The “Bad Labor” Footprint: Quantifying the Social Impacts of Globalization

Abstract

Abstract:The extent to what bad labor conditions across the globe are associated with international trade is unknown. Here, we quantify the bad labor conditions associated with consumption in seven world regions, the "bad labor" footprint. In particular, we analyze how much occupational health damage, vulnerable employment, gender inequality, share of unskilled workers, child labor, and forced labor is associated with the production of internationally traded goods. Our results show that (i) as expected, there is a net flow of bad labor conditions from developing to developed regions; (ii) the production of exported goods in lower income regions contributes to more than half of the bad labor footprints caused by the wealthy lifestyles of affluent regions; (iii) exports from Asia constitute the largest global trade flow measured in the amount bad labor, while exports from Africa carry the largest burden of bad labor conditions per unit value traded and per unit of total labor required; and (IV) the trade of food products stands out in both volume and intensity of bad labor conditions. OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2014, 6 7515

RESTART: What, Why, How and So What?

“…When companies develop unhealthy or harmful products, this has consequences for both human health and quality of life (e.g., Collins and Fairchild 2007). And when companies enter markets with weak background institutions and carry out exploitative business practices in order to get cheap labor working under hazardous or highrisk conditions, several social values are under pressure (e.g., Simas et al 2014).…”

Development of a methodological framework for social life-cycle assessment of novel technologies

“…This indicator requires information on whether there is child labour involved for the studied technology across its life chain, including the number of children involved per economic sector per country. This information was not directly available in THEMIS so data on child labour from the U.S. Department of Labor's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor (U.S. DOL 2012) as well as data on the amount of persons involved in child labour per sector per region from the ILO (2010; 2012) was linked to information on total employment which could be extracted from THEMIS (Simas et al 2014). The data on the number of persons working in child labour per sector is multiplied by an assumed average of 2020 working hours per year.…”

“…The total number of child labour hours caused by the introduction of the novel technology can be calculated by multiplying the total employment caused by the introduction of the novel technology with the share of child labour hours per country per sector. A detailed discussion of the methodology as well as of the benefits and drawback of this approach can be found in Simas et al (2014). The baseline for the assessment is the global income Gini when only the reference technology is implemented.…”

Raw Material Equivalents: The Challenges of Accounting for Sustainability in a Globalized World

“…Because the material flow data is not available in sectoral resolution, assumptions as to the allocation of material flows to economic sectors must be made in constructing the environmental extension. This method, referred to as environmentally extended input-output analysis (EEIOA) and essentially based on Leontief's framework [5,6], is constantly advanced and applied to RMC or material footprints [7][8][9] as well as to other RMC-type indicators on energy [10,11], carbon and greenhouse gas emissions [12][13][14], land (reviewed in [15] and [16]), the Ecological Footprint [17,18], water (reviewed in [19]), changes in biodiversity [20], and labor requirements [21,22] and inequality [23] associated with traded goods and services.…”