The domestic politics of corporate accountability legislation: struggles over the 2015 UK Modern Slavery Act

Abstract

Over the last decade, the norm of corporate accountability for labour standards in global supply chains has become increasingly prominent within the transnational governance arena. As global governance initiatives to spur due diligence for labour standards and combat exploitation in global supply chains—especially its most severe forms frequently described as modern slavery—have proliferated, societal coalitions have pressured states to pass domestic legislation to the same effect. In this article, we examine the regulatory processes that spurred the passage of one piece of anti-slavery legislation, the UK’s 2015 Modern Slavery Act. Our findings corroborate a number of established expectations regarding business opposition towards new legislation to raise public labour standards, but also provide a clearer picture of the mechanisms through which industry actors impact policymaking processes. Paradoxically, such mechanisms include business actors’ championing of weak regulatory initiatives, CSR activity and partnering with civil society organizations. Understanding industry actors’ use of these strategies improves our understanding of how transnational norms of corporate accountability and anti-slavery are being contested and shaped at domestic scales.

Big audit firms as regulatory intermediaries in transnational labor governance

“…This body of legislation varies with respect to institutional design and levels of stringency; it can be usefully thought of as a continuum, encompassing both “hard” and “soft” legal approaches (LeBaron & Rühmkorf ,b). As LeBaron and Rühmkorf (,b) have shown, the form that such legislation takes is partially determined by the influence of societal and industry coalitions within domestic regulatory spheres. For instance, the French version of labor‐focused disclosure legislation contains penalties to corporations for non‐compliance.…”

“…The 2012 California Act version of due diligence, by contrast, is much more soft‐law in orientation and less specific in its description of firm obligations. In the UK context, there is both “hard” and “soft” law with respect to CSR, therefore it is not inevitable that corporate disclosure legislation should take a “soft” law approach (LeBaron and Rümkorf ).…”

Historicizing Modern Slavery: Free-Grown Sugar as an Ethics-Driven Market Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain

“…Crane returned to the subject of modern slavery in a co-authored paper that examines forced labour in UK domestic supply chains, offering a cross-industry comparison of the regulatory gaps surrounding forced labour in the UK (Crane et al 2017 ). Drawing on political science research on modern slavery (e.g., LeBaron 2014a ; LeBaron and Rühmkorf 2017 ), Crane et al argue that addressing governance gaps around forced labour requires new thinking about how to design operative governance that is sensitive to local cultural contexts. Christ and Burritt ( 2018 ) examine modern slavery in an accounting journal paper that considers the recent efforts of the Australian policymakers to suppress modern slavery.…”

Global Supply Chain Governance: The Search for ‘What Works’

“…It contains a small-scale empirical assessment of supply chain documents of 25 FTSE100 companies. 68 The documents that were assessed in that study included supplier codes of conduct, CSR/sustainability reports and, where available, the terms and conditions under which these companies purchased goods and services. The study analysed the way in which these 25 companies deal with the issues of forced labour and bribery in their supply chains.…”