Between Private Governance and Public Regulation: COVID-19 and Workers’ Rights in Global Garment Supply Chains

Abstract

The article traces the adverse human rights impacts of business responses to COVID-19 in the garment sector to long-standing systemic problems in global supply chain management. It scrutinizes attempts by States and business enterprises in Europe to address these adverse impacts in the light of the ongoing implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The article discerns a shift in the European legal and policy framework from early attempts to promote corporate social responsibility to more recent modalities of home state regulation of corporations. In response to concerns that the EU’s regulatory turn in business and human rights may exhaust itself in perpetuating economic imperialism and market hegemony, the article highlights the importance of ensuring access to judicial remedies for foreign victims of business-related human rights violations; and of grounding unilateral home state regulation in a multilateral international legal framework.

Keywords: UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, global supply chains, corporate social responsibility, corporate human rights due diligence, home state regulation, garment sector, COVID-19, European Union