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Supporters of free trade argue that one of its benefits is to increase wellbeing and enhance respect for workers’ rights. Nevertheless, this will not happen unless concrete requirements concerning such protection are inserted within the actual agreements. This thesis argues that trade agreements should include labor provisions that provide effective protection for core labor rights and that those rights are enforced by the Parties. In the case of Taiwan, it has signed Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras; but only in the FTA with Nicaragua, a Labor Chapter (No. 18) has been introduced in the accord. It follows the United States- Dominican Republic- Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) design, and the signatories agree to enforce their own domestic labor laws and reaffirm their commitment to the internationally recognized labor rights. However, the language of the agreement is merely aspirational, directing Parties to strive to improve their laws, but providing no effective reward or sanction in this reward.

No / The McDonald's Corporation is not only the largest system-wide sales service in the world, it is a phenomenon in its own right, and is now recognized as the most famous brand in the world. By providing a detailed analysis of the extent to which the McDonald's Corporation adapts or imposes its labour relations policies in Europe, this volume represents a real life case study revealing the interaction between a global multi-national enterprise and the regulatory systems of a number of different European countries. Key features include: an overview of the McDonald's Corporation's development and structure; an analysis of its corporate culture and the issues of franchising; an examination of key union strategies, including systems of co-determination, consultation and collective-bargaining; and a chapter dealing specifically with European legislation, in particular the McDonald's European Works Council. The author systematically analyses the conflict between the McDonald's Corporation and the industrial relations systems of the European countries within which it operates, and exposes this conflict as an 'unequal struggle' between economic liberalism and collectivism.

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Corporations have increasingly turned to CSR-initiatives in order to monitor workers’ rights and responsibilities in global supply chains. This article argues that in order for these CSR- initiatives to succeed in enabling workers’ voice at the workplace, the shared benefits of the practice must be realized by all stakeholders. In this article, H&M’s social dialogue project in Bangladesh has been analyzed through the lens of social practice theory identifying three crucial elements which must exist or be created, linked and sustained in order to produce behaviour change, which in this case is social dialogue between factory workers and factory management. This article argues that H&M’s social dialogue project has all the essential elements and objectives to increase workers’ voice and improve industrial relations. It also points out the importance of not viewing bipartite social dialogue as the end goal. Instead, H&M’s implementation of bipartite social dialogue at their suppliers’ factories should serve as the stepping stone toward tripartite social dialogue where trade unions can empower workers in the readymade garment-sector. The trade unions have the unique right to bargain collectively and if corporations truly want to ensure workers’ rights, they must promote increased union activity in the industry. This research describes the key activities, training methodology, objectives and expected outcomes of H&M’s social dialogue project followed by an analysis of workers employed in Bangladeshi readymade garment-sector experiences, attitudes and associations to social dialogue. By analysing workers’ associations to social dialogue and H&M’s objectives of the social dialogue project, certain conditions have been identified as crucial in order to enable efficient social dialogue at the workplace.

After gaining independence from Pakistan in 1971, the Bangladesh state moved from a mainly state-managed sector to a privatised one based on export-oriented industrialisation. Under this policy, the production of garments for export emerged in the mid-1970s to later become the most lucrative export earner for Bangladesh, underlining the fact that it has become an important world exporter of garments. In developing into the only multi-billion- dollar manufacturing export in the country, this industry has created employment for more than a million workers most of whom are young females from the impoverished rural areas of Bangladesh. This is socially significant because, for the first time, it marked the entry of Bangladeshi women into formal manufacturing employment. This thesis attempts to examine the origins and development of this export garments industry, with specific reference to the role of women workers in this process. In so it endeavours to contextualise these issues by arguing that the changes that it endeavours can be best explained according to a Marxist class analysis and by reference to a colonial history characterised by ongoing exploitation in an emerging manufacturing sector and by ongoing resistance to such exploitation by an emerging industrial workforce. Additionally, in examining the development of this industry, the thesis also sets out to show how the industry is the product of a conjuncture of forces, including an emerging capitalist class, a weak state, foreign capital and international state formations such as GATT and the ILO. / Finally, by testing some of the prevailing hypotheses in the literature that deals with third world women workers, the thesis examines the impact of this industrial development on the place of women in Bangladeshi society. More specifically, it attempts to demonstrate that, contrary to the dominant view, such workers are not necessarily passive; nor are they reluctant to engage in trade union activity. Instead, it endeavours to show that, in the case of the export garments industry in Bangladesh, the young women workers have over time learned to exercise their rights and to participate in industrial activity, largely, and ironically because the centralisation necessary for labour and quality standards has also created the conditions for the proletarianisation of the women workers.

