Corporate Social Impact and Exploitation of Workers on the Ground

This study examines how global fashion retailers’ particular actions, including cancelling orders, impacted the livelihood of workers in Bangladesh amidst Covid-19 disruptions. Our research is motivated by the apparent research gap in understanding (missing) link between retailers’ CSR standards and social impacts on the grounds of their particular operation. Driven by critical realist inquiry and informed by labor process theory, we conducted interviews with workers—primarily women—in Bangladesh garment factories supplying global fashion retailers in North America and Europe, as well as with NGOs, trade unions, and development agencies advocating for workers' rights in the sector. This study shows workers' and NGOs’ accounts of how retailers’ particular actions, including cancellations of orders during the Covid time, exacerbated economic insecurities and job losses, exploitation and abuses, and negligence of basic human rights, employment rights and rights to organise, especially among women workers. Such accounts by less powerful stakeholders, including workers, on retailers’ social impacts, expose the exploitation of women and inequality in the global supply chains. The study reveals that retailers do not document or disclose their adverse social performance regarding human rights and working conditions, potentially concealing the truth or silencing workers' voices.