Corporate Responsibility and Labour Rights

Chapter 4

‘I'll tell you what I want …’: womenworkers and codes of conduct

Ruth Pearson and Gill Seyfang

INTRODUCTION

There has been much discussion in the last 30 years of the terms under which women workers have been incorporated into what is now known as the global value chain. Since the 1970s researchers and activists have produced a litany of evidence and complaints that working conditions are bad, wages are very low and non-wage benefits are often not paid, even when theoretically required by national labour laws (Elson and Pearson, 1981; Lim, 1990; Pearson, 1998; Razavi, 1999). Although part of the analysis of the subordinate position of ...