Remi Edwards - Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility: Exploring the potential of worker-driven alternatives in supply chains
About my PhD thesis
My PhD project is focused around the ways in which workers are involved - and could be more widely and meaningfully involved - in the governance of global production networks. Private, corporate-driven governance dominates the sphere of production, in particular corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes which have been shown to have little positive effect on working conditions. In response, there are a number of alternative governance programmes that more fully integrate workers into the governance model such as worker-driven social responsibility. I want to understand how these alternatives come about despite the dominance of CSR and what this might tell us about the operation of power between corporations, workers and other actors within the political economy of global production.
What made me interested in this topic
I became interested in the system of global production - in particular issues around labour exploitation, the role of consumption and the crucial importance of the governance of production in mediating and maintaining exploitative relations - during my MA Global Political Economy (now MA International Political Economy) at The University of Sheffield. I had previously been interested in development and poverty alleviation in the global south, but I found the lens of labour and work an instructive and pragmatic way to think about these issues and their key drivers. I also found that the robust combination of empirical and theoretical insights generated by scholarship in this space indicative of the kind of research I hoped I might be able to achieve in the future - including engagement with policy and activist organisations to drive change.
What’s new about this work
This work will contribute new insights into the role of workers in the governance of global production. Previous work has tended to position workers as recipients rather than makers of governance regimes, but my focus on alternatives to CSR hopes to uncover how and under what conditions workers are able to meaningfully influence governance to produce favourable outcomes for labour. It will also offer empirically novel data that will compare the role of workers in a traditional CSR programme and an alternative WSR programme through documentary analysis and interviews with corporate actors, activists and, most importantly, workers.
What impact my research could have
There is little evidence that CSR and similar private governance regimes are having their purported positive impact on working conditions, yet early indicators show that the involvement of workers in alternative governance regimes have engendered fast and meaningful improvements in pay and conditions. I hope that my research will provide understanding of the processes (including enablers and barriers) through which workers can be involved in and drive governance processes, and thereby create more equitable outcomes, shifting power away from capital and towards labour. I hope these insights will be of use to workers and their organisations, activists, lawyers and policy makers in recognising and harnessing opportunities for workers to organise and participate in governance with a view to sustainably improving conditions in exploitative industries and workplaces.
What’s most interesting to me about my work
Lots of work in the global value chains / global production network space has usefully and convincingly highlighted the key drivers of labour abuse and the shortcomings of dominant governance regimes in effectively tackling this, but I hope to contribute to normatively-driven scholarship on the viability of alternatives to drive change. I hope to combine a critical political economy approach with novel data to produce impact-focused research that will be of use to workers fighting for better pay and conditions, while remaining intellectually engaged with relations of power between labour and capital within governance and the global economy more broadly.