Labour Exploitation Research Articles

The Impact of Replicas and First-Copy Products on Authentic Products: An Exploration in the Apparel Industry

The purpose of this study is to find out the impact of replicas and first copies on authentic products. Replicas and first copy products are unauthorized and are designed to mimic the original products and confuse the customers. Replicas has a great influence on customer’s mind and this has a significant effect on the sales of authentic products. The reason for this is that consumers prefer to pay lesser amount for these replicas than paying premium for the original thing. Therefore, this has led to decrease in revenue of companies that produce these authentic products. However, there has been an argument about this as some of them state that replicas and first copy products would help in generate interest in particular brand and this can serve as a gateway for more expensive and premium purchases in the future. The impact of replicas and first copy products are therefore complicated and multifaceted and it depends on various factors such as consumer behaviour, market strategies and the overall health of the market. The fashion industry grapples with the pervasive issue of replicas and first-copy products, which undermine the authenticity and integrity of apparel brands. This abstract delves into the multifaceted impact of replicas on authentic apparel, considering perspectives from consumers, brands, and ethical considerations. Counterfeit alternatives tempt consumers with discounted prices, eroding brand identity and aspirational value. Brands face threats to intellectual property rights and reputation, while ethical concerns arise from exploitative labor practices and environmental degradation. By exploring motivations, vulnerabilities, and proposing mitigation strategies, this research aims to inform stakeholders and foster solutions in combating the detrimental effects of replicas on the apparel industry. Counterfeit alternatives allure consumers with enticingly discounted prices, thereby undermining the distinctiveness of brand identity and eroding the aspirational value associated with genuine products. Concurrently, brands are confronted with formidable challenges concerning the protection of intellectual property rights and safeguarding their reputation against dilution and imitation. Moreover, ethical dilemmas emerge from the prevalence of exploitative labor practices and environmental degradation inherent in the production of replicas. By delving into the underlying motivations that drive consumer behavior, identifying vulnerabilities within the market, and proposing robust mitigation strategies, this research endeavors to provide valuable insights to stakeholders within the fashion industry. Through an informed understanding of the intricate dynamics at play, it is hoped that this study will catalyze collaborative efforts aimed at combating the detrimental effects of replicas and first copies on the apparel industry.

The Impact of ILO Convention No. 182 (1999) on Safeguarding Against Child Labor in Indonesia

Child labor poses a serious challenge to Indonesia's commitment to children's rights and workplace protection. ILO Convention No. 182 has become a crucial global guideline in combating this issue. Using doctrinal legal research with an analytical descriptive component and includes the comparative approach, the statute approach, and the historical approach. Using secondary data, which included primary, secondary, and tertiary legal material and with library research and examined resources relating to the topics under investigation with qualitative analysis. Before ratification, weak enforcement and inadequate regulations left child workers vulnerable to health risks and exploitation. The ratification marked a pivotal moment, aligning Indonesia's laws with international standards to better safeguard children from exploitative labor practices, emphasizing the urgent need for stronger protections and enforcement measures.

Om allokering av straffansvar vid arbete utan tillstånd

AbstractOn 23 February 2023, a comprehensive reform of the Aliens Act concerning the employment and business activities of foreign nationals entered into force in Finland. The objective of the reform was to increase the authorities’ ability to prevent the exploitation of foreign labour. One of the most significant changes involved the client´s obligations to ensure the right to work for foreign nationals entering and remaining in employment. These changes were prompted by, among other things, problems identified in the regulatory framework concerning the obligations of the employer and the client and the allocation of criminal liability. The article analyses the allocation of liability for offences related to unauthorised work from the perspective of Finnish legislation. It focuses on how criminal liability has been shared and allocated since the comprehensive reform of Chapter 5 of the Aliens Act was implemented in Finland. The article concludes that after the amendments to the Aliens Act, criminal liability will be allocated in the same way and to the same parties, regardless of whether the Criminal Code’s provision on the unauthorised use of foreign labour or the Aliens Act’s employer’s alienage offence applies in the case under consideration. This can reasonably be seen as reducing the problems of apportioning responsibility for unauthorised employment. As regards the concrete attribution of criminal liability, attention must be focused on the circumstances of the act, the employer organisation and the specific person in that organisation. The starting point for allocating criminal liability must be to determine who is responsible for the offence in the first place within the meaning of the applicable provision. It is then necessary to determine who has the authority to hire and retain employees. Finally, criminal liability must be attributed to the person who actually committed the acts in question.

