Labour and supply chains

My name is Annie Delaney

I am a senior lecturer at RMIT School of Management in the College of Business.

For a really long time i've been working with low-paid home-based workers of whom a majority are women who work from their homes often sewing garments and sewing shoes, making bags many types of products, sewing embroidery, weaving etc. I've worked with home workers in Australia and globally in many different countries.

The common feature of home workers is they're very low paid they're very often working at the bottom of very long global supply chains and get paid very little. They get paid by the piece.

More recently i've been doing work in india with home workers sewing the tops of shoes. Those really expensive handmade shoes in stores those home workers sow each day and they get very very little money.

Not enough for their for them to live on by working six to seven days a week and they're working in many instances you know 12 14 hours a day so it's really hard work.

So a lot of my research has been in understanding and demonstrating the nature of work of home workers to get employers and governments and and global corporations to acknowledge their presence in supply chains to get them recognized by documenting their work conditions showing where they are in supply chains.

And also to understand what they would like to change and documenting that. So i think that's been probably in the last 20 years or so i've been doing that kind of work.

The other side is looking at from a broader corporate accountability systemic lens of how do corporate, how do we affect corporations to actually care about these workers in their supply chains, and how how can research and engaged action research bring about some of the changes that those women want.

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