My dissertation research is interdisciplinary in nature, at the nexus of three areas of scholarly work and actual practices: union renewal and non-unionized workers-rights organizing in Canada and the US; feminist, anti-racist Marxian approaches to class relations as being racialized, gendered and bureaucratic; and, the institutional ethnographic method of inquiry into social reality. My empirical focus is on the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign (OMWC). The OMWC was a Toronto-based labour-community project to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour. It was started in 2001 by Justice for Workers (J4W), was carried on by the Ontario Needs a Raise coalition (ONR) from 2003 to 2006, and was re-launched in 2007 by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) in association with some community groups. The OMWC brought together across time and space activist groups, community agencies and labour organizations, all of whose volunteers, members, clients, educators, officials and staff were the agents and/or targets of the campaign. The apparent victory of the OMWC is quite contested. Local campaign realities were compartmentalized in numerous ways and OMWC involvement met different institutionally specific and coordinated needs. And while coalitions generally arise as vehicles to transcend such institutional separation, the campaign was challenged to materially bridge such compartmentalization. The fragmentation of reality amongst institutions and how it was managed in practice affected how collaboration, participation, and decision-making happened and appeared to have happened in organizing and educational activities. While there were at times transformative intentions, there was generally a pragmatic anti-racist organizing practice and effect. I contend that the complexity of contemporary society poses great challenges for the possibilities for human-agency based labour-community workers-rights organizing with a broad-based, political capacity for movement building orientation. I suggest that this is largely so because the social coordination of what we do and what we understand about what we do turns on at least three components of social reality: an institution-based organization of multi-layered social relations that is generally locally circumscribed but extralocally driven; a conditioned individually-driven orientation to meeting human needs; and an ideological orientation to both the content of ideas and thought, and the process of that reasoning.

My dissertation research is interdisciplinary in nature, at the nexus of three areas of scholarly work and actual practices: union renewal and non-unionized workers-rights organizing in Canada and the US; feminist, anti-racist Marxian approaches to class relations as being racialized, gendered and bureaucratic; and, the institutional ethnographic method of inquiry into social reality. My empirical focus is on the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign (OMWC). The OMWC was a Toronto-based labour-community project to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour. It was started in 2001 by Justice for Workers (J4W), was carried on by the Ontario Needs a Raise coalition (ONR) from 2003 to 2006, and was re-launched in 2007 by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) in association with some community groups. The OMWC brought together across time and space activist groups, community agencies and labour organizations, all of whose volunteers, members, clients, educators, officials and staff were the agents and/or targets of the campaign. The apparent victory of the OMWC is quite contested. Local campaign realities were compartmentalized in numerous ways and OMWC involvement met different institutionally specific and coordinated needs. And while coalitions generally arise as vehicles to transcend such institutional separation, the campaign was challenged to materially bridge such compartmentalization. The fragmentation of reality amongst institutions and how it was managed in practice affected how collaboration, participation, and decision-making happened and appeared to have happened in organizing and educational activities. While there were at times transformative intentions, there was generally a pragmatic anti-racist organizing practice and effect. I contend that the complexity of contemporary society poses great challenges for the possibilities for human-agency based labour-community workers-rights organizing with a broad-based, political capacity for movement building orientation. I suggest that this is largely so because the social coordination of what we do and what we understand about what we do turns on at least three components of social reality: an institution-based organization of multi-layered social relations that is generally locally circumscribed but extralocally driven; a conditioned individually-driven orientation to meeting human needs; and an ideological orientation to both the content of ideas and thought, and the process of that reasoning.

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / The ever increasing regional and global trade competition has manifested itself in a growing number of non-standard forms of employment including the increasing use of "temporary employment services" (or “labour brokers” as commonly referred to). Labour brokers enter into employment relationships as third parties with client companies to supply employees through a commercial contract. These labour services usually fall outside the regular twoparty contract of employment defined under existing labour laws and thus the employees are not covered by that law. Labour brokers have been labelled as “the re-emergence of new apartheid strategy” and “modern slavery” by some quarters in labour sectors of Namibia and South Africa. Trade unions, particularly, have led the most vocal resistance against labour brokers in both countries. They argue that, like previous apartheid contract labour systems, labour brokers today erode standards for decent working conditions and weaken union representations in the workplace. Thus unions have repeatedly sent strong calls to lawmakers to amend existing labour laws and „forever put labour broking in its grave where it belong‟1. On the other hand, employers have argued that recent forces of globalisation demand flexible employment strategies and banning labour brokers will make it more difficult for local businesses compete profitably globally via flexible short term employments and can lead to losses of many job opportunities.2 It is against this background that I will argue that current labour laws should be amended to define and regulate labour brokers more closely and compel them to recognise workers rights and conditions as equal as those of standard employees. But first, I will highlight some socio-economic indicators influencing the labour markets in South Africa and Namibia, including the history of worker‟s rights under the contract labour systems in both countries. Second, I will look at some of the expressed exploitive conditions resulting from the use of labour brokers and also look at some reasons why businesses engage labour brokers. Thereafter I will point out some of the reasons why trade unions have called for a total ban on labour brokers. I will then discuss the difficulty of banning labour brokers, including the constitutional challenge in the landmark case of African Personnel Services v Government of the Republic of Namibia3. Lastly i will expand on the ruling by the Namibian Supreme Court of Appeal (NSA) recommending a regulatory approach in line with the International Labour Organisation‟s (ILO) conventions on third-party employments. / South Africa

No / The fast-food industry is one of the few industries that can be described as truly global, not least in terms of employment, which is estimated at around ten million people worldwide. This edited volume is the first of its kind, providing an analysis of labour relations in this significant industry focusing on multinational corporations and large national companies in ten countries: the USA, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Russia. The extent to which multinational enterprises impose or adapt their employment practices in differing national industrial relations systems is analysed, Results reveal that the global fast-food industry is typified by trade union exclusion, high labour turnover, unskilled work, paternalistic management regimes and work organization that allows little scope for developing workers' participation in decision-making, let alone advocating widely accepted concepts of social justice and workers' rights.