Transnational Labour Governance: A Critical Review of Proposals for Linkage through the Lens of the Rana Plaza Collapse in Bangladesh

Abstract

Exploitative working conditions in the factories of developing countries like Bangladesh have fueled scholarly arguments for linking labour governance through trade/economic cooperation agreements/arrangements. This article argues that despite rich theoretical analyses of the structural form of these trade/economic-labour linkage mechanisms, less attention has been paid to the conceptualizations of the social, which tend to be narrow. These conceptualizations yield a restrictive approach to labour governance, maintaining a sharp difference between fundamental and redistributive approaches to transnational labour law. This approach may focus only on workers engaged in exporting sectors; defend individualized, civil, and political rights; weaken the participation of non-state actors in factory monitoring; and accentuate voluntary forms of corporate responsibility. Referring to some of the challenges in the transnational governance mechanisms launched after the collapse of Rana Plaza, this article argues that it is necessary to consider the aggregate effects of labour deregulation and the distributional problems of labour.