Buyer Engagement and Labour Conditions in Global Supply Chains: The Bangladesh Accord and Beyond

The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (‘the Accord’) has received both praise and criticism concerning its implications for corporate responsibility and power. This article contributes to the debate by situating the Accord within a broader set of activities that buyers are engaged in to promote better labour conditions in their supply chains. The authors identify three approaches of buyer engagement: auditing, capacity building and advocacy. Drawing on interviews conducted with European brands and retailers, the article shows how buyers perceive the merits and challenges of these approaches, and whether and how they discharge responsibility and power through these activities. The study shows that the Accord is seen primarily as part of the auditing approach with a key feature being its use of collective leverage as a means of enforcement. While greater buyer power has not necessarily been accompanied by greater responsibility, the article highlights heterogeneity among buyers in how they take up different approaches, painting a more nuanced picture of buyer responsibility and power.     

Indigenous student labour and settler colonialism at Brandon Residential School

This paper contends that unfree Indigenous student labour at residential schools was a key—and underappreciated—component of settler colonialism in Canada. Colonial administration and the churches attempted to “civilize” and assimilate Indigenous people—and prepare the frontier for white settlers—through residential schooling. Labour, in accordance with Euro-Canadian gender norms, was expected to usher Brandon Industrial Institute (later Brandon Residential School) students from the “backwardness” of traditional lifeways to the industriousness and assimilation necessary for their roles in the serving classes of modern society. I use archival sources—newspapers, unpublished reports, Department of Indian Affairs documents, and United Church correspondence and photographs—and employ a version of Norman et al.'s “settler-colonial grid of recognizability” to examine student labour. This paper argues that the Department of Indian Affairs and church officials at Brandon Residential School sought to make Indigenous youth “legible” under the settler-colonial grid of recognizability through agricultural and manual work for boys and domestic labour for girls, both of which ensured the school's financial viability. I propose that this under-explored aspect of settler colonialism could be understood through three main themes—imperial settler-humanitarianism, the logic of containment, and productive bodies—that are traced across the lifetime of the school.     

A survey of the Nabataean/Roman Site,Umm at-Tawabin,Ghor as-Safi,Jordan

Umm at-Tawabin is an extensive Nabataean/Roman site overlooking Wadi al-‘Arabah in southern Jordan. The site, as a whole, consists of a number of buildings, circular stone structures, a roadway and other features that are fortified, for the most part, by a lengthy wall and with a predominance of Nabataean and Roman surface pottery on the ground. Up until now, the site has only been documented in brief in a handful of survey reports since its discovery in the late nineteenth century and its chronology has since been the subject of some conjecture among scholars. With a grant from the Palestine Exploration Fund, the author has sought to better understand the occupational history of this undoubted historically important site through survey and by extension, a study of its surface pottery and architectural remains.