ABSTRACT
Some academic writings as well as agency and practitioners’ discourse assume that insertion into global value chains (GVCs) creates development benefits (e.g. UNIDO 2006). In terms of labour outcomes and the development debate, the phrase ‘trickle down’ has now largely been replaced by assertions that social pressures on transnational corporations may lead them to ‘ratchet up’ labour standards or cause a ‘cascading down’ of norms of good production behaviour towards those less ‘responsible’ (Sabel et al. 2000; Knorringa 2007). Yet thus far, this optimistic view has rarely taken the conditions of workers explicitly into account (Coe et al. 2008).
