multinational corporations’ (MNCs) recent turn toward the use of codes of conduct in regards to labour and working conditions (labour codes) and, correspondingly, activists’ increasing reliance on the private law doctrines of tort and damages to resolve labour disputes, dilutes labour law’s focus on “distributive justice.” What problems and challenges do these shifts cause for labour law practice and theory? Taking the KiK case as an example, this chapter applies a critical legal perspective to address these questions.
Highlights
In the context of global value and supply chains,1 workers in the Global South often struggle against the labour practices of both foreign investors and local manufacturers, where the latter are frequently dependent on the former for their foreign investment and capital
Labour unions in the Global North offer concrete transnational solidarity and unionisation support for workers and labour struggles in the South. Both capital’s overall structural logic and workers’ collective struggles dialectically shape labour conditions and labour law in the Global South. Both common and civil law systems considered the formation of labour associations and strikes to be modes of conspiring against business and property, and a violation of the “freedom of contract.”2 Yet, at the same time, private law’s strictly moral and ethical basis, oriented toward “corrective justice,” proved insufficient to adequately address the fundamental inequality between employers and employees
As we have discussed so far, labour law was a large departure from private law, as it moved workers’ economic concerns away from the state
Summary
In the context of global value and supply chains, workers in the Global South often struggle against the labour practices of both foreign investors and local manufacturers, where the latter are frequently dependent on the former for their foreign investment and capital. It developed through the International Labour Organization into a convention-based system of core standards tied to ratification, government responsibility, sanctions and enforcement mechanisms Against this original labour law regime, the 1990s and the proliferation of neoliberal globalisation and rightsapproaches to address human suffering saw the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development push the ILO into the role of a social mediator through an evolving rights-based approach to labour law.. As opposed to labour law’s orientation towards “distributive justice,” this rights-based approach to labour regulation is rooted in private law’s emphasis on “corrective justice.” With this historical shift in mind, this chapter examines the KiK case as an example of the complex interactions and often diverging practices between international labour law standards and MNC’s labour codes for manufacturers and/or contractors.. I argue that a critical legal perspective is best suited to advance workers’ interests in this situation
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