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This paper examines whether the Rana Plaza disaster of 2013 has changed the approach by which German garment retailers govern their supply chains, particularly with regard to labour standards issues. We analyse institutional developments and firm-level initiatives that have resulted as a response to the Rana Plaza disaster and the heightened public attention that German garment retailers have received regarding labour standards. Our analysis is based   on   interviews   with   large   German   garment   brands   and   retailers   as   well   as representatives from multi-stakeholder initiatives, unions, and NGOs and on information available in public statements by institutional initiatives and industry statistics. On the institutional level, we find that massive political attempts to regulate labour standards in global supply chains have been initiated and describe these with regards to their aims as well as the actors involved. On the firm level, we observe a more multi-layered process, with some   firms being increasingly proactive regarding labour standards issues and others engaging more reluctantly in new initiatives and practices. We describe these patterns in detail and discuss them in light of the wider German institutional infrastructure in which lead firms are embedded. We thereby contribute to a better understanding of the German garment retail sector, in particular institutional and firm-level approaches governing labour standards in global garment supply chains in light of this country’s political economy.

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The tragic 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh represented a focusing event (Birkland, 1998) that galvanized key transnational and national stakeholders into developing and implementing policies aimed at improving factory safety in Bangladesh while being cognizant of the need to uphold related international labour standards. Drawing mainly on a survey of 50 Bangladeshi garment factory managers part of a larger project that includes lead firms based in Australia, Germany, the UK and Sweden we investigate three aspects of contemporary supply chain governance. These are: 1) relationships between lead firms, mainly based in the developed countries, and factory management regarding business in general and labour standards in particular; 2) factory responses to a new institutional ensemble of organizations requiring improvements in building safety; and 3) relationships between   factory   management   and   employees,   both   in   terms   of   procedural   (worker representation) and substantive (pay and working conditions) aspects. While progress had been made in improving building safety and lead firm-factory relations appear to be positive and durable, questions remain regarding treatment of employees.

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The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh in April, 2013 resulting in the death and injury of more than 2000 workers from the country’s export garment industry was one of the worst industrial disasters in recorded history. The tragedy galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters. Prominent in these efforts were two multi-stakeholder agreements which brought together lead buyers, trade unions and NGOs in a concerted effort to improve health and safety conditions in the industry. These initiatives represent a move away from the buyer-driven compliance-based model that continues to dominate CSR to what is being described as a ‘cooperation-based’ model, which brings   together   multiple   stakeholders   who   affect,   and   are   affected,   by   the   business operations of lead multinational corporations (MNCs) in global value chains. This paper is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers with regard to these new initiatives. It examines competing interpretations of stakeholder analysis within the CSR literature and uses these to frame its key research question: has the shift from compliance to co-operation as the basis of CSR been a promising way forward or merely a shift in rhetoric? We use a survey of garment workers to explore the extent to which these initiatives have brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, where progress has been slowest and why.

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Based on an analysis of the main institutional responses to the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, we find that the catastrophe produced institutional change in some areas, but has thusfar failed to do so in others. We focus our analysis on Germany, which has significant garment import from Bangladesh. Specifically, we find that the majority of governance initiatives are production-oriented and not consumption-oriented. This means that they are mostly geared towards changing working conditions at supplier factories and not towards challenging the fast fashion business model and the related consumer behavior. By drawing on the ‘focusing events’ framework we outline the problem definition, policy templates, and actors behind the most important initiatives and are thereby able to offer explanations for this outcome. We conclude by outlining alternative consumption-oriented courses of action that could complement production-oriented initiatives.

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Local supplier corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries represents a powerful tool to improve labour conditions. This paper pursues an inter-organizational network approach to the global value chain (GVC) literature to understand the influence of suppliers’ collective behaviour on their CSR engagement. This exploratory study of 30 export-oriented and first-tier apparel suppliers in Bangladesh, a developing country, makes three relevant contributions to GVC scholarship. First, we show that suppliers are interlinked in a horizontal network that restricts unilateral CSR engagement. This is justified in that unilateral CSR engagement is a source of heterogeneity in labour practices; consequently, it triggers worker unrest. Second, we present and discuss an exploratory framework based on four scenarios of how suppliers currently engage in CSR given their network’s pressure toward collective behaviour: unofficial CSR engagement, geographic isolation, size and competitive differentiation, and external pressure. Finally, we show the need to spread CSR homogeneously among suppliers and to reconceptualize the meaning of CSR in developing countries, encouraging more scrutiny toward horizontal dynamics.

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