Corporate Accountability and Worker Rights

ARC collaborates with national worker rights advocates to document their strategies for holding governments and corporations accountable. Through participatory action research, ARC learns from and connects these national advocates to international policy dialogues and helps share their experiences.

Two central questions guide this program. First, how do workers and affected communities hold multinational corporations (MNCs) accountable – directly and through government regulations? Second, what policies and programs facilitate their ability to exercise their rights and secure remedy?

ARC’s Corporate Accountability and Worker Rights program connects bottom-up and top-down change strategies – lifting up worker-driven solutions to better inform international trade, development, and business and human rights policies.

Research professor Judy Gearhart leads the program for ARC, leveraging over 25 years of experience building multi-stakeholder coalitions to help workers and affected communities secure legal and corporate reforms.

1.  Worker-driven solutions for advancing accountability

Worker voice, as protected by the right to organize trade unions and to bargain collectively, is essential to advancing corporate accountability. These core, enabling rights are necessary for any sustainable prevention of egregious abuses such as forced labor, child labor, and gender-based violence. They are also critical building blocks for advancing equity and enabling workers to seek remedy for rights violations.

‘Remedy’ is the third pillar of the UN Guiding Principles (UNGPs) on Business and Human Rights (after ‘Protect’ and ‘Respect’) – and the most challenging to fulfil for companies and governments alike. It requires that workers have the agency to seek out and demand remedy. Yet governments intent on maintaining ‘business-friendly’ export sectors often limit labor rights protections and restrict worker agency as a result.

ARC research draws on lessons across industries. It learns from apparel worker organizers’ transnational strategies to negotiate binding agreements with MNCs. It documents the challenges of enabling worker-driven solutions in challenging, remote settings including cocoa farms, isolated fishing communities, and at sea.

The research in this working paper examines how national worker organizers and rights advocates leverage transnational advocacy to gain influence and drive reforms. Case studies feature the experiences of global South organizers in the apparel, cocoa, and seafood industries.

In 2023-4 ARC is building on this research to explore how migrant fishers are organizing in transnational supply chains, and how small-scale fishers are seeking better access to social services and rights protections.

2. Global policies to enable workers’ access to remedy

ARC draws lessons from transnational organizing in industries such as apparel, cocoa, and seafood. In these and other industries, transnational supply chain advocacy networks (TSCANs) have emerged to connect national organizers’ demands to international campaigns for industry reforms. CSO coalitions like the TSCANs create locally grounded networks with broad industry knowledge and the ability to facilitate South-South learning. These ‘knowledge networks’ are essential to informing trade and development policies and to improving human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) and the regulation of MNCs’ global impact.

ARC research monitors closely how laws mandating HREDD and laws that incentivize HREDD, such as forced labor import bans, are advancing pathways for workers to demand remedy. Working with national organizers, ARC assesses the potential impact of corporate policies to mitigate rights abuses and how governments can strengthen information flows among diverse stakeholders to improve workers’ access to remedy.

Each year, Judy Gearhart works with a team of graduate students to assess the implementation of HREDD laws and their impact on corporate practice in the seafood industry. Each report draws on legal research and practitioner interviews to summarize current policy debates and challenges in ensuring HREDD enables workers’ access to remedy.

2024’s report Casting Light on the Deep , asks whether greater transparency can protect fishers and oceans.

ARC, Pulitzer Center, and Washington College of Law co-hosted a film screening and panel discussion 29 February 2024.

Steve Sapienza (Pulitzer Center) introduced Squid Fleet, a documentary from The Outlaw Ocean Project. It tells the story of fishers and the conditions they endure on the Chinese fleet.

An expert panel discussed worker experiences and policy gaps in the global seafood supply chain, pathways to remedy, security dimensions of illegal fishing, and strengthening inter-agency cooperation.

Judy Gearhart (Accountability Research Center) introduced Ian Urbina (The Outlaw Ocean Project), Martina Vandenberg (Human Trafficking Legal Center), Sally Yozell (Stimson Center), and Molly McCoy (U.S. Department of Labor).

Watch the discussion here.

The Labor Link Podcast features the experience and analysis of worker organizers who are advocating for worker rights and corporate and government accountability in the apparel and seafood sectors.

Hosted by Judy Gearhart, the Labor Link Podcast is affiliated with the Labor Radio Network.

Series 2 (2024)

• Episode 1: John Hartough (International Transport Workers’ Federation) on the challenges of organizing migrant workers in the Thai fishing industry.
• Episode 2: Mario, Nguyen, and Lin (organizers with the Fishers’ Rights Network) on challenges and obstacles to their rights education and organizing work to improve wages and working conditions.
• Episode 3: TheHoya Dy (Center for the Alliance of Labor and Human Rights) on CENTRAL’s approach to working with migrant fishers working in Thailand, which connects direct services and training on safe migration with organizing and community-based network building.
• Episode 4: Hariyanto Suwarno (Indonesian Migrant Workers Union) and Charli Fritzner (Greenpeace USA) on how Indonesia’s oldest migrant workers union came to work on fishers rights and Greenpeace’s campaigns for seafood brands to phase out transshipment and implement real human rights due diligence.

Series 1 (2022)

• Episode 1: Sawit Kaewaan (State Enterprises Workers’ Relations Federation) on mobilizing national trade unions to support migrant workers in Thailand.
• Episode 2: Tola Moeun (Centre for the Alliance of Labor and Human Rights) on social movements and transnational organizing for apparel workers’ rights in Cambodia.
• Episode 3: Kalpona Akter (Bangladesh Center for Workers’ Solidarity) on bringing bottom-up organizing to shape global campaigns for apparel workers in Bangladesh.
• Episode 4: Aung Kyaw (Migrant Worker Rights Network) on bringing his activist drive from Myanmar to organizing migrant workers in Thailand.

Series 1 was produced by Evan Matthew Papp of Empathy Media Lab and Series 2 is produced by Jules Taylor.

Bangladesh Center for Workers’ Solidarity, Bangladesh

BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, Bangladesh

Destructive Fishing Watch, Indonesia

Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, Cambodia