Assembling Fair Labour. Moral Values and Private Sustainability Standards at Indian Tea Plantations and Natural Stone Pits

以确保足够的收入、可靠的合同和安全的工作条件的方式组织劳动力仍然是一项具有挑战性的任务，特别是在全球南方国家，那里的低工资和与工作和环境有关的国家法规的执行不到位，继续吸引着全球资本。在贸易伙伴平等、团结和赋予生产者权力等规范性价值观的启发下，一些“公平”或“道德”贸易倡议旨在通过制定关于童工、工资、工作合同、加班等方面的标准来改善工人的条件。与正式和非正式的法律、规则、协议、社会关系和思想一起，这些标准构成了一个复杂的劳工法规网，表现为地方地点的劳工法规部分重叠、互补或相互矛盾。然而，几乎没有任何关于私营可持续发展标准(PSS)如何在这些已经存在的监管背景下发挥作用以及与之相关的研究。本项目以PSS有争议的结果，以及PSS的普遍性方法和当地劳动制度的独特性之间的矛盾为出发点，试图了解PSS在全球南方特定生产地，即印度全球一体化的茶园和天然石坑中，在塑造和改变劳动制度方面发挥了什么作用。因此，它有助于更好地理解劳工制度的多标量治理。在概念上，该项目借鉴了集合、政府和道德经济方法的新组合，从而补充了现有的从劳工地理学和全球生产网络对PSS工作原理的研究。

Organising labour in a way to guarantee adequate incomes, reliable contracts, and safe work conditions remains a challenging task especially in countries of the Global South, where low salaries and the patchy enforcement of national regulation pertaining to work and environment continue to attract global capital. Inspired by normative values such as the equality of trading partners, solidarity, and empowerment of producers, a number of “fair” or “ethical” trading initiatives aim at improving the conditions of workers by setting standards regarding child labour, wages, work contracts, overtime, besides others. Together with formal and informal laws, rules, agreements, social relations, and ideas, such standards construct a complex web of regulation of labour that manifests in partly overlapping, complementary or contradictory regulations of labour at local sites. Yet, there is hardly any research on how private sustainability standards (PSS) work inside and in relation to these already existing regulatory contexts. Taking the controversially discussed outcomes of PSS, and the contradictions between the universalist approach of PSS, and the uniqueness of local labour regimes as starting points, this project seeks to understand what role PSS play in shaping and transforming labour regimes at specific production places in the Global South, namely at globally integrated tea plantations and natural stone pits in India. Thereby, it contributes to a better understanding of the multi-scalar governance of labour regimes. Conceptually, the project draws on a novel combination of the approaches of assemblage, governmentality, and moral economy, and thereby complements existing research on the workings of PSS from Labour Geography and Global Production Networks.