Race to the Bottom: The Soccer Ball Industry in China, Pakistan and India

Abstract

An antisweatshop movement emerged in the early 1990s, exposing very low wages and poor working conditions in the factories in the world's South that manufacture for big brand-name companies in the global North, which drew up corporate codes of conduct and promised to rein in their suppliers. To ensure that their suppliers complied with the corporate codes, they turned to an elaborate monitoring system, and a new industry of monitoring firms offering factory-inspection services flourished in the global South. There emerged the concept of 'supply chain governance' and a subdiscipline in academia devoted to studying this buyer-supplier relationship, the succes and failure of the monitoring system, and the labour conditions of the workers who make the products within the chains. Has this 'corporate social responsibility' (CSR) monitoring, however, improved labor standards for the supply-chain workers?