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While there are heated debates about how digitalization affects production, management and consumption in the context of global value chains, less attention is paid to how workers use digital technologies to organize and formulate demands and hence exercise power. This paper explores how workers in supplier factories in global value chains use different digital tools to exercise and enhance their power resources to improve working conditions. Combining the global value chain framework and concepts from labour sociology on worker power, the paper uses examples from the garment industry in Honduras and the footwear industry in China to show how workers used old and new digital tools to create and enhance associational and networked powers. Digital tools were used by workers and their allies in the global value chain to lower costs of communication, increase information exchange and participate in transnational campaigns during labour struggles vis-à-vis firms and governments in structurally and politically repressive environments. The paper contributes to our understanding of how workers use of digital technologies to exercise and combine different resources of power in online and offline actions in global value chains, as well as how they are confronted by new dimensions of constrains which include digital surveillance and control by the state.

Little consensus exists about the efectiveness of transnational private governance in domains such as labor, the environment, or human rights. The paper builds on recent scholarship on labor standards to emphasize the role of labor agency in transnational private governance. It argues that the relationship between transnational private regulatory initiatives and labor agency depends on three competences: irst, the ability of workers' organizations to gain access to processes of employment regulation, implementation, and monitoring; second, their ability to insist on the inclusion of employers and state agencies within such processes; and third, the ability of workers to efectively exercise leverage in pursuit of particular goals. The paper develops a framework, called hybrid production regime, for examining how workers' capacity to act at the local level depends on how these three collective competences are addressed in the institutionalization of capital–labor relations between the transnational and national levels.

Inhalt: 1. Bestandsaufnahme der Europäischen Nachbarschaftspolitik; 1.1. Entstehung; 1.2. Ziele der EU; 1.3. Aufbau und Prinzipien der ENP; 2. Sicherheit und Stabilität als Hauptziele der ENP?; 3. Probleme der ENP: "No carrots, no sticks?" – und weitere Aspekte; 3.1. Asymmetrie der Beziehungen; 3.2. Ökonomische, politische und soziale Probleme der Regionen
Osteuropa und Südkaukasus; 3.3. Konkurrenz der EU mit anderen internationalen Akteuren in
Osteuropa und im Südkaukasus; 3.4. Die fehlende Beitrittsperspektive; 4. Fazit: Zukünftige Perspektiven der ENP

Preamble

The project explores the extent to which transnational private governance affects the capacity of workers to take collective action in pursuit of improvements in employment conditions in developing countries.

Transnational private labour regulation such as corporate codes of conduct and multi-stakeholder standards on labour, environment or human rights claim to respond to the governance deficits that have arisen as a result of the globalization of global production networks. Yet, little consensus exists about the effectiveness of their monitoring and enforcement practices or their ultimate impact.

Context

Since the 1990s, the concern has intensified about the responsibility of businesses in global subcontracting chains for exploitation of labour, inequality, and pollution. Many private transnational regulatory initiatives claim to address this concern by incentivizing multinational companies to voluntary sign up to human rights and environmental standards often referring to, for example, the International Labour Organization's core labour standards. The effectiveness of this approach remains a complex and highly debated issue.

Over the last decade, scholars have studied the emergence, performance and problems related to transnational private labour regulation, their interactions on the transnational level and local level compliance. Stepping back from conventional debates on the overall effectiveness of transnational private governance, the project focuses instead on agency: the effect of transnational private labour regulation on the capacity of those involved, especially workers, to act in local contexts. With our project, we explore how different types of transnational private labour regulation, different national settings and different firm-level contexts of application combine to form what we call transnational hybrid production regimes.

Aim

The study examines how these regimes support workers' collective capacity to take action to improve their own conditions of employment.

What part do/should corporate actors play in global governance? With regard to concerns over such issues as public health, education, human rights, and the environment, they arguably are influential. But what is the actual nature of their engagement, and what motivates it? What challenges do they face when they assume more responsibility in these spheres? Are they responsive to the normative environments in which they operate? In answering these questions, the authors of Corporate Actors in Global Governance offer an empirically rich picture of the often contentious governance roles of corporations in today's global political economy