Activist coalitions, state-sanctioned forced labour, and top-down reform in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector

Remi Edwards - Doctoral Researcher, Department of Politics and International Relations, the University of Sheffield

Frank Maracchione - Doctoral Researcher, Department of Politics and International Relations, the University of Sheffield

The movement was crucially informed by affected Uzbek communities who provided credible primary information, and benefited from effective engagement with international stakeholder groups, which were key to their later successes. International pressure on the Uzbek government led to the outlawing of child labour in the country in 2014, resulting in no children being mobilised for the cotton harvest that year. 

In 2017, at the United Nations General Assembly, the newly appointed Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev acknowledged the problem of forced labour and committed to end state-mandated forced-labour in the cotton harvest. However, poverty-related child labour persists in other sectors.

An important role was played by the coalition of hundreds of companies involved in the cotton supply chain, including Adidas, Nike, H&M and Zara among others, who, formalised by the Cotton Campaign, signed the Company Pledge Against Forced Labour in the Cotton Sector of Uzbekistan committing “to not knowingly source Uzbek cotton […] until the Government of Uzbekistan ends the practice of forced labour in its cotton sector”. 

Given the feeble role of institutions such as the International Labour Organisation or the World Bank, whose supposedly independent investigations on forced labour were often disrupted by government involvement, local and international activism was key to applying the relevant pressure to achieve reform.

The case of state-mandated forced labour in Uzbekistan complicates standard narratives of exploitation in global supply chains. Research has explored the role of large corporate business models in perpetuating forced labour in supply chains, so their role as allies of activists in the form of a boycott should give pause for thought. The prevalence of forced labour in the garment sector and the role of irresponsible purchasing practices by corporations that drive demand for labour abuse sits uneasily with this new-found role as advocates of workers’ rights.

In fact, it was likely to have been relatively easy for retailing corporations to commit to ‘boycott’ cotton from Uzbekistan, a comparatively small player in the global economy, and from whom corporations were not directly sourcing due to networks of subcontracted supplier firms that make up garment supply chains. Yet, cotton produced in Uzbekistan could well have been making its way into the finished products sold to consumers by those same corporations due to a lack of supply chain traceability. Caution should be exercised, therefore, in praising their actions, when the broader structures of exploitation perpetuated through supply chains and their business models remain largely untouched.

The role of the private sector is growing in Uzbek cotton due to rapid privatisation, part of an array of sweeping liberal economic reforms under President Mirziyoyev and backed by the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank. The reforms have been framed as conducive to ridding the sector of forced labour through encouraging private investment in higher value-added production activities such as textile and garment manufacturing, supported by corporate social responsibility programmes. 

Not only does the poor track record of multinational corporations providing worker protections suggest otherwise, but the privatisation programme has also led to a wave of state-sanctioned land-grabs whereby private companies have acquired land, previously long-leased to farmers by the government, to combine cotton production with processing operations in ‘cotton textile clusters’. Farmers are either coerced to produce as contractors for corporations or are being dispossessed of their land entirely by threat and force – but this is framed by government officials as “voluntary” land release, leaving farmers without access to compensation.

Furthermore, concerns remain about the extent to which a marked reduction in forced labour and the end of its systematic usage by the Uzbek government is really demonstrative of a concerted and prolonged improvement in the conditions and rights of workers. The Uzbek Forum found that despite positive changes, child labour has increased due to school closures and poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and new vulnerabilities are emerging among farmers and workers.

Activists are continuing to campaign for better conditions and outcomes for rural communities in Uzbekistan, and an end to state-sanctioned forced labour in Turkmenistan and Xinjiang, but this global effort does not and should not stop with state-sanctioned forced labour. Campaigning continues to apply pressure on corporations but also empower workers to build enabling environments for corporate accountability for labour abuse in many contexts worldwide. 

While some positive top-down reform has been pursued, the Uzbek state and corporations continue to dominate the regulation of work while civil rights and liberties remain repressed, the fulfilment of which are crucial to broader and structural reform. This repression makes global activism all the more necessary to push powerful actors to concede something to those who are not afforded the access to rights to fight for their own demands domestically.

With thanks to Allison Gill, Senior Cotton Campaign Coordinator for ILRF-GLJ and former Senior Research and Policy Advisor to the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights, for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this blog. The work of the Cotton Campaign is ongoing.

Tomorrow: in the next blog in the series Freda Forrest looks at how Hong Kong citizens are finding new ways to express their political opinions under the current very repressive atmosphere.

This is the third part of a new blog series by members of SPERI’s Doctoral Researcher Network that is exploring how different types and forms of social contestation are shaping the global economy.