Informal workers play a central role in the global value chain along which electronic waste (e-waste) is collected and recycled. The failure of governments to recognize informal e-waste workers as legitimate stakeholders in the e-waste economy means these workers assume acute health and livelihood risks. This article argues that the exclusionary dynamics of contemporary e-waste governance paradigms, in failing to acknowledge the legal identity of some stakeholders and the legal responsibilities of others, contribute to a grossly imbalanced and environmentally unjust globalization of e-waste marked by the proliferation of dangerous and exploitative forms of work. E-waste legislation must embrace and reflect the needs and interests of marginalized social groups whose livelihoods depend on their participation in the urban waste economy. Waste governance paradigms must recognize informal workers’ claims over urban space and resources, in other words, their spatial citizenship and fundamental place as workers within the global hi-tech economy.

Labour and environmental law operate in silos. This is equally true in the transnational sphere, despite the 2011 endorsement of UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Labour rights as human rights appear easier to grasp than environmental human rights, and the UNGPs specifically highlight the work of the ILO. Due to egregious events such as the Bangladesh Rana Plaza factory collapse, transnational governance regimes have emerged to better ensure building safety and respect for labour rights. Yet the process of production of “fast fashion” is not only a problem for workers whose health and safety are put at risk, but also for children and families who live in the vicinity of polluting factories and experience “slow death” as a result of contaminated air and water. This paper will explore how a reconceptualization of the worker as a relational being and corporeal citizen might bridge the silos.

Socially responsible corporate governance (SRCG) is a product of the interaction of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. These two transnational business governance schemes have converged around the principles of accountability, sustainability, and due diligence. This article will examine to what extent SRCG can be useful in promoting worker protection. It will contend that, as a reflexive regulation, SRCG is normatively indeterminate and may easily be subject to regulatory capture by the traditional actors of corporate governance. This article will argue that these risks may be alleviated by the interaction of SRCG with transnational labour law (TLL). Transnational labour law increases SRCG’s responsiveness to the value of worker protection by offering labour more direct sources of participation to strengthen SRCG’s enforcement and alleviate risks of capture. Moreover, the principles of TLL weave a coherent and meaningful framework which can be used to assess the quality of the various corporate governance initiatives.

Exploitative working conditions in the factories of developing countries like Bangladesh have fueled scholarly arguments for linking labour governance through trade/economic cooperation agreements/arrangements. This article argues that despite rich theoretical analyses of the structural form of these trade/economic-labour linkage mechanisms, less attention has been paid to the conceptualizations of “the social,” which tend to be narrow. These conceptualizations yield a restrictive approach to labour governance, maintaining a sharp difference between fundamental and redistributive approaches to transnational labour law. This approach may focus only on workers engaged in exporting sectors; defend individualized, civil, and political rights; weaken the participation of non-state actors in factory monitoring; and accentuate voluntary forms of corporate responsibility. Referring to some of the challenges in the transnational governance mechanisms launched after the collapse of Rana Plaza, this article argues that it is necessary to consider the aggregate effects of labour deregulation and the distributional problems of labour.

This article analyzes the corporate citizenship (CC) practices by which multinational corporations (MNCs), which have invaded the public arena, impose new standards, forcing the collectives to retire from democratic spaces. In order to verify whether this new relationship to the law fosters the emergence of a citizenship regime for everyone, the research studies its configurations based on a MNC, hailed as a role model, in a plant in Canada and a mine in Ghana. The results, which reveal a fragile autonomy in one case and a heteronomy in the other, raise the question of effectiveness of the CC torn between economic liberalism and industrial democracy. The article concludes that, under its neoliberal posture, the CC is far from conciliating its workers’ individual aspirations for equality in their difference and their collective tendency towards homogeneity; both principles articulate liberalism and democracy but do not solve the opposition between liberal individualism and collective action, including union actions, in a flexible business in the era of economic globalization.

The analysis proposed here defends the necessity to operate a shift in the terms that seem to dominate, at present, the thinking on new forms of slavery or servitude, in order to fully integrate gender relations as production and exploitation social relationships. In this regard, based on two field studies performed with domestic and agricultural workers subjected to the Canadian immigration programs, we must try to see how the work relations amalgamated under the concepts of “modern slavery” and “unfree labour” give rise not only to a working class that is excluded from the canonical wage-earning class, but also and simultaneously to a racialized, intrinsically sexual workforce: “non-nationals” who are also male workers and female workers whose bodies are put to work, exploited and branded differently.

This article explores the inequality inhering to low-wage migrant labour and critically evaluates the current capacity of human rights law to account for and address this inequality. This article uses two recent human rights tribunal decisions as case studies through which to conduct this examination: PN v FR, 2015 BCHRT 60, and OPT v Presteve Foods Ltd, 2015 HRTO 675. While these cases establish the positive role of human rights law in accounting for the wider context in which inequality impacts on migrant labour, this role is also inherently limited by the purpose, scope, and function of the Tribunals. This article will identify and discuss issues illustrated in the cases that are reflective of deeper systemic and structural inequalities attending low-wage migrant labour, including: the underlying reasons motivating low-wage labour migration; the legal regulations governing migrant workers’ status and employment conditions; and, the racialization of migrant workers.

The article considers the temporary labour migration program in Canada, which catapults workers from the global South into work and wider relations in the global North, in the context of debates swirling around Anglo-American labour law. There is widespread consensus that labour law is experiencing a sustained moment of crisis in the face of neoliberal globalization. Not widely considered is how this crisis relates to temporary labour migration and the global South-North relationship and, in turn, how this relationship may impact emergent approaches tasked with transforming or transcending the field. Critical interventions seeking to confront the “southern question” within the socio-legal imaginary have gone largely unnoticed by labour law scholars. Transnational labour law may hold potential for an alternative account of the racialized production of unfree migrant labour. But only if its adherents can truly confront the dynamic unfolding through temporary labour migration—that of the “South of the North.”