HRM and Global Value Chains

Economic crises have disrupted supply chains and many firms have shifted production to suppliers. Supply disruption and demand contraction have impacted most heavily on workers in the Global South. This chapter draws on interdisciplinary perspectives to ask: How and where do dominant suppliers explicitly or implicitly promote labour repression down their supply chains in hard times? How has the reconfiguration of supply chains affected the dissemination of practices up and down supply chains? And how might different – and in many instances, diminishing – forms of formal and informal regulation impact on both of these? The chapter reveals variation according to extra-, intra- and inter-organisational factors such as sector and locale. Contrary to what might be expected, not all emerging markets are following the liberal market model, with some showing renewed appetite for regulation of worker rights, with implications for HRM, contracting and labour standards.