Labour Rights from Labour Wrongs? Transnational Compensation and the Spatial Politics of Labour Rights after Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza Garment Factory Collapse.

Antipode

Asia

The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Bangladesh, which resulted in the loss of at least 1134 lives and injuries to hundreds more, exposed the brutality of a global production system in which labour rights have become privatised, circumscribed, and deterritorialised. Unprecedented for an incident of its kind, affected families received $30 million in “compensation” from global apparel companies through the Rana Plaza Arrangement, a voluntary initiative overseen by the International Labour Organization (ILO). This article situates the Arrangement in debates over labour rights in global supply chains, presenting it as a hybrid mechanism that recognises workers’ right to compensation for injury or death but relies on the voluntarism of corporate social responsibility for funding. Exploring the complex role of neoliberal regulation in reproducing geographies of uneven development, I show how a transnational initiative can restrict labour rights even as it attempts to expand such rights.

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Prentice Rebecca