Global Value Chains, Labor Rights, and the Nature of Transnational Law

Abstract

Abstract This Article develops a framework to analyze the laws that bear on working conditions in global value chains (GVCs), a production structure based on hierarchical international firm networks. In so doing, it contributes to broader debates about how to conceptualize law under contemporary “globalization.” The Article argues against the widespread view that GVCs—and today’s globalized legal order—are fundamentally different from a prior regime of Westphalian state sovereignty. Instead of this vision of globalization as rupture with the past, the Article proposes a “monist” perspective according to which the state has always been embedded in a single body of conflicting and contested transnational legal rules. In this view, sovereign power was never something of which all states could have more or less. Rather, sovereignty is a bundle of rights that can only ever be distributed to specific states vis-à-vis one another and private actors like labor unions and corporations. The Article emphasizes the analytical benefits of this conceptualization of transnational law for policy projects like those of improving working conditions in GVCs and empowering workers globally.