Ando International garment factory. Aaron Santos for the ILO/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
Chances are, you’re reading this on a laptop. If so, you’re sitting at the end of a long and winding global supply chain. The typical computer contains a memory chip from Malaysia, a battery from Indonesia, a screen from South Korea, RAM from Germany, and a hard drive made in Thailand. This all before it was assembled in China and then bought off a shelf in Buenos Aires, New York, or Vienna. The reality is that most products are now made by a global workforce fragmented across dozens of national boundaries, worksites, and employers.
Transnational retail and manufacturing companies like Apple, Walmart, Tesco, and Unilever organise large swathes of global production across these complex, multi-national networks. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates that they encompass 80% of all world trade. The transnational corporations (TNCs) sitting at the top of them source goods through commercial contracts across thousands of arms-length supplier firms, each of which is a discrete legal entity employing its own workers. This allows products to be made cheaply and quickly, but it also distances TNCs from legal responsibility for the labour and environmental practices associated with their production.
