Labour Networks under Supply Chain Capitalism: The Politics of the Bangladesh Accord

The Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety is a transnational governance approach towards implementing factory safety standards in the Bangladeshi garment sector. Some commentators argue that the Accord is a ‘game changer’ in times of corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially because it includes transnational buying companies in a legally binding contract with union federations. This article takes the Accord as an interesting case for how labour networks become part of a transnational governance arrangement. Taking a cultural political economy perspective, the author assumes that the Accord marks a practice of implementing ethical demands under conditions of supply chain capitalism and argues that calling the Accord a paradigm shift would be overly optimistic: while labour networks were able to use a crisis in the regime of CSR policies, they could not challenge the managerial culture of translating political demands according to the conventions of supply chain management. These conventions separate the sources of profit from the political claim for decent labour standards. In a transnational governance initiative, labour networks rely on such management conventions, since they are constitutive of the production network. From this perspective the Accord is an impressive reaction to the Rana Plaza disaster, but not a game changer.