Under the headline ‘UK retailers blamed for rise in slave labour’, Felicity Lawrence reported yesterday:
Big-brand fashion and food retailers are accused of contributing to appalling employment conditions around the world in a new study by Oxfam published today.
Using their power at the top of global supply chains, companies with ruthless buying practices are squeezing their suppliers to deliver faster and more cheaply, the aid agency says. The effect is to drive down wages and compromise the welfare of the workers.
“There is a widening gap between the rhetoric of global corporate social responsibility and the reality of corporate practice,” Oxfam’s policy director, Justin Forsyth, said.
…..
At one US-owned factory in Kenya… price pressure has led to hourly production targets that are almost impossible to reach. The factory rules allow unions, but in April 2003, when workers went on strike to demand decent pay, most union members were fired.
Why is this happening? I would suggest it’s in the same line of country as the deaths of those Chinese workers at Morecambe. When Chris Bertram wrote two days ago that ‘such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism’, there was an immediate raising of eyebrows in the Crooked Timber comments box. I must say I find that perplexing. It’s not as if it’s hard to think of what motivating concerns central to capitalist enterprise might lead to disasters of the sort Chris was talking about, or why companies run for profit might adopt the practices criticized in the Oxfam study. Nor is it as if it’s a new idea that capitalism either unrestrained or too little restrained has this kind of regular downside. Is the scepticism towards the ‘predictable consequence’ claim based on a view that there is just no alternative world to one in which workers are obliged by their impoverished circumstances to take terrible risks, and in which the production and distribution of economic goods must necessarily ‘compromise the welfare of workers’? One has to hope, and try, for a better possible world than that.