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Governing Global Supply Chains: Workers’ Rights and Power in a Transnational Economy (STG-MA-ECR-GSC)

STG-MA-ECR-GSC

Description

Global supply chains have reshaped how goods and services are produced, fragmenting production across borders and integrating firms and workers into transnational networks. While this model has generated growth and new opportunities, particularly in parts of the Global South, its benefits remain uneven and its capacity to deliver sustained improvements in working conditions is uncertain. At the same time, systems of law and governance have struggled to keep pace. Traditional regulatory frameworks, whether corporate accountability mechanisms or labour law protections, often fail to match the realities of global production. In response, a wide range of actors, including states, international organizations, firms, unions, and civil society, have advanced new forms of regulation across multiple levels.
This course examines the challenge of protecting workers' rights in global supply chains. It approaches global supply chain governance as a dynamic site of policy innovation and regulatory experimentation and explores how different actors seek to address the challenges created by supply chain capitalism. The course asks how emerging governance frameworks attempt, often imperfectly, to improve workers’ rights within global value chains and what forms of governance are most effective in addressing contemporary labour rights challenges. Situated at the intersection of key global debates, the course engages with issues of economic development, inequality, human rights, migration, gender, and labour. It introduces students to diverse and often competing approaches developed across public, private, and hybrid governance arenas, and considers how these interact across national, transnational, and international levels.
The course is structured around four themes. It begins by examining the emergence of supply chain capitalism and the labour governance challenges created by contemporary patterns of global production. It then explores different approaches to governing workers’ rights in global supply chains, including private governance mechanisms such as corporate social responsibility and multi-stakeholder initiatives; public regulatory approaches such as transparency legislation and human rights due diligence; and worker- and union-led strategies including global framework agreements, enforceable brand agreements, worker-driven social responsibility, and transnational organizing campaigns. The third part of the course examines how power is exercised, contested, and regulated in global supply chains through strikes, trade policy, antitrust perspectives, and transnational litigation. The final part focuses on enforcement and institutional design, asking what makes supply chain governance effective and exploring emerging approaches to improving workers’ rights in transnational production systems.
Attention is paid to how different regulatory approaches distribute and contest power relations within supply chains and to their effectiveness in improving working conditions in practice. Drawing on real-world cases, policy debates, and a stakeholder negotiation simulation, students will compare governance tools and examine the interactions between public, private, and hybrid forms of regulation. The course also looks forward, asking what more effective forms of labour governance might look like in a globalized economy. It invites students to critically assess existing models and to explore emerging approaches that seek to better align regulation with contemporary patterns of production, ownership, and control.
 

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