The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production.

Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains—such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads—generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

Richard P. Appelbaum is Research Professor and MacArthur Foundation Chair in the Departments of Sociology and Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The author or editor of many books, he is coeditor most recently of Can Emerging Technologies Make a Difference in Development? Nelson Lichtenstein is MacArthur Foundation Chair in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He is the author or editor of many books, including most recently State of the Union: A Century of American Labor.

Fourteen papers analyze the system of world capitalism under which the majority of workers labor, explaining how corporate social responsibility (CSR) has failed to achieve its professed objectives, different approaches to the governance of global suply chains, the prospects for workers' rights in China, and the way forward for labor rights.

Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy seeks to understand why sweatshops continue in the apparel industry despite the 20-year-long investment in private regulation (monitoring corporate codes of conduct) by major brands and retailers.... In sum, Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy is an important book that is particularly useful as a textbook for students learning about the barriers to effective improvements in labor standards, as well as for useful pathways to explore for the future. In addition, practitioners will gain from the discussion of potential avenues forward.