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Based on an analysis of the main institutional responses to the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, we find that the catastrophe produced institutional change in some areas, but has thusfar failed to do so in others. We focus our analysis on Germany, which has significant garment import from Bangladesh. Specifically, we find that the majority of governance initiatives are production-oriented and not consumption-oriented. This means that they are mostly geared towards changing working conditions at supplier factories and not towards challenging the fast fashion business model and the related consumer behavior. By drawing on the ‘focusing events’ framework we outline the problem definition, policy templates, and actors behind the most important initiatives and are thereby able to offer explanations for this outcome. We conclude by outlining alternative consumption-oriented courses of action that could complement production-oriented initiatives.

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Local supplier corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries represents a powerful tool to improve labour conditions. This paper pursues an inter-organizational network approach to the global value chain (GVC) literature to understand the influence of suppliers’ collective behaviour on their CSR engagement. This exploratory study of 30 export-oriented and first-tier apparel suppliers in Bangladesh, a developing country, makes three relevant contributions to GVC scholarship. First, we show that suppliers are interlinked in a horizontal network that restricts unilateral CSR engagement. This is justified in that unilateral CSR engagement is a source of heterogeneity in labour practices; consequently, it triggers worker unrest. Second, we present and discuss an exploratory framework based on four scenarios of how suppliers currently engage in CSR given their network’s pressure toward collective behaviour: unofficial CSR engagement, geographic isolation, size and competitive differentiation, and external pressure. Finally, we show the need to spread CSR homogeneously among suppliers and to reconceptualize the meaning of CSR in developing countries, encouraging more scrutiny toward horizontal dynamics.

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Using qualitative data comprising interviews with multiple respondents in 45 garment brands and retailers, and unions and other stakeholders, the authors analyze the emergence of the Action Collaboration Transformation (ACT) living wages initiative, asking how the interfirm coordination and firm-union cooperation demanded by a multifirm transnational industrial relations agreement (TIRA) developed. Synthesizing insights from the industrial relations and private governance literatures along with recent collective action theory, they identify a new pathway for the emergence of multi-firm TIRAs based on common group understandings, positive experiences of interaction and trust. The central finding is that existing union-inclusive governance initiatives provided a platform from which spillover effects developed, facilitating the formation of new TIRAs. The authors contribute a new mapping of labor governance approaches on the dimensions of inter-firm coordination and labor inclusiveness, foregrounding socialization dynamics as a basis for collective action, and problematizing the limited scalability of this mode of institutional emergence.

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This article analyzes the impact of the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse on garment lead firms’ labor standards policies in the light of new governance approaches, particularly the pathbreaking Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Based on a sample of 20 Australian and German garment firms, the authors find that firms with low prior baseline standards revised their supply chain and sourcing policies and signed the Accord. Firms with medium and high baseline standards responded variously, from making no changes to revising their policies and signing the Accord. Firm response variation can be explained by stakeholder pressure occurring in different national industrial and institutional contexts following the Rana Plaza incident, which served as a focusing event. Results suggest the wider applicability of the focusing event framework for industrial relations scholarship and highlight some of the mechanisms driving changes in industrial relations institutions.

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The April 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, which killed over 1,000 garment workers and injured many more, shocked the world. Since then, lead firms, supplier factories, governments and multiple other stakeholders have sought to improve building safety in Bangladesh and to strengthen the governance of labour standards in garment supply chains. This report summarizes the results of the Garment Supply Chain Governance Project, which provides the most thorough analysis of lead firms’ current practices and their impact on garment factories and workers in the context of various public and private labour governance initiatives to date.

Since the Rana Plaza disaster, buyer-supplier relations, lead firm labour governance approaches and worker outcomes in Bangladeshi garment factories have changed. These changes can be attributed to an intensified climate for compliance regarding primarily building safety, but also other aspects of working conditions. While it is difficult to tease out precisely the causal impact of each initiative implemented in Bangladesh since Rana Plaza, our data indicate that this climate of compliance and the resulting changes can be strongly associated to lead firms’ engagement in the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety (Accord).

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