Towards Worker-Driven Supply Chain Governance: Developing Decent Work Through Democratic Worker Participation

Abstract

The management of working conditions in global supply chains has become a pressing issue in supply chain research and practice. In the absence of effective public labor regulation, most of the focus to date has been on supplier auditing and compliance with codes of conduct. The question of how workers themselves can be part of the decent work governance architecture in a post-Fordist era has received far less attention. Grounded in industrial democracy, this article proposes the concept of worker-driven supply chain governance—the democratic participation of workers and their representatives in supply chain governance systems at both the transnational and workplace levels. It develops a sensitizing framework for understanding how buyer companies can foster decent work through enabling democratic participation of workers in their supply chains through trade unions and other representative structures. In doing so, this article demonstrates the potential of supply chain management scholarship to expand its reach through studying the role of worker representation in supply chain governance.