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

以一种保证足够收入、可靠合同和安全工作条件的方式组织劳工仍然是一项具有挑战性的任务，特别是在全球南方国家，那里的低工资和有关工作和环境的国家法规的执行不完善继续吸引着全球资本。受贸易伙伴平等、团结和赋予生产者权力等规范性价值观的启发，一些“公平”或“合乎道德”的贸易倡议旨在通过制定童工、工资、工作合同、加班等方面的标准来改善工人的条件。这些标准与正式和非正式的法律、规则、协议、社会关系和观念一起，构建了一个复杂的劳动监管网络，在当地的劳动监管中表现为部分重叠、互补或矛盾。然而，几乎没有任何关于私人可持续性标准（PSS）如何在这些已经存在的监管环境中发挥作用以及与之相关的研究。以PSS有争议的讨论结果，以及PSS普遍主义方法与当地劳动制度独特性之间的矛盾为出发点，本项目旨在了解PSS在全球南方特定生产地（即全球一体化的茶园和印度的天然石坑）塑造和改造劳动制度方面发挥的作用。因此，它有助于更好地理解劳工制度的多尺度治理。从概念上讲，该项目借鉴了集合、治理和道德经济方法的新颖组合，从而补充了劳动力地理学和全球生产网络中关于PSS运作的现有研究。

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.