Who Holds the Key to Improving Labor Standards?
INTERVIEWER: There has always been this kind of huge divide between rich and poor, you say, [but] now we are able to know about it much more quickly and see it up front. Can you talk about the political consequences of that? NEMAT SHAFIK: Well, that’s a very difficult issue. The politics are very complex. [Let’s take sweatshops as an example.] On the one hand, [multinational] companies are subjected to huge reputational risk. And what’s an interesting twist is that many of these sweatshops are not owned by the multinationals whose brands are at stake; they’re all subcontractors. And the companies, the major corporations will say: “These aren’t my factories. I’m just buying from them.” So where does their accountability end and begin? I have been involved in working with many corporations and trying to deal with this issue, and when they put pressure on the factory owners, they also run the risk of cutting them off, and then the people in those factories lose their jobs. And it’s not cl
