Overview

Since the 1990s, human rights advocates, business leaders, and consumers have become increasingly attuned to mitigating sweatshop labor and other abuses in the supply chains that manufacture the clothing, electronics, and countless other products that we buy and use each day. But we know surprisingly little about how companies interact with people in the communities beyond the factory's walls. In many cases, community members are left out of the process of identifying both risks and solutions to problems in global supply chains, including how global companies could add social value in the localities where they operate. Business, governments, and civil society are supposed to be jointly responsible for shaping the remedies available to people harmed in the course of business activity, wherever it takes place. However, the answer to the question of how to do this remains underdeveloped and poorly executed. This book explores the conditions under which local communities and companies can work with one another and the types of remedies available in one of the most widespread and challenging sectors: light manufacturing. Tethered Fates draws on quantitative data (including the 7,000-company database of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre) and original qualitative data to analyze regional and industry-specific trends in stakeholder dialogue globally and at the local level. The book features original interviews with community members in two factory towns in the Dominican Republic, whose perspectives shed light on the prospects for dialogue with companies and the challenges of everyday life in towns where light manufacturing takes place. Tethered Fates does more than simply explain why stakeholder dialogue often falls short as a vehicle for safeguarding economic rights and promoting community development. It also offers an assessment of the varieties of emerging policy alternatives for moving beyond the current state of practice.

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9780190903831

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A masterful expansion of our thinking on economic and social rights, grassroots participation in global governance, and the power relations of global supply chains. Hertel reveals the limitations of the 'business as usual' model of corporate social responsibility and carefully explores alternatives, with an effective combination of history, mapping, and interviews. This study fills important gaps and advances the agenda of human rights scholarship in an era of global challenge. -Alison Brysk, author of The Struggle for Freedom from Fear: Contesting Violence against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization With this meticulous work, Hertel gifts the reader with a rare gem of social science research in the business and human rights space. Through a grounded approach and fresh primary data, she steers our attention to the fates of people-communities as well as workers-tied up in global supply chains and to the systemic poverty that creates the vulnerabilities in the first place. Tethered Fates is a compelling argument for a concept of remedy that considers business responsibility for the broader underdevelopment and underemployment in a society and for why the responsibility to remedy needs to be built into our business models. -Joanne Bauer, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs, Columbia University and Co-Founder, Rights CoLab This book is an important contribution to the ongoing debates around Business and Human Rights (BHR). The research is grounded in case studies where Hertel argues for an alternative Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) paradigm developed by workers and community-based allies. The book also illuminates the potential and limits to WSR and BHR strategies, and points to the need to look at structural roots of poverty and concludes with a renewed call for more robust theory and practice that foregrounds economic rights remedies that are inclusive, dynamic, and adaptive to the human rights challenges of current supply chains in the global economy. -Radhika Balakrishnan, co-author of Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice: The Radical Potential of Human Rights Shareen Hertel's careful and timely research eloquently exposes how business-influenced social responsibility initiatives often leave community members out of the remedy process when harmed by business activities. In contrast, 'worker-driven social responsibility' (WSR) initiatives provide the crucial element of grassroots engagement that often makes remedy possible. Masterfully employing a range of methods from statistical analysis to participant-observation in two small factory towns in the Dominican Republic, Hertel provides a crucial contribution to the literature on social responsibility in global supply chains. This book is highly recommended to scholars and practitioners alike. -Mark Anner, Associate Professor of Labor and Employment Relations, and Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University

Author Information

Shareen Hertel is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut and has worked with foundations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and United Nations agencies in the United States, Latin America, and South Asia for over two decades. Hertel is also editor of The Journal of Human Rights and and has published books and articles across multiple disciplines.

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