A Crisis of Accountability and Corporate Immunity for Unfair Purchasing Practices: A Survey of Global Fashion Retailers’ Factories in a Global South Country

This study investigated unfair purchasing practices by the Global North fashion retailers sourcing products from the Global South and whether and how such practices are ingrained in the retailers’ accountability crisis and their immunity in relation to the rights of suppliers and workers within the global supply chains. Based on a survey of 1,000 Bangladeshi factories producing garments for retailers during Covid -19 time and by drawing on the contested notions of economic and ethical accountability and notion of immunity, we found that there were widespread unfair purchasing practices, including sudden cancellation of orders, price reductions, refusal to pay for goods dispatched or in production and delayed payment of invoices, encountered by factories. Due to such unfair practices, one in five factories reported that they had struggled to pay the legal minimum wages, impacting the vulnerability of workers. While retailers used social compliance audits, a neoliberal accountability tool to discipline suppliers and improve working conditions, we found that many retailers shifted compliance audit costs to their suppliers, impacting workers' further vulnerability. Such practices were ingrained in the crisis of ethical accountability and perpetuated immunity by the retailers in pursuing their profits over ethics. Our findings suggest that accountability is an illusionary phenomenon that fails to recognise the facts of ‘othering’. This is the first known scholarly study that explores unfair purchasing practices by powerful global fashion retailers with relatively weak suppliers and how a crisis of accountability and corporate immunity for such practices exacerbates the vulnerability of workers or ‘others’ in global trade.