Professional women footballers’ stories of marketing portrayals and sponsorship: “I just had to feel grateful for what I’ve been given”

ABSTRACT In this paper we investigate the marketing portrayal and sponsorship experiences of professional women athletes. Specifically, we examine the perspectives of professional women footballers (i.e. soccer) and the ways in which the gender ideal is reproduced, negotiated, and resisted, as well as their (re)imagined equitable sporting future. Using critical feminist narrative inquiry, twelve interviews were conducted with four professional women footballers. Four themes were constructed that call attention to: 1) the lack of commercial sponsorship that limits career growth; 2) performative partnerships that perpetuate inequities; 3) objectifying women athletes through labour exploitation; and 4) limited agency restricts resistance and transformation potential. The findings challenge the concept of sponsorship “partnerships” and expose an exploitative off-pitch reality for women athletes. This study highlights the need for systemic change in professional football for all women to be perceived as legitimate and worthy of investment.

Is China an imperialist power?

Among the mainstream press, western political elites and sections of the Left, China is accused of exploiting the Global South and even being an imperialist power. China argues it is pursuing a ‘win-win’ policy. To explore this question, this article looks at several factors, including labour exploitation, debt, environmental damage and military activity. Imperialism today operates through a vast network of integrated transnational investments and expansive global assembly lines, overseen by a transnational capitalist class. China’s position in the global capitalist system needs to be assessed in this context. It is certainly a major power within that system and its capitalists engage in the super-exploitation of labour, for example in Africa. At the same time, Chinese development loans have so far helped countries in the Global South build infrastructure and reduce neoliberal austerity, even as associated projects have been beset by corruption and environmental harms. China has not yet used its military in imperialist adventures, but it does apply regional pressure and cultivates military relationships with countries where it has investments. Overall, the picture that emerges is complex and contradictory.

A study on the impact of the degree of mixed ownership reform of state-owned enterprises on corporate environmental response

Purpose This study aims to explore the relationship between the degree of state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) mixed reform and the environmental response of enterprises, against the background of actively promoting the reform of mixed ownership in China. Design/methodology/approach The study is conducted on a sample of A-share listed manufacturing companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen of China, investigated for the period 2015 to 2020. The baseline regression results are robust to a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. To deal with the issue of endogeneity, the technique of instrumental variable method has been applied. Findings The study confirms the U-shaped effect of the depth and restriction of mixed ownership on SOEs’ environmentally responsive behaviour in the manufacturing industry, especially for lower environmental regulation and higher level of risk-taking firms. The findings indicate that the government, shareholders and other stakeholders of enterprises should not simply consider that the mixed reform is directly promoting or reducing the environmental response behaviour of enterprises. Practical implications SOEs should improve their shareholding structures to undermine performance enhancement at the expense of the environment and increase environmentally beneficial behaviours. Regulators and governments should improve the institutional mechanism of environmental regulation and make efforts to promote corporate awareness of the environment. Social implications Although the adoption and implementation of environmentally friendly policies are costly, improved environmental response and other social responsibilities are helpful to corporate long-term growth and reputation and obtain more capital market attention. Therefore, firms would benefit from improving their environmental response to protect nature, as well as to enjoy the economic and social benefits of a better environmental response. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is a lack of studies focussing on the environmental behaviour of SOEs of mixed reform. As the mixed reform in China has come to a climax phase in recent several years, SOEs of mixed reform is an ideal environment for research. The study focusses on manufacturing firms as these firms are more susceptible to contribute to environmental pollution, exploitation of natural resources and labour concerns.

