Over the last three decades, the production of manufactured goods and services has increasingly moved into global production networks. Rather than taking place within a single firm, the different stages of the production process are split between different businesses located in different countries. Broadly speaking, design, intellectual property, marketing and retailing are located in the north, while manufacturing is contracted out to businesses in developing and emerging economies.
While the generalization of global production networks has created new job opportunities in developing and emerging economies, these jobs are often characterized by poor pay and conditions. Although it is widely recognized that eliminating competitiveness strategies primarily based on the exploitation of labour demands regulation at the transnational level, governments and established interstate cooperation mechanisms have only a limited ability to introduce and enforce appropriate measures. Transnational private regulation systems like corporate codes of conduct and multistakeholder sustainability standards claim to respond to this governance deficit. As most of these systems include work and labour rights conditions, they explicitly aspire to improve employee welfare. Yet, little consensus exists on the effectiveness of their monitoring and enforcement strategies and their ultimate impact on workers.
Stepping back from conventional debates on the overall effectiveness of transnational private regulation, the project focuses instead on agency: the effect of private regulation on the capacity of those involved, especially workers, to act in local contexts. This shift in perspective allows us to explore how different types of transnational labour regulation, different national settings and different firm-level contexts of application combine to form what we call hybrid production regimes. The study examines how those regimes vary in the degree to which they support workers’ collective capacity to take action to improve their own conditions of employment.
The project tests two hypotheses. The hypothesis of institutional complementarity proposes that what is important for the impact of transnational private regulation on workers’ capacity to take collective action is not the regulation scheme in itself, but the interaction between the rights guaranteed by the scheme and existing local and national institutions. The hypothesis of production regime dependency proposes that different types of hybrid production regime will provide more or less propitious contexts for worker collective action.
The project uses a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative analysis and qualitative case studies. Data are gathered in four countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Brazil) via firm-level surveys of workers, managers and trade union representatives and interviews with expert informants.

Professor Jean-Christophe Graz is the lead investigator of the project; the research teams includes one post-doc researcher, one Ph.D. student, academic partners and field partners in charge of conducting surveys.