Stitching Governance for Labour Rights

Juliane Reinecke is Professor of Management at Said Business School, University of Oxford. She is a Fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Research Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, from where she received her Ph.D. Juliane's research focuses on transnational governance, collective action and multi-stakeholder collaboration, sustainability in organizations and in global value chains. She serves as Associate Editor of Academy of Management Journal and as a trustee of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies (SAMS). Jimmy Donaghey is Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of South Australia, Australia. His main research interests focus on the effects of internationalisation on the employment relationship. He is an editor of the journal Work, Employment and Society. Aside from his academic interest in employment relations, Jimmy has been an active participant in industrial relations in both the UK, where he was a branch officer and national executive member of UCU for over fifteen years, and Australia, where he is currently branch secretary of the UniSA NTEU branch.

• 1. Introduction; 2. The democratic deficit of global supply chains; 3. Democratic representation: structures and claims; 4. After Rana Plaza: mending a toxic supply chain; 5. Representative alliances in the creation of the Bangladesh Accord; 6. Creating representation through industrial democracy vs. CSR: the Accord and Alliance as a natural experiment; 7. When transnational governance meets national actors: The politics of exclusion in the Bangladesh Accord; 8. Building representative structures at the workplace level; 9. Conclusions: the emergence of transnational industrial democracy?; Appendix 1. The practical and political issues of studying transnational labour representation; Appendix 2. When CSR meets industrial relations: reflections on doing interdisciplinary scholarship.

'Through their detailed empirical work on the ground in Bangladesh and their thoughtful theorising on democratic representation, the authors show that what seems like an unsolveable problem - achieving better labour standards in the global garment industry - hinges on one core ingredient: the voice of workers. Their book sheds light on who can legitimately take up this role in the absence of institutionalised structures of representation, taking us through the complex and fragile alliances on different levels that have emerged in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster. A great read for anyone interested in the intricacies of making global supply chains more sustainable, be it from an industrial relations, a governance or a management perspective.' Elke Schüßler, Head of Institute of Organizational Science, Johannes Kepler University Linz