Limits of Complementarity: Private Governance and Public Regulation of Labour Standards in Brazil’s Garment Supply Chain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under what conditions can private compliance and public regulation be complementary within global value chains, resulting in promotion of labor standards? This critical case study examines a retailer-led association that developed a code and social audit mechanism in apparel supply chains in Brazil - the world’s third largest apparel market and fourth largest apparel manufacturer - and its relationship with regulation by public authorities. The authors highlight key undertheorized institutional dimensions of effectiveness in private governance and in public inspection shaping the viability of complementarity, and how weaknesses therein undermined initial prospects for public-private complementarity identified by practitioners and analysts in this code. As institutional flaws kept the code distant from better practices theorized and evident internationally in private labor governance, and the public inspectorate and forced labor enforcement regime declined institutionally, labor standards languished. Rather that outright displacement of public by private, or an effective coordination through complementarity, the study finds two rivalrous, competitive systems. Important issues are raised for future research about this Brazilian code and key implications are raised regarding the need for a more sophisticated institutional lens to inform efforts to study complementarity as an analytical construct and develop it as a policy construct in the ILO setting.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".