Principal speaker
Professor Jimmy Donaghey
[with co-authors Juliane Reinecke (Warwick), Christina Niforou (Birmingham) and Benn Lawson (Cambridge)]
Abstract: Global supply chains are part of the corporate strategy of many multinational companies, with often adverse effects on labour conditions. While employment relations scholars focus on a production-oriented paradigm, revolving around interactions between employers, workers, and government, much of the activism motivating the development of private labour standards is based around companies’ relations with their consumers. Using Wright’s dimension of labour power and Hirschman’s analysis of consumer power, this paper proposes an analytical framework conceptualising the interface of employment relations and consumption relations within global supply chains, identifying four regimes of labour governance: governance gaps, collective bargaining, standards markets, and complementary regimes. Finally, we suggest a research agenda for examining the role of consumption relations in the changing nature of global labour governance.
Speaker: Jimmy Donaghey is Associate Professor of International and Comparative Industrial Relations, Industrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick. Prior to joining Warwick, Jimmy was Lecturer in Management at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research focuses on three broadly, overlapping issues: employee representation, comparative industrial relations and the international regulation of employment relations. Recent projects have included a project comparing the effects of the EU’s Information and Consultation Directive on employee voice in the UK and Republic of Ireland; a comparative analysis of the effect of the Information and Consultation Directive in six divergent EU economies; and a project comparing working lives in rural Ireland and Canada. Jimmy is in the early stages of developing a project on models of global labour governance across supply chains for which this paper is the start.
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