Human Rights and Business Practices: Double Movement or Neoliberal Hegemony?

Throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the 21st century, campaigns by labor rights activists brought the issue of labor exploitation by Northern transnationals (TNCs) operating in the Global South into the centre of public debate. Labor rights scholars raised the possibility of a broader Polanyian 'double movement' in the global economy, as the polarizing effects of neoliberal globalization produced anti-globalization movements and shifts towards forms of social protection through emerging approaches to transnational labor rights regulation. One of the results of these processes was the adoption of a human rights discourse by TNCs as they sought to re-define their public image in response to growing public awareness and condemnation of sweatshop labor practices. Read through a Polanyian lens, these developments would seem to confirm that a double movement was in fact producing a more socially responsible capitalism where the 'satanic mill' of the sweatshop would be moderated through corporations proclaiming respect for human rights. In this paper, I examine the adoption of human rights principles by corporate actors as both normative framework and business practice. I argue that rather than a double movement from market liberalism to social protection, the dynamics present in this process indicate tendencies towards the construction of a new hegemonic discourse to support neoliberal globalization - that of the 'socially responsible' corporation where business practices and human rights principles intersect. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript