ABSTRACT
To ensure that benefits reach the most vulnerable workers at the bottom of labor intensive value chains, we need move beyond a narrow focus on the workplace to also target the places and communities where workers live. Alongside top-down, multilateral arrangements, we also need to think of more proximate, locally embedded initiatives that can simultaneously build vigilance and accountability from the bottom-up. This “sandwich” strategy of scrutiny, where mobilization, engagement and oversight from below meet reformist mechanisms from above, can serve to deepen workers’ own agency while building local institutions and organizational capacity that can remain in place even after more global initiatives have faded. This chapter draws on insights from a place-based experiment in spatially embedded contracting in Mewat, India, to illustrate this argument.
