Better Work Initiative: ILO, IFC Partnership

This is the program Lizzie mentioned in class tonight through the ILO to raise the bar and set the stage for a race to the top in labor standards.

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BETTER WORK INITIATIVE

Better Work is developing practical tools to help enterprises improve their compliance with labour standards and increase their competitiveness.

Better Work is a unique partnership programme between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Launched in February 2007, the programme aims to improve both compliance with labour standards and competitiveness in global supply chains.

Better Work involves the development of both global tools and country-level projects, with a focus on scalable and sustainable solutions that build cooperation between governments, employers’ and workers’ organizations and international buyers. Donor support also plays a large role in implementation of global and country-level activities.

Improving compliance with labour standards in global supply chains is an important part of a pro-poor development strategy. The protection of workers’ rights and entitlements helps distribute the benefits of trade to promote human, social and economic development. Compliance with labour standards can also help enterprises be more competitive through a variety of factors such as access to new markets and buyers and new sources of financing and credit, and can contribute to high productivity and quality. Better Work supports enterprises in implementing the ILO core international labour standards and national labour law.

From consumers to clusters can cooperation be the key?

A week removed from discussing the relevance consumers play in the policy approach to protecting rights and promoting sustainable development I would like to address a bi-product of the fair trade movement that seems to run parallel to the idea of industrial clusters and upgrading the global supply chain for sustainable economic growth. This idea being cooperation, or more specifically the vertical and horizontal integration and dissemination of information utilized by both fair trade producers and industrial clusters to combat trade liberalization and globalization.

The fair trade movement is about more than a cute label that causes consumers to get that warm fuzzy feeling in their stomachs, market access, fair wages, and sustainable living conditions for those who participate. It is also an access point to information, where producers can gain knowledge and skills to improve their lives and where technology transfers lead to more consistent harvests/productions and increased quality. Fair trade producers may even go as far as forming cooperatives or collectives to gain greater bargaining power in the market. This is where we begin to see the parallel between fair trade producers  and the small/medium sized firm industrial clusters (inter-related groups of industries that are geographically concentrated and inter-connected by the flow of goods and/or services)  examined by Schmitz and Nadvi. Well, that and the fact that many fair trade goods are marketed through global supply chains run by fair trade certifiers!

 So why does this matter? Well, at the center of both of these approaches is cooperation. Cooperation within industry being fair trade producer cooperatives  and cooperation between industry meaning small firms specializing in a product integral for the geographical industrial cluster. Yes, a rather revolutionary idea to spread the wealth of knowledge and disseminate information within a market in which competition is supposed to reign supreme. As large multinationals lock up their rights to intellectual properties for eternities, the opposite seems to create shared resistance for fair trade producers and industrial clusters allowing them resilience in a market they may not have had access or bargaining power in without cooperation.

 Furthermore, Tewari and Pillai push this idea of cooperating forward by discussing how industrial clusters, in response to environmental regulations abroad, increased not only cooperation vertically and horizontally within the supply chain but with the government and business organizations. This case backed up Schneider and Doner’s view that business organizations may not necessarily be “rent seeking monsters” but may play a crucial function in development. It also illustrated the need for the government to play a role in sustainable development  of industrial sectors but in a cooperative private-public partnership type of way rather than in a Judith Tendler Devil’s deal sort of way.  

 At the end of the day cooperation in the sense of vertical and horizontal integration and the sharing of information should be explored for the fact it allows the small/medium sized firms to prosper in the global market and in the case in India (Tewari and Pillai) remain competitive even while facing global environmental regulations. Or, maybe it is just another oversimplified, nonreplicable answer to the question of development fellow scholars can criticize!