Brands as labour rights advocates? Potential and limits of brand advocacy in global supply chains

• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Author: Chikako Oka
• Date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12172

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Brands as labour rights advocates? Potential and limits of brand

advocacy in global supply chains

Chikako Oka

School of Management, Royal Holloway

University of London, Egham

Surrey TW20 0EX, United Kingdom

Correspondence

Chikako Oka, School of Management, Royal

Holloway University of London, Egham,

Surrey TW20 0EX, United Kingdom.

Email: chika.oka@royalholloway.ac.uk

There is a growing phenomenon of brand advocacy, where brands pressure a producer country

government to take pro-worker actions such as respecting the rights of activists and raising mini-

mum wages. This article examines the potential and limits of brand advocacy by developing a

conceptual framework and analysingthree recent cases of brand advocacyin Cambodia’s garment

industry. The studyshows that brands’action and influence are shaped by issuesalience, mobiliza-

tion structures,political opportunities/contexts, and resource dependency. This article makes both

empirical and theoretical contributions. This is one of the first studies delving into the advocacy

role of brands in promoting labour rightsand conditions vis-

a-vis government. Moreover, the arti-

cle develops a testable framework specifying the conditions under which brands are likely to

respond, act collectively, and influence government for pro-worker change. It also offers novel

insights by applying social movementlenses and casting brands associal movement actors.

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INTRODUCTION

On January 3, 2014, minimum-wage strikes were violently crushed by

the military police, killing five garment workers and wounding more

than 30 in Cambodia’scapital. Twenty-three union leadersand workers

were detained for months without trial. This deadly incident, widely

covered by the international media, provoked public outcries and calls

to release the detained activists. A large group of brands and global

union federations (GUFs) formed a united front and wrote joint letters

and engaged in talkswith the Cambodian government.After months of

pressuring and brands’credible threat of withdrawing orders, the

detained activistswere finally released.

This episode illustrates how brands,often targeted by activists and

the media as the culprit of sweatshop conditions, are increasingly act-

ing as labour rights advocates vis-

a-vis producer countrygovernments.

This phenomenon,which I call brand advocacy, is particularly interesting

given that corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts to improve

labour rights andconditions in global supply chains have knownserious

limitations. Scholars find that the progress made thanks to the CSR

approach through codes of conduct and monitoring has been largely

limited to health andsafety issues (Barrientos & Smith, 2007; Bartley&

Egels-Zand

en, 2015), while it has failed to address workers’right to

organization and living wages (Anner, 2012; Egels-Zand

en & Merk,

2014; Locke, 2013). Moreover, the CSR approach to labour tends to

address visible issues, notably child labour, while leaving fundamental

conditionsunchanged (Jamali, Lund-Thomsen,& Khara, 2017).

Scholars increasingly recognize that improving labour conditionsin

global supply chains requires a confluence of forces. Locke (2013)

argues that privateregulation has the best chance of succeeding when

layered on and interacted with public regulation. Donaghey, Reinecke,

Niforou, and Lawson (2014) argue that “symbiotic governance,”com-

bining consumer power and labour power is likely to drive progress in

labour conditions in global supply chains. Similarly, Gereffi and Lee

(2016) maintainthat “synergistic governance,”oralliances of public, pri-

vate, and social governance actors, offers a promising pathway for

social and economic upgrading in global supply chains. Nonetheless,

the conditions under which such layered, symbiotic, orsynergistic gov-

ernance emerges and the processes of how that works on the ground

remain understudied. Scholars have examined complementarity

between publicand private labour regulation (Amengual,2010; Coslov-

sky & Locke, 2013; Locke, Rissing, & Pal, 2013), as well as interactions

between private regulation and civil society (Anner, 2013; Distelhorst,

Locke, Pal, & Samel, 2015;Rodriguez-Garavito, 2005).Although impor-

tant, these effortslargely focus on the factory level,limiting their reach

and impact.

Based on three cases of brands’political intervention in Cambo-

dia’s garment industry, this article shows that brand advocacy (i.e.,

pressuring a producer country government for pro-worker action) is a

new form of boomerang politics with potential to make sector-wide

changes despite limitations. This study develops a conceptual frame-

work and illustrates with case evidence that brand advocacy can

prompt states to take pro-worker actions under certain circumstances:

BusinessEthics: A Eur Rev. 2018;27:95–107. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/beer V

C2017 JohnWiley & Sons Ltd

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Received:25 January 2016

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Revised: 15 August2017

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Accepted:19 August 2017

DOI: 10.1111/beer.12172