He’s No Spartacus: Jesus, Slavery, and the Utopian Imagination

Abstract James Crossley and Robert Myles’s Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict is a considerable accomplishment in its situation of Jesus as a figure inseparable from the material conditions of labor exploitation. The present review discusses two topics that the book touches upon only briefly, but linger under the surface of their analysis: Jesus’ treatment of enslaved laborers and utopian social experimentation. This article juxtaposes Jesus with the roughly contemporaneous figure of Spartacus to consider about the availability of social experimentation and the location of slaves within class-based analyses of Roman antiquity.

Supply Nets: The Logistics of Seafarer Abandonment

AbstractThis paper studies the infrastructural and organisational forms that facilitate labour exploitation within maritime logistics. My entry point is the rising wave of seafarer abandonments, which I approach not as isolated incidents of mismanagement but as an intensification of the flexibilising tendencies underpinning contemporary capitalism. I trace the recent history of these dynamics, examining their effect on shipping labour. I then investigate some of the specific legal and economic mechanics of shipping, focusing on debt, insurance, and bordering. Using supply chain mapping software, I study supply systems in a way that centres labour rather than the commodities being moved. I close by claiming that abandonments are not an accident, but an inevitable endpoint of a system designed to precaritise labour while protecting shipowners’ profits. Against this, I sketch out a new way of conceiving of supply chains—as supply nets, matrices of interconnected lines, prone to becoming tangled.

Insights from a community of practice: Integrating human rights in fisheries improvement

A recent article authored by Williams and Sparks suggests that fishery improvement projects (FIPs) “as currently constituted and reported, will not be an effective part of the fight against labour exploitation and abuses in global industrial fisheries.” We wish to reinforce their argument that driving social responsibility improvements in global fisheries requires a systemic approach combining genuine worker representation, mandatory human rights due diligence, enforceable and legally binding agreements, changes to purchasing practices, and the ratification and implementation of international labor and human rights conventions, and we acknowledge that the FIP model alone will fall short of this. Based on our collective experience working towards social improvements in fisheries, we wish to bring a slightly more nuanced perspective to bear to demonstrate the critical importance of using a human rights-based approach in fisheries’ sustainability efforts across industrial and artisanal contexts. We structure this response by revisiting each of the main points Williams and Sparks raise, bringing in our own experiences and additional evidence to build upon their original remarks, suggesting: there is a need for continuous monitoring and improvements in dynamic risk environments; voluntary measures can lead to and buttress mandatory and legally binding measures; diverse fisheries require diverse approaches; and humans are inextricably linked to fisheries, thus effective and enduring solutions must consider human wellbeing and environmental sustainability in tandem. We end with a call to action with explicit roles and responsibilities for different actors inside and outside of the Fishery Improvement Project context to support binding and enforceable agreements between buyers and fishworker representative organizations, advancing human and labor rights protections in seafood supply chains.

Uncomfortable quilts: textile-based artivism in response to Bangladeshi garment factory disasters

ABSTRACT Recently, two deadly garment factory disasters in Dhaka, Bangladesh – the 2012 Tazreen Fashions factory fire (117 killed; over 200 injured) and the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight story complex including garment factories (1,135 killed, over 2,500 injured) – inspired a series of artworks addressing globalisation, gendered labour exploitation, memorialisation, and the power of empathy. This essay explores the work of four visual artists: Robin Berson, Taslima Akhter, Reetu Sattar, and Dilara Begum Jolly. Each engages in physically and/or emotionally challenging creative processes, including enactments of repetitive garment labour, weaving the names and faces of deceased workers into textiles, and displaying personal effects such as family photographs salvaged from the ruins of the destroyed factories. In this way, the artists call attention to the human cost of so-called ‘fast fashion’ and agitate for moral responsibility in the face of these disasters. More universally, this essay offers examples of how visual art can expose the causal dimensions of structural violence and socio-economic power imbalances while also memorialising, expressing solidarity, and aiding with community healing.

