 It's a great pleasure to be here and to be speaking to you all. It's a very interesting issue to be discussing here today. And I'm glad to share some of my experiences for the last seven years that I've been working in the coming supply chain. If we focus in the post-1990 world, the export-oriented garment industry in South Asia developed in areas with no union density. In countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the industry actually started with no unions allowed. And then, as Ponteen has worked his struggles through, governments were forced to allow unions within a restrictive legal structure that made and still makes forming unions very difficult. In the case of India, the export-oriented garment factories hired first-generation union workers with no exposure to unionism. According to some approximate estimates, less than 5% of workers out of 51 million workers are unionized in India, less than 2% out of 4 million workers in Bangladesh, and only about 0.3% in the ETZs out of 0.15 million workers in Sri Lanka. As the transnational companies began to expand their sources from the global south, activists and organizations in the global north began monitoring the shift, including raising the sweatshirt of conditions in the production countries. As time has progressed, this monitoring has evolved, become more involved in the global south, become more sophisticated and diversified along stated interests. In this presentation, I'd like to examine this involvement of various northern actors in the global south, especially their involvement with the trade unions. These northern actors involved the trade unions can be broadly divided into three categories, NGOs and their funders, including corporate funders, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and finally the global and northern unions. Even though the groups are very different, their relation with their southern partners is not very different. These northern actors, more often than not, mirror the unequal power relation that exists between their countries or countries of origin and the country they relate to in the global south. And the starkest evidence of this is the most powerful instrument that all these actors, the northern actors, used to negotiate within the supply chain. The final strategy, which is about the withdrawal of orders from the errand supplier in the global south. What this translates to in the global south is that a loss or a fear of loss is imposed on the suppliers, which they in turn pass on to the workers in multiple weeks. It may be through higher work intensity, union busting and ultimately job loss or replacement by new workers. The ultimate strategy thus is about reinforcing the relation of power between the global south and the global north over the suppliers and their transnational buyers. The northern support actors do not question the role of the transnational companies in perpetrating the violence and the violation in the supply chain. Instead they use the perpetrator, which is the northern transnational companies, to arm twist their southern suppliers. How these agencies work and why are they more acceptable than units? That the fall of Soviet Union brought in a new era and this era was about the vilification of all that was associated with the Soviet Union and that also influenced the trade unions and especially militant trade unions. And that has been the project for many since the 1990s. While employers have tried to promote team development models of work councils, grievance repressor committees, safety committees that are aimed at preventing unions from being formed on the shop road. Governments and other multilateral agencies have promoted and funded different types of NGOs. These NGOs are meant to serve multiple purposes. One, fill the vacuum created by the restructured state that has been devoted to advancing corporate interests, diffuse political anger and dole out paid what people ought to have had as right. Alter the public psyche by converting resentment into dependence and plant the edge of political resistance. The NGOs therefore form a buffer between the state and its people between empire and its subjects. They play the role of arbitrator, interpreter and facilitators. They play the role of the so-called reasonable arbitrator intermediary in an unfair, unreasonable conflict between perpetrators of violence and those affected. This is how NGOs have gained a wide social acceptability that in sharp contrast to trade unions that are seen as the last remnants of a social order that challenges capitalism at its core and are thereby not reasonable. NGOs on the other hand maintain a status quo, not challenge capitalism but try and fix the glitches that marred the face of capitalism. Let's take the example of the much-talked-about instance of the Rana Plaza Accident in 2013, which resulted in the death of over 1,100 workers and over 2,000 workers were wounded. A devastated world came together and decided to change the working conditions of workers' immigration. Campaigns were launched across the global north by NGOs, global unions, demanding that the TNCs sourcing from Rana Plaza pay up for compensating the workers and their families. This culminated finally in the signing of the legally enforceable Bailadesh Accord in 2015 between global garment retailers who were sourcing from Rana Plaza and two major global unions, industrial global union and the uni-global. Under the mentorship of the ILO, the co-signatories or the support organizations that were part of this negotiation were also the clean-float campaign, the Workers' Rights Consortium, its National Labor Rights Forum and the McKillers Solidarity Network, who acted as witnesses to the sign of the accord. However, not all retailers who were sourcing from Rana Plaza signed this agreement. They formed a parallel initiative for the Alliance for Bailadesh Worker's Safety that relied on the luxury contributions by the brands, mainly the US rights. The Accord today is treated as an ideal model for a legally enforceable global framework agreement and there is a concerted effort to extend it to other countries in South Asia. But if we look critically at the agreement, we find that this too is no more than an attempt to fix a glitch that caused a glaring incident like Rana Plaza. The Accord focused narrowly on building safety and not on why five producers, hiring close to 4,000 workers, had their factories running in that one illegally constructed eight-story hazardous building in the outskirts of the city of Taqla. Over almost a decade, the Accord has enshrined a restructuring of the garment industry in Bailadesh. It has almost obliterated small suppliers such as those housed in multi-storey buildings in and around the city of Taqla and consolidated and expanded large suppliers. Suppliers have moved away from rented facilities in Taqla city to other districts by investing in