ABSTRACT
An historical perspective on free trade and globalisation is sketched, and conditions in England in the time of Marx and Engels’ writings will be paralleled to those of underdeveloped countries and low-tech industries in developed countries, one and a half centuries later. The behaviour and a tentative suggestion of the underlying valuesets of the diverse actors in the international economy are explored e.g. supranational retail and marketing companies, contracting companies, subcontractors, unions, homeworkers, NGOs, ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ governments, and international institutions such as the World Bank: and the ILO. The main context of the exploration is in the clothing and footware industries, so that the simultaneous use of hightech control and marketing systems are juxtaposed with the use of labour-intensive and low-capital technologies. Current conflicts around appropriate auditing and monitoring procedures to reduce non-transparency are used to illustrate the profound schisms in underlying value-sets of the different actors.
