CROSS-BORDER SOCIAL DIALOGUE AND AGREEMENTS: An ...

Cross-border social dialogue and agreements
value added that was traded in the 1980s and 1990s and, furthermore,
the rising share of imported intermediate inputs in the domestic production
process of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) countries. In other words, not only do we observe an
increase in the trade in finished goods, even the trade in inputs to produce
these goods has grown considerably in recent decades. This implies
more than just a quantitatively higher level of trade integration; rather, it
underlines a qualitative shift from vertically integrated (“Fordist”) production
to geographically dispersed production along global value chains
(see Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994, for example).
These developments provided the background for the labour and
other social movements to campaign for a link between trade and labour
standards at multilateral level within the WTO and ILO (van Roozendaal,
2002). Such a link would have created some social regulation for
MNCs’ own operations as well as their (trading) activities along supply
chains. However, in the absence of a compromise at multilateral level, we
find only a reference to minimum labour standards in geographically
limited bilateral and regional trade agreements (Greven, 2005), which,
by their nature, do not take into account the wider dynamics of global
value chains.
Two other strands of the literature focus on the industrial context,
organizational structure, policies and strategies of MNCs and only subsequently
consider implications for their global value chains. Debates
within international human resource management (IHRM), for example,
have focused on the transfer of policies and strategies within MNCs’
global operations, and the tension between global standardization and
local adaptation (see Dickmann and Müller-Camen 2006 for a typology
of IHRM strategies). They have also discussed the relative strength of
home- and host-country effects (as well as integration and dominance
effects; see for example Almond et al., 2005; Royle, 2004). Edwards and
Kuruvilla (2005) consider IHRM issues in the light of MNCs’ internal
division of labour but still remain focused on intra-firm processes, that is
the MNC and the authority relation vis-à-vis its foreign operations and
subsidiaries.
A different approach emphasizes the determinants of MNCs’ decisions
to relocate and/or outsource parts of their production. Bair and
Ramsay (2003; also Ramsay 2000) develop a contingency approach —
taking into account product and process determinants, the role of labour
costs and skills, market contingencies and the organizational capacity of
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