infrastructure, which has led to consolidation of factories and concentration of capital. This in turn has meant the suppliers once again gained access to first-generation, non-unionized workers in these new areas. This physical shift of factories pushed unionization and collective bargaining two steps back. These new factories are larger, more modern and capable of producing more with ultimately merely means, which ultimately merely means a small adjustment in capitalist production without altering the power dynamics within the country between the suppliers and their workers and beyond between the suppliers and their transnational buyers. This restructuring also ensured higher profits from both scale and investment in new technology and machinery for both the domestic suppliers and their transnational buyers. The Accord avoided the larger question of workplace health and safety that are intrinsically linked to the profit system. Neither did the framework agreement signed by the two global unions and four international worker support organizations legally protect workers' right to free the workers' association and collective bargaining. That would have ensured a sustainable, safe environment for the workers through continuous negotiation with their employers. The Accord therefore did not disturb the status quo. It only re-adjusted it for higher profit chains and a lower wage share in the long run. And that is where the problem lies. In addition to this are the various multi-stakeholder initiatives in the government supply chain such as the Ethical Trading Initiative which is the ETI, the Fair Labor Association, Fair Trade International, Fair Fair Foundation and many more, which are primarily joint platforms of employers, employee representatives like for unions and other social organizations meant to resolve issues in the supply chain through a framework of so-called collaborative governance. These initiatives have been more critiqued than others for the intrinsic imbalance of power within these framework. The MSI structurally assumed that the equal dialogue is possible between representatives of the TNCs and those directly or indirectly representing the workers just because they are part of a certain initiative. These MSIs are initiated by the TNCs to protect their own corporate interests along with creating a smoke screen of collaborative governance. All issues that are raised within these MSIs are bound by strict norms of confidentiality. This effectively strangles affected workers and trade unions from launching public campaigns to build pressure on the TNCs thereby providing an additional edge to the TNCs involved in any particular negotiation within these MSIs. The global agenda for changes in the government supply chain is that therefore decided in the Global North, negotiated by the Global North and executed by the Global South. The actors are different for different negotiations but the balance of power between the southern unions and their northern supporters remain the same. When the NGOs are northern actors, their funders which can even be cooperates using their CSR resources decide how and where these funds will be used and thereby they set the agenda. This is very simple. When the unions are the northern actors, they set the agenda for their southern partners based on the demands of their own membership in the North and their agenda in the North. Even though many of the southern garment unions are affiliated to the industrial global union, their limited number compared to the northern membership is not able to direct the organization to a southern perspective. Thus, even within a global union that represents southern garment workers' unions, the agenda is largely normal. In all these cases, the actors in the Global North become the primary negotiators while the actors in the Global South are reduced to information providers and passive recipients of the negotiated outcome. The domain of influence of these northern actors is not restricted to instances of correction of worker rights violations in the supply chain. It extends to how partner organizations in the Global South should be structured, what their gender composition should be, what their racial composition should be, who should be their leadership and so on. On what the organizational agenda should be, so whether they should be focusing on organizing women workers, precarious workers, migrant workers, etc. Or it could be issue-based organizing such as around gender-based violence, on issues of sustainability, on health and safety, on forced labor and so on. On how organizational resources should be allocated, be it human resources or even financial resources. This is more insidious and ultimately changes the nature of these southern organizations, their composition, their leadership, their democratic structure, everything. Tribunals get transformed into deliverers of northern agenda, which may not even be the agenda of the militia. This in turn creates a widening gap between the leadership of the union who can keep pace with the global agenda, its other leaders and its militia. This also creates tribunals that do not even have critical members in the industry as membership and its strength is in material to achieving outcomes. Having said this, what is possible and how? There is no easy way forward, at least not what we can see. Organizing strong democratic units at the factory level is the first building block towards changing this power imbalance. And this I can give you an example of. 1,200 women workers were fired at an H&M supplier near Bangalore post-lockdown as H&M cancelled their order at this supplier for delay in delivery during the pandemic. This supplier had two other factories supplying to H&M, but this was the only one that was fully unionized. In the midst of the pandemic and searing summer heat, the workers continued their protest for over three months till the supplier was forced through continuous negotiation to reinstate all the workers, even after many of them had accepted financial settlement from the management under financial distress and delays. This was only possible because the union stood its ground. H&M withdrew their orders and yet the supplier reinstated the workers. What this case revealed is the need to have multiple strategies to fight together. So it protests within the national legal system, using the global framework agreements that bind TNCs to certain conditions in their own supply chain, strong linkages with unions in the global laws, which too engaged in solidarity of actions against the TNC, putting their own jobs at risk. This is a strategy that puts fear into the minds of the employers, into the minds of the labor administration and also that of the TNCs. This is a strategy that breaks the status quo. It disturbs the balance of power, even if temporarily. It is as difficult to create as it is to sustain, but it is possible. Thank you.