ABSTRACT
A large proportion of workers in Southern workplaces producing for multinational companies are young women, many single mothers with children and other family members to support with their salaries. This chapter aims to use the voices of women workers and representatives of their organisations to assess whether codes of conduct can act as mechanisms of corporate governance that can bring benefits to workers. Mainly making use of data from a recent research project in Nicaragua with women workers from banana plantations and maquila factories, it looks at some of the problems with transparency that makes codes of conduct ineffective in practice. The chapter partly makes use of research findings from an ongoing collaborative project. In this work, funded by the UK Department for International Development, the New Academy of Business has been collaborating with the Central America Women's Network.
