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Business and Labor Rights in Global Supply Chains
Online Event
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This talk will argue that the very nature of global supply chains, which has led to a fragmentation of work, is directly at odds with good labor and human rights. Private interventions focused on monitoring and compliance have resulted in limited improvements for workers over the years. To understand these limitations, the lecture will draw on lessons from one of the worst industrial disasters in history, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh in 2013. The lack of progress in many vital areas created a ripe situation for suffering under an unanticipated and unprecedented global pandemic. The talk will conclude by arguing that changes to the business model itself are necessary to make substantial gains in improving the conditions of workers in global supply chains.
Speakers
Sanchita Saxena
Executive Director
Institute for South Asia Studies - UC Berkeley.
Sanchita Banerjee Saxena is a researcher working in social science, public policy, and business and human rights. She is currently the Institute for South Asia Studies executive director at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies under the Institute. She is also a lecturer of responsible business at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Saxena is the editor of Labor, Global Supply Chains, and the Garment Industry in South Asia: Bangladesh after Rana Plaza (Routledge, 2020) and author of Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka: The Labor Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries (Cambria Press, 2014). She serves on the editorial board for the Bristol UP series on Business, Finance & International Development.
Saxena has been a practitioner resident at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy and a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. She is currently a non-resident research fellow at the Institute of Human Rights and Business, serves on the BRAC USA Advisory Council, and is a member of the Research Network on Sustainable Global Supply Chains. She frequently gives invited lectures and publishes commentaries in the popular media.
Saxena holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.