Unit 4 Macro: Should TNCs make full disclosure on factory wages?

Peter Day’s World Business programme on BBC this week is an evocative report on the travels of two people who have explored where we get most of the clothes and the shoes adorned with global brands.

The interviews take us first to Indonesia to meet Jim Keady - founder of Education for Justice - and a discussion about supplier factories - sub-contractor factories used by the like of Nike.

Fair trade campaigners continue to lobby for 100% disclosure and transparency about how much workers in these factories are getting paid - a call for the raw data to be published to see if people working long hours in sweat-shop conditions are getting paid a living wage. They believe that a commitment to open-source data on pay and conditions will help educate consumers about the economic and social background to the premium-priced brands that dominate the shopping malls. Do consumers much care for the sourcing of their clothing, smart-phones and tablets? Or are there signs of an awakening similar to the rise of the organic food movement and the support for fair trade - a growing commitment to a new social contract.

In the second interview, Peter Day meets the adventure capitalist Conor Woodman whose new book Unfair Trade is a “bottom-up exploration” of extractive and assembly industries in developing countries where he finds a huge disconnect between those right at the start of global supply chains risking their lives everyday for rocks, minerals and consumers in advanced nations.

The vast majority of miners in the Congo for example have no absolutely idea what their work ends up producing. Their main priority argues Woodman is having job and that western TNCs are best placed to employ them and guard against exploitation. More should be done to encourage TNCs into these countries allied to stronger pressure from consumers to create pressures on businesses to focus more on shared value - a concept that embraces not just narrow shareholder value but also the broader economic, social and environmental impact of production. “Outsourcing production should not mean outsourcing responsibility.”

The World in Business podcasts are available freely from the BBC Business web site and I know of several teachers who have made imaginative use of podcast homework as a way of getting their students either to choose a podcast of interest and reflect on it, or when the teacher choose an issue of specific focus for a group to listen to.