Spotlight: Towards Worker-Driven Supply Chain Governance: Developing Decent Work Through Democratic Worker Participation

This week we talked to Jimmy Donaghey about his research with Juliane Reinecke entitled “Towards Worker-Driven Supply Chain Governance: Developing Decent Work Through Democratic Worker Participation”

“The management of working conditions in global supply chains has become a pressing issue in supply chain research and practice. In absence of effective public labour regulation, most of the focus to date has been on the emergence of private labour governance that often takes the form of supplier auditing and compliance with codes of conduct. The question of how workers themselves  can be part of the decent work governance architecture in a post-Fordist era has received far less attention. Grounded in Industrial Democracy, this article proposes the concept of worker-driven supply chain governance – the democratic participation of workers and their representatives in supply chain governance systems at both the transnational and workplace levels. It develops a sensitising framework for understanding how buyer companies can foster decent work through enabling democratic participation of workers in their supply chains through trade unions and other representative structures. In doing so, this article demonstrates the potential of supply chain management scholarship to expand its reach through studying the role of worker representation in supply chain governance and motivates novel research areas where the SCM field can make substantial contributions.”
The full article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jscm.12250
https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12250

This research is also part of our EDI: Managing Working Conditions in Supply Chains: Towards Decent Work
During our EDI Webinar Juliane Reinecke also discussed her work with Jimmy.