<i>A Fair Day's Wage for a Fair Day's Work? Sweated Labour and the Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation in Britain</i> By Sheila Blackburn

Laybourn, Keith

doi:10.1111/j.1468-229x.2008.432_43.x

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…They increasingly used production mediators ("sweaters") that 23 could "extract[] the most labour … at the lowest possible price from manufacturing units with the most vulnerable workers that could be found" (Miller, 2012, p. 1). In reference to Blackburn (2007), Miller argues that this system works in contexts marked by an oversupply of labor and no union organization, varying or seasonal demand, and a lack of proper management. The discourse in the cooperation paradigm aims to address root causes of poor working conditions at the bottom of global value chains, but it does little, if anything, to change the pyramid-shaped, unequal, exploitative (global) production system.…”

Section: The New Cooperation Paradigm: a Critical Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Value Chains: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?

2013

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We outline the drivers, main features, and conceptual underpinnings of the compliance paradigm. We then use a similar structure to investigate the drivers, main features, and conceptual underpinnings of the cooperative paradigm for working with CSR in global value chains. We argue that the measures proposed in the new cooperation paradigm are unlikely to alter power relationships in global value chains and bring about sustained improvements in workers' conditions in developing country export industries. After that, we provide a critical appraisal of the potential and limits of the cooperative paradigm, we summarize our findings, and we outline avenues for research: purchasing practices and labor standard noncompliance, CSR capacity building among local suppliers, and improved CSR monitoring by local resources in the developing world.

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Section: The New Cooperation Paradigm: a Critical Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Value Chains: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?

2013

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“…The connection between sweating and outwork/homework (and its effects on poverty and public health) was remarked upon by contemporary observers 3 and more recently extensively documented by historians such as Bythell (1978), whose study of outwork in 19 th -century Britain was emblematic (see also Blackburn, 2007). While mechanisation led to the emergence of large factories from the second half of the 19 th century, contracts for clothes (and other products) were also tendered out through a succession of contracts (for a lower price at each point to allow intermediaries to secure a return) with actual production taking place in small sweatshop factories (often little more than some small rooms with machinery) or in the home (again typically a room in a tenement building).…”

Section: Sweating Subcontracting and Garment Makingmentioning

confidence: 95%

Subcontracting and low pay kill: lessons from the health and safety consequences of sweated labour in the garment industry, 1880–1920

Gregson

Quinlan

2020

Labor History

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Over the past 20 years, regular reports of eroding safety standards and deaths among workers, customers and other members of the public in an array of industries ranging from transport (ride-share platforms, long-haul trucking and aviation), construction (including, in Australia, insulation batts installation), mining, oil rigs and refineries, and factories, have emerged. These workplace deaths shared one largely overlooked characteristic; all involved subcontracted work arrangements and sometimes very elaborate supply chains. Where these fatalities have been subject to critical investigation, three causal factors consistently emerge, namely economic/cost pressures compromising safety, disorganisation, and regulatory failure. These failures raise important political and industrial questions, not the least of which is the social cost of dominant neoliberal policy-settings that encourage subcontracting practices. Furthermore, historical object lessons can provide insights because subcontracting of work is by no means new. Drawing on evidence from the garment industry, predominantly in the UK, but with reference to the USA and other countries, this paper highlights substantial historical evidence of the safety risks embedded in this type of business/work arrangement. The inquiries and investigations into sweated labour discussed here not only highlighted risks to health; they also suggest a contemporary need for urgent reform to the regulation of work in order to mitigate the prospective risks of injury and disease, including epidemics.

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“…Trade Boards were a key feature of the New Liberal legislation under the prewar Liberal government. 65 The number of workers affected was quite small, and the extent of the impact on these disputed, but for proponents the law marked the establishment of a new principle. The historian R. H.Tawney, who was actively involved in the calls for such intervention, cited the laws as a rejection 'of the doctrine, held for three generations with almost religious intensity, that wages should be settled, as it was said by free competition alone, is one of the most remarkable changes in economic opinion which has taken place in the last hundred years…'.…”

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

Churchill's Defeat in Dundee, 1922, and the Decline of Liberal Political Economy

Tomlinson

2019

Hist. J.

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This article uses Churchill's defeat in Dundee in 1922 to examine the challenges to liberal political economy in Britain posed by the First World War. In particular, the focus is on the impact of the war on reshaping the global division of labour and the difficulties in responding to the domestic consequences of this reshaping. Dundee provides an ideal basis for examining the links between local politics and global economic changes in this period because of the traumatic effects of the war on the city. Dundee depended to an extraordinary extent on one, extremely ‘globalized’, industry – jute – for its employment. All raw jute brought to Dundee came from Bengal, and the markets for its product were scattered all over the world. Moreover, the main competitive threat to the industry came from a much poorer economy (India), so that jute manufacturing was the first major British industry to be significantly affected by low-wage competition. Before 1914, the Liberals combined advocacy of free trade with a significant set of interventions in the labour market and in social welfare, including trade boards. The Dundee case allows us to examine in detail the responses to post-war challenges to these Liberal orthodoxies.

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A Fair Day's Wage for a Fair Day's Work? Sweated Labour and the Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation in Britain By Sheila Blackburn

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Value Chains: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?

Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Value Chains: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?

Subcontracting and low pay kill: lessons from the health and safety consequences of sweated labour in the garment industry, 1880–1920

Churchill's Defeat in Dundee, 1922, and the Decline of Liberal Political Economy

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