How workers shape supply chain governance: struggles to establish, implement and contest private initiatives

This thesis asks how workers shape private supply chain governance (PSCG). It explores three cases of PSCG with contrasting roles for workers in the governance process: the worker-driven Fair Food Program in US agriculture, a union-corporation Global Framework Agreement in Chiquita’s banana supply chain, and a set of corporate-driven Codes of Conduct in other banana supply chains. It argues that workers exercise agency through concrete processes of struggle that can shape PSCG to their interest, even in the context of highly uneven power relations. In some cases, this can rework those relations in favour of workers, and in others this only improves resilience to severe exploitation.

The thesis contributes a novel framework of three stages of struggle in PSCG: to establish, implement and consolidate/contest PSCG initiatives. This process of struggle is underpinned by capital-labour relations, and embedded within interlocking geographic and temporal dynamics — or ‘labour regime’. The framework is applied to the cases based on qualitative, worker-centred field research undertaken in 2022. It shows that when struggles establish a strong role for workers in the governance process backed by material enforcement, workers can secure meaningful and sustained gains, as demonstrated by the Fair Food Program. The struggle to improve and expand those gains is ongoing.

Conversely, where struggles establish initiatives with a weak role for workers and ineffective enforcement, compounded by a repressive labour regime, gains are elusive despite efforts for implementation. In these cases, there are direct attempts to leverage corporate commitments to critique exploitation, but predominantly labour agency turns towards micro-gains to cultivate resilience to severe exploitation, indirectly contesting PSCG. Despite this, unequal power relations are reproduced. PSCG is a site in which workers can make meaningful gains, but this is limited by structural dynamics of capitalist agricultural production and the voluntary nature of PSCG.