Securing institutional workers' power in the global garment industry: The ACT agreement's efforts to establish sectoral collective bargaining in Cambodia

This master thesis analyses the implementation of the Action, Collaboration, Transformation (ACT) agreement, signed between 20 garment lead firms and the Global Union Federation IndustriALL. The agreement seeks to secure living wages through a dual approach. At the national scale in selected garment producer countries, the agreement aims to establish sectoral collective bargaining between garment trade unions and employer associations. At the transnational scale, lead firms have committed to support this process by transforming their purchasing practices to enable negotiated changes structurally and financially. This thesis analyses the implementation process in Cambodia, the country with the longest and most comprehensive negotiation process. Theoretically, I complement the vertical perspective of the GPN approach with the horizontal perspective of the Power Resource approach (PRA). To combine these two approaches, I use the concept of scales to describe the complex geographical relations in the ACT agreement. I explore how vertical and horizontal power relations influenced the implementation process in Cambodia between mid-2018 and mid-2020, and how this process in turn affects these power relations. Drawing on the qualitative analysis of press and media articles and interviews with Cambodian trade unionists (6), a representative of the Cambodian garment employer association (1), IndustriALL and ACT staff (2) and industry experts (2), this thesis identifies three phases and its key developments, in addition to summarising the position of the employers' association and six unions on the implementation process. Although, ACT is a promising and qualitatively novel approach to labour governance and has been appreciated by Cambodian stakeholders, the implementation process in Cambodia has been unsuccessful. Key factors identified are limited lead firm participation, institutional weaknesses in the mechanism, intense regional competition and the lead firms' mode of handling the Covid-19 pandemic. These factors left the vertical and horizontal relations highly asymmetrical and resulted in the fact that the employer association declined to enter sectoral bargaining. On the horizontal dimension, the thesis finds that while unions were eager to join sectoral bargaining, the employer association and the state preferred and were able to prevent the establishment of a new form of institutional power for trade unions. IndustriALL and Cambodian unions did not use their power resources to pressure lead firms and employers to get the establishment of sectoral bargaining off the ground. The thesis concludes that ACT represents a promising and novel approach to GPN specific problems, but it lacks a power-sensitive approach to implementation.