Labour Migration, Crime, and ‘Compliance Washing’: A Tailor’s Odyssey from an African Workshop to European Luxury Fashion Multinationals

Abstract

Following a series of corporate scandals involving human rights abuses, forced labour, and unethical sourcing practices across supply chains of major corporations, we have seen a growth in voluntary, soft, as well as hard law and compliance-oriented regulations demanding supply chain and human rights due diligence (HRDD) and increased transparency of value chains on the part of multinational enterprises. This chapter seeks to peek behind the veil of ‘transparency’ and corporate disclosures and interrogate the current limits of these compliance-driven visions of social justice and the dynamics of compliance and defiance in corporate reporting by juxtaposing these with the realities of supply chains in the fashion and luxury industry. We argue that corporate disclosures, which tend to make us mistake carefully designed compliance maps for the actual territories of supply and value chains, could hide more than they reveal, resulting in new forms of opacity and practices of ‘compliance washing’, while further entrenching and enhancing the power of large market actors. To make our case, we delve deep into the complex entanglements of labour migration, organized crime, exploitation and human suffering which are part and parcel of contemporary fashion supply chains, following the destinies of labour migrants from Africa to Made in Italy.