The Corporation as Imperialist and Antagonist in Contemporary African Fiction

ABSTRACT More powerful and influential than some smaller nations, multinational corporations exert a tremendous influence on the functioning of contemporary global society. From as far back as the dawn of capitalist modernity, proto-corporations furthered the ends of empire, bringing massive foreign populations and swathes of territory under economic and political control. This essay analyzes how recent works of sub-Saharan African fiction have conceptualized the corporation as functioning in a fundamentally imperialistic manner within the global system of neoliberal capitalism. In analyzing the novels How Beautiful We Were and Congo Inc., it considers to what extent these works see the operations of corporations within Africa as part of a long line of imperialistic exploitation of labor and resources stretching back to the days of the large European colonial empires, and to what extent these works see the machinations of the corporation as a novel socioeconomic phenomenon of our age of frenetic transnational flows of capital and information. In doing so it also asks how these novels envision possibilities of local-level resistance to these forms of corporate economic predation that threaten to stir up military conflict and despoil local ecosystems.

Digital Capitalism and Child Labor Exploitation on YouTube

AbstractThis article examines the issue of child labor exploitation on YouTube through the phenomenon of “kidfluencers” ‐ children who create video content and gain a large following on the platform. It discusses kidfluencing within the framework of digital capitalism and platform capitalism, where companies monetize users' data. While kidfluencing can allow children to be creative and gain income, it also risks exploiting their labor and compromising their privacy and well‐being. The article analyzes several popular kidfluencer YouTube channels and finds that some children are producing content in a way that resembles intense work. It highlights how digital capitalism leads to the commodification and alienation of digital labor. While kidfluencers benefit platforms and brands through promotion, they may not receive fair compensation for their efforts. The involvement of parents also raises issues about children's autonomy and protection. Overall, the article argues that while kidfluencing seems like casual play, in some cases it amounts to a hidden form of child labor that fails to uphold children's rights. It calls for stronger regulations to ensure kidfluencers are not subject to exploitation of their immaterial labor.

Migrant sex work beyond slavery and trafficking: Sex work, unfree labour and the crisis of social reproduction in Ghana

This paper examines the working lives of migrant women in the sex sector in Ghana, in light of surging global interest in the governance of “slavery and trafficking”. The paper draws on qualitative data gathered in Ghana in 2021, namely 30 interviews with migrant sex workers. Interview data document wide-ranging and systematic labour exploitation, including some of the worst forms of unfreedom characterised as “modern slavery”. Yet the majority of workers report that they entered into and stay in sex work out of economic necessity (i.e. rather than individualised, extra-economic relations of coercion), typically due to caring responsibilities. To explain this, the paper makes two interrelated arguments: firstly, it shows why the concept of “unfree labour” is more appropriate than “modern slavery” for capturing how extreme exploitation emerges from a continuum of labour unfreedom in the Ghanaian sex sector. Unfreedom is (re)produced through state laws, relations of (re)production, and trajectories of neoliberal economic restructuring, which have given rise to widespread precarisation and informalisation. Secondly, the paper argues that extant studies of unfree labour should pay greater attention to the crisis of social reproduction as a key structural driver of unfree labour. This crisis constitutes the broader material conditions in which migrant women in Ghana enter into and stay in highly exploitative forms of work within the sex sector, as a means of household survival. The paper contextualises this crisis not only in relation to neoliberalism, but to the longue durée of colonial capitalism in Ghana.

