Paper short abstract:

The ethical codes of labour practices imposed around the world are aimed to reshape the organisation of production. This paper explains the ambivalent local experiences of global solutions, i.e., auditing, CSR, and labour law focusing on the crises management of garment factories of Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2012, garment factories in Bangladesh have been undergoing transformations with the implementation of factory compliance principles that aim to ensure better working conditions for the workers. The backdrop for such implementation of 'changes' to the production regime, is the scale and severity of accidents in the factories that have killed thousands of workers. Increasingly, the ethical codes of labour practices imposed around the world by global buyers are shaping the organisation of production and the regimes of labour deployment. For the garment factories in Gazipur, Dhaka, these requirements took the form of independent company codes of conduct, which were private company initiatives that allowed buyers to select factories based on their relative compliance regulations. The emphases on the auditing of the factories and on so-called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices converged in the production regime as well as governance. Aimed to create good economic practices auditing, CSR practices, and labour law are represented as the radical reorientation of businesses in promotion of an era of 'humane capitalism'. In this paper, I will argue, firstly, that the auditing culture is a bureaucratic process that only helps in the accumulation of capital for the owners and producers, and, secondly, that it promises a kind of rhetoric of long-term growth and prosperity through which the current crisis came about. Based on ethnographic findings, I will illustrate that all of the policies that are part of the global governance create conditions for accumulation and add an extra layer of dispossession against the workers.