Who Made That?: Influencing Foreign Labour Practices through Reflexive Domestic Disclosure Regulation

Abstract

An important tool of "decentred" regulation, including reflexive law, is corporate information disclosure. Disclosure regulation can have an important normative influence on corporate behaviour because it introduces a risk element that must be managed by corporate leaders. The challenge for regulators is to identify the scope of disclosure that will cause corporate responses of the sort desired by the state. This article considers the potential role of disclosure regulation as a tool for influencing labour practices beyond the borders of the regulating state and, in particular, within the vast global supply chains of multinational corporations. In the context of improving labour practices in developing states, the goal of regulation must be foremost the empowerment of the workers and their organizations in those states, and of the indigenous and emerging global social movements that assist them. The article examines three recent proposals for mandatory disclosure of information about global labour practices, and concludes that the least ambitious of them (disclosure of factory addresses) may contribute to this goal more effectively than broader proposals that seek to inject raw information about actual labour practices into the consumer and investor markets of advanced economic states.

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