Beschreibung
1. Introduction Indonesia is one of the Asian countries industrial production has been shifted to after the crisis of Atlantic Fordism. While European and North-American countries-the former "industrial nations"-are transforming themselves into "knowledge-based economies", world market production of industrial goods is now located in countries like China, India and Indonesia. Whereas export production has fuelled rapid economic growth and rising national income, it was underpinned by poverty wages and inhumane working conditions in those world market factories that became to be known as the new "sweatshops". Multinational corporations like Nike and Adidas began shifting their production sites to Indonesia in the 1980s looking for cheap labour (Merk 2011b). In fact, it was Nike in Indonesia that sparked the anti-sweatshop movement in the 1990s after reports about massive human rights abuses in factories producing shoes for Nike had surfaced. The subsequent global campaign against Nike can be considered one of the constitutive moments of the emergence of the broader movement against neoliberal globalisation. Civil society organisations managed to effectively damage the public image of Nike through the tactic of "naming and shaming" (Bartley and Child 2014). Image, today, is a core asset for companies like Nike-selling not only shoes, but a sportive lifestyle of freedom and youth. This image and the picture of young women producing these shoes under hellish conditions were a bad match. Growing consumer pressure endangered Nike's profits. It was only in reaction to these movements that Nike felt the need to introduce one of the first "voluntary codes of conduct" of a transnational corporation (Merk 2011b). Clearly, Indonesia is a critical case when it comes to discussions of workers' rights in the age of globalisation. Today, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a general feature of the global economy; every global player has a CSR programme. While these programmes are supposed to demonstrate to consumers that the companies are taking responsibility for working conditions along their supply chains, they have been widely criticised for largely failing to deliver on the promise of substantially improving them (Burckhardt 2011). Mere company-side codes of conduct and CSR policies are widely seen as "blue-washing" (John 2011), because they are geared towards improving public image without fundamentally changing their business model in order to enable social improvements. CSR initiatives are voluntary, usually unilateral and not legally binding. Company codes of conduct that have been criticised as mere "window dressing" are increasingly replaced or amended by industry-wide codes, multi-stakeholder initiatives and global framework agreements. Many companies seek to improve the credibility of their codes of conduct by linking them to the core labour standards of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). These are the most commonly acknowledged reference points for the content of codes of conduct-prohibition of child labour, prohibition of forced labour, non-discrimination, freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining (ILO 1998). The ILO as the only tripartite organisation of the United Nations (UN) framework representing governments, trade unions and employer associations is one of the central nodes of a global multilevel governance network of public and private labour regulation. Since 1999, the ILO is organising its activities around the notion of "decent work" (ILO 1999). The decent work agenda is the result of a major revision process within the ILO, developed as a response to the challenges of neoliberal globalisation. Global restructuring processes of deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation transformed the world of work in profound ways, requiring the ILO to adopt a completely new strategic framework for its institutional action (Vosko 2002, 2004). On the one hand, this framework recognises the need to extend labour rights and social protection to groups of workers outside the "standard employment relationship" or at the margins of formal employment systems. The proliferation of informal, precarious, non-standard work or "downgraded labour" (Castells and Portes 1989) has been a central feature of neoliberal global restructuring. The new ILO convention Decent Work for Domestic Workers (ILO 2011a) is an example of the commitment to work towards incorporating marginalised and vulnerable groups of workers in the "informal sector"-mostly women-into the framework of international labour regulation (Schwenken 2012). This move can be seen as a progressive step towards representing the interests of the majority of workers worldwide, rather than protecting the relatively high standards of European and North-American standard employees-mostly men-at the expense of informalised workers. On the other hand, this move also means that the previously existing body of international labour standards has been weakened, because only the most fundamental labour rights have been defined as the core labour standards that the ILO aims to implement around the globe as part of the decent work agenda (Standing 2008). From a scholarly perspective stressing the progressive potential of "decent work", the ILO's agenda may be seen as an element of an emerging post-neoliberal framework of labour regulation (on the notion of post-neoliberalism cf. Brand and Sekler 2009). This perspective is underpinned by the hope that the world economic and financial crisis starting in 2008 may have signalled the end of the neoliberal period and opened up political space to re-regulate the global economy, shift power away from financial markets and reignite productive growth generating new jobs. By now, these hopes have been largely disappointed (Scherrer 2011). Austerity policies in Europe show rather that the crisis has been used by political and economic elites to embark on a further round of "roll-out neoliberalism" (Peck and Tickell 2002) flanked by new social policy discourses (Graefe 2006). 1.1 Research Question and Hypothesis The following question arises: What is "decent work" in this context? Is decent work a discourse that challenges the hegemony of neoliberalism by mobilising counter-hegemonic forces such as progressive trade unions, social movements and activist non-governmental organisations (NGOs)? Is it a flanking mechanism for neoliberalism, adding legitimacy to the neoliberal framework through a largely symbolic appeal to social policy without fundamentally changing underlying power structures and, thus, reproducing neoliberal hegemony? My hypothesis is that it can be both, depending on the context, on who is making use of the decent work discourse in what kinds of practices, for which ends and how. What is new about decent work, it can be argued, is less its actual content in terms of hard law labour regulation than its discursive form that symbolically proclaims the right to decent work for all. Decent work by itself does not codify any new legally binding agreements and subsequent possibilities of sanctions. Rather, it uses moral persuasion and voluntariness to promote compliance with existing conventions (Vosko 2002). What is more important, it creates a new normative framework or discursive order not only for the ILO itself but also for other social actors working on the field of (transnational) labour rights or struggling to improve the working and living conditions of workers worldwide. The domestic workers convention is an example of how a specific network of social movements and institutional actors appropriated the decent work discourse in order to extend existing labour rights to vulnerable groups of workers who have been previously excluded from these rights. Decent work proclaims the "right to labour rights" that can be used by different actors on various scales and sites to claim those rights. On the one hand, decent work can th...
Autorenporträt
Felix Hauf, Dr. phil., ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Politikwissenschaft der Universität Frankfurt am Main.
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