Metaphors of Extractive Capitalism and Fabulation in Nope

This essay argues that Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) offers metaphor and fabulation as a critique of extractive capitalism and its detrimental consequences on sentient life. Peele visualizes the outcomes of capitalist extraction and accumulation as exemplified in racialized labor exploitation and anthropogenic catastrophe. I examine how the film mobilizes fabulation to explore cinema’s erasure of Blackness from its history as an example of racial extraction. My analysis of extraction extends to the shapeshifting sentient “alien,” nicknamed Jean Jacket, who I contend embodies extractive capitalism via its consumption and expulsion of carbon-based life and indigestible objects. I maintain that Peele uses the trope of the alien-monster as a metaphor to comment on the threat of ecological collapse. I then proceed to study how Nope makes a pointed critique of human misuse of media technologies due to an insatiable avarice for notoriety. Finally, I conclude with a reading of how extractive capitalism forecloses the possibility for humans to establish multispecies empathy and cohabitation.

Depletion through transnational social reproduction: guestworker migration and uneven development in the South Pacific

The recent expansion of regional guestworker migration schemes has altered the political economy of the South Pacific, creating a ‘permanent labour reserve’ (MacWilliam, 2022) for low-wage industries in rural Australia and New Zealand. Historical structures of uneven development, against which the ‘blackbirding’ of indentured Kanaka labourers took place more than a century prior, have again enabled a transnational labour (im)mobility regime in which Pasifika workers are rendered unfree and situated as a ‘fix’ for accumulation: limited to racialised and gendered labour practices, tied to employer-sponsors in remote locations, and without the rights afforded to other migrant workers. Taking the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme as the paradigmatic example of a resurgent guestworker model in the region, this article foregrounds overlooked processes of transnational social reproduction that emerge from the interplay of restrictive migration policies and exploitative Local Labour Control Regimes (LLCRs). Drawing on extensive in-depth interviews with migrant workers, their family members, and government staff from four participating Pacific Island Countries (PICs), it examines how the PALM scheme spatially and temporally reconfigures care practices, skills formation, and communal labour to progressively deplete (Rai et al, 2014) socially reproductive capacity within the South Pacific. The article concludes by suggesting that the strains the PALM scheme places on social reproduction within PICs is itself a fundamental driver of uneven development across the region.

Lives and sustenance of migrant Indian women in Indenture and COVID-19

In the early nineteenth century, several indentured laborers and their descendants were exposed to political, social, and cultural shifts and instabilities that perpetuated over the decades. Simultaneously, in the pandemic era of COVID-19 and the colonial period, women workers had to overcome numerous hurdles, as they migrated without proper sustenance. The main objective of this study was to examine the working conditions, physical and psychological conditions, and sustenance of contracted laborers, especially migrant women, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of them are inequality in the labor markets, domestic workloads and workspaces, sexual abuse, mobility crises, child abuse, xenophobic attitudes, and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). By adopting a qualitative approach and critical examination, it is observed that the vulnerabilities of low-skilled women, the exploitation of migrant labor, as a matrix of identities, behaviors and power relationships are discernible in capitalist expansion, and the disparities that they induce while taking into account how the market mimics the prevalent sexual division of labor.

Could commodities themselves speak? An introduction to the agnotology of the spectacle

This article introduces the ‘agnotology of spectacle'. While agnotology is a relatively recent term used to describe the production and use of ignorance, we argue that Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1992) is an early attempt to outline a global field of disinformation and secrecy. For Debord, such secrecy is required to maintain the political and moral authority of what he defined as ‘spectacle', namely the images used by states and corporations to mediate relations of power with consumers and citizens. We consider how the spectacle creates fields of disinformation and secrecy to maintain its political and moral authority by examining notes in commodities that purport to be calls for help from coerced labourers in China. These notes allow us to assess the uncanny experience of consuming goods manufactured across global supply chains which may well comprise of serious labour exploitation. However, these sources also demand a more expansive agnotology than that provided by Debord: one that engages with labour processes, contracts and race. We therefore develop Debord's ideas by examining the work of Mills and Benaji. Finally, drawing on Brecht's concept of the 'estrangement effect', we discuss how exploited workers can co-opt the aesthetics of the uncanny to articulate their subject position within a global agnotological field.

Monstrous Mushrooms, Toxic Love and Queer Utopias in Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot

Embarking on a close reading of Jenny Hval's 2018 novel, Paradise Rot, this paper sets out to unveil the utopic potential rooted in reimagining the body not as a self-contained being but as an intricate network extending beyond the confines of the skin. It challenges prevailing Western epistemologies that isolate humans, hierarchically distancing them from non-humans such as plants and animals. By taking up the literary conventions of gothic horror, the analysis focuses on the peculiar, co-dependent relationship of Paradise Rot's central characters: Carral and Johanna. As the women’s unsettling love affair unfolds, they become a symbiotic and mycorrhizal entity akin to the sprouting mushrooms inhabiting their dilapidated house. Exploring the metaphorical and tangible challenges posed by mushrooms, the paper underscores the interconnected, non-singular nature of fungal networks. Hval provocatively links the queerness of her main characters with fungi, both typically demonized as alien, contaminating, and freakish. This paper furthermore aligns these characteristics with queered figures from classic gothic horror, including the lesbian vampire and Susan Stryker’s transgendered Frankenstein. Together, these monstrous entities disturb the boundaries between the “natural” and the supernatural, the human and the non-human, the living and the dead. Marxists have drawn comparisons between the vampire’s parasitic need to feed on blood and capitalism’s exploitation of labor. Through the character of Carral, who I read as a femme vamp figure, I argue that vampires have redemptive qualities that illuminate our fundamental dependence on others to survive. Hval's novel illustrates the essential, confronting fact that we need one another, and more so than ever in precarious times. In the context of the climate crisis, neoliberal individualism, and ongoing economic instability, understanding our indebtedness to one another and our environments is crucial for planetary survival. Ties of care in late capitalist societies are complex, messy, and unequal, yet by recognizing our reliance on one another, we might, as scholar Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) argues, realize a utopia where one’s dependence on others cannot, and need not, be concealed.

"…full of opportunities, but not for everyone": A narrative inquiry into mechanisms of labor market inequity among precariously employed gay, bisexual, and queer men.

This study brings lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (trans), and queer (LGBTQ+) populations into scholarly discourse related to precarious employment through a political economy of queer struggle. Drawing on narrative inquiry, 20 gay, bisexual, and queer men shared stories of precarious employment that were analyzed using Polkinghorne's narrative analysis. Results tell an overarching narrative in three parts that follow the trajectory of participants' early life experiences, entering the labor market and being precariously employed. Part 1: Devaluation of LGBTQ+ identities and adverse life experiences impacted participants' abilities to plan their careers and complete postsecondary education. Part 2: Participants experienced restricted opportunities due to safety concerns and learned to navigate white, cis, straight, Canadian ideals that are valued in the labor market. Part 3: Participants were without protections to respond to hostile treatment for fear of losing their employment. These stories of precarious employment illustrate unique ways that LGBTQ+ people might be particularly susceptible to exploitative labor markets.

COVID capitalism: The contested logistics of migrant labour supply chains in the double crisis

The introduction to the special issue (SI) lays out the agenda and key concepts of the SI ‘COVID Capitalism: The Contested Logistics of Migrant Labour Supply Chains in the Double Crisis’. The contributions to the SI focus on the reconfiguration of the means and methods of the exploitation of migrant labour during the COVID-19 pandemic and the related reorganisation of contemporary border and migration regimes. They all focus, more or less explicitly, on the adaptation and reorganisation of migrant labour supply chains which were disrupted through the ‘double crisis’ of public health and existing border and mobility regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, the SI seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of COVID-capitalism, understood as a form of disaster capitalism, in which fractions of capital try to turn the multiple crises implicated by the pandemic into a source of profit. If and how they succeed with these endeavours is, however, not guaranteed from the outset but an empirical question. The study of migrant labour supply chains does thus not only help to develop a more nuanced understanding of disaster capitalism but also contributes to debates on the logistification of migration management.