Conference Agenda

Outsourcing has become a defining feature of modern labour markets, driven by the fragmentation of production, flexible labour regulations, and internationalized production processes. Although a substantial body of literature focuses on wage disparities between outsourced and in-house workers (e.g. Goldschmidt and Schmieder, 2017, Fana et al., 2024), other aspects of job quality have received limited attention. This paper addresses the gap by exploring whether outsourced workers experience poorer job conditions compared to their in-house counterparts and whether this disparity affects all types of workers uniformly.

Using data from the European Working Conditions Survey covering 15 European countries, we construct a comprehensive multidimensional set of sixteen job quality indicators grouped into four dimensions: intrinsic job quality, employment quality, health and safety, and working time.

While most of the literature deals exclusively with outsourced workers in elementary/manual occupations, one novelty of our research is that we test the difference of job quality across the whole occupational distribution and across different sectors. This type of analysis makes possible to establish to what extent the job quality penalty varies between different types of outsourced occupations and sectors.

Drawing from these insights, we use econometric techniques to address the following research questions:

• To what extent are outsourced workers subject to a job quality gap compared to their in-house peers?

• Is the job quality difference between outsourced and non-outsourced workers uniformly distributed across sectors and the occupational distribution?

Our findings reveal that outsourced workers generally endure worse working conditions than in-house employees, particularly in terms of intrinsic job quality and employment stability. Outsourced workers are more likely to engage in less cognitively stimulating and socially supportive tasks, experience limited career development opportunities, and face higher work intensity. However, differences in health and safety outcomes appear minor.

Another significant finding is that being outsourced does not equally distributed. Workers in low-knowledge-intensive sectors are more adversely affected than their counterparts in high-knowledge-intensive sectors. Moreover, while top-level outsourced workers face fewer penalties or even enjoy comparable (or even higher) job quality to their in-house peers, lower-tier outsourced workers experience significant disadvantages.

These results contribute to the literature by underscoring the necessity for a nuanced, multidimensional understanding of job quality in outsourced employment contexts. Our analysis provides a more complete view of the implications of outsourcing beyond wages, highlighting the multifaceted disadvantages faced by many outsourced workers.

In cooperation with Praveen Jha, Bruno de Conti, Ernesto Noronha, Premilla d’Cruz, Ben Scully et al.

Countries in the Global South generally have less favorable starting positions in global value chains, less economic policy leeway than countries in the Global North as well as less favorable working conditions and fewer employee representation rights. Nevertheless, on the basis of exemplary case studies, clear differences can be identified between countries such as Brazil, India and South Africa, as well as in sectors such as the automotive and textile industries. Against this background, the question arises as to which national institutional structures can produce crisis reactions that are oriented not only to economic but also to labor policy success criteria.

Empirically, this presentation would compare analyses in Brazil, India, and South Africa in the automotive and garment industry. On this basis, I expect to provide answers to the question how differently the three countries of the Global South have reacted to the multiple crises since the pandemic and what this reveals about the leeway of nation-state policy.

Instructive here is firstly the case of industrial policy involving trade unions in the Brazilian automotive sector but not in South Africa and by no means in India. Secondly, I will discuss exemplarily to what extent the Brazilian and South African garment industries deviate from the dominant global model, which is also represented by India. These empirical cases should contribute to finding out whether historical path dependencies, unique institutional and social configurations at the national level, and specific positions in international hierarchies and networks result in different albeit limited capacities for economic and social upgrading, particularly during periods of crisis.

The contribution would complement existing approaches that concern the interaction between GVC constellations and national policy or national institutional systems by integrating new analytical dimensions, and also by emphasising the value of analysing these dimensions in light of their mutual interactions.

As a result of the comparison of political trajectories, it will be shown that Brazil is most likely to involve trade union representation not only in wage policy, as in South Africa, but also in industrial policy initiatives. India, on the other hand, represents the most unfavorable political constellation in this comparison, as employee representatives are continually excluded from problem solving.

The global garment supply chain is being profoundly impacted by the multi-form crisis troubling the global political economy. This is having consequences for the rights and wellbeing of workers that threaten to undo sustained progress towards achieving standards of Decent Work across the sector globally. In Cambodia, for example, the garment industry employs nearly 1 million people, 80% of whom are women. In part through the achievements of the ILO Better Factories Cambodia programme, which assesses labour compliance in export factories, basic labour standards including compensation, occupational safety and health, and forced and child labour have generally been on a sustained upward trajectory across recent decades. However, rising costs coupled with global trends of aggressively downward pricing have squeezed suppliers leading to the proliferation of a vast subcontracting industry, characterised by informal factories providing illicit forms of irregular and unregulated work. To date, little is known about the scale of subcontracting in Cambodia or conditions of work within it. Responding to this gap, in this paper, we present the first ever mapping, census, and survey of Cambodia’s subcontracting garment sector, conducted in 2023.

Our research identified more than 250 subcontracting factories across two of the garment industry’s most densely populated provinces, accounting for more than 15 percent of the garment industry’s workforce there. In this paper, I present the findings from a randomly sampled survey of 500 workers across this segment of the industry. The survey evidences a series of substantive decent work deficits across the subcontracting segment of the garment industry in Cambodia, including widespread violation of minimum wage and working time regulations; almost unanimous lack of freedom of association and social protection; and returning incidence of child labour. The findings of the research evidence a growing challenge for securing labour rights at the furthest end of global supply chains, undermining work towards attainment of SDG 8 on Decent Work in Cambodia and beyond. They challenge the model credentials of Cambodia’s garment industry, where ‘“ethical production” has been showcased as a comparative advantage of the Cambodian industry’ (Xhafa and Nuon 2018). Instead, whilst current efforts at transnational labour regulation are having some effect on basic labour rights at direct suppliers, they are failing to make an impact further down the supply chain. The research calls for new frameworks to improve standards of work in the face of the persistence of informal work in the global garment supply chain.

How are workers' expectations about working conditions shaped by trade and the institutions that govern it? Answering this question provides new insights into the politics of globalization in developing countries. We explore this question through a pre-registered, face-to-face, between-subject survey experiment with $\sim$2,500 garment workers in Morocco. The survey was informed by qualitative interviews that informed survey design. We find that workers do not expect superior labor conditions in exporting firms. Instead, they associate improved labor conditions with the presence of regulatory institutions—whether by foreign buyers or state regulators. These expectations are differentiated: workers believe that institutions improve compliance-related conditions but do little to ease work intensity. Our findings suggest that the institutions that regulate labor standards in global trade critically shape workers’ expectations about its benefits. This evidence contributes to our broader understanding of the relationship between trade and labor standards as perceived by workers and identifies ways in which regulatory institutions can potentially buffer against disillusionment with trade-openness.