This study builds on long-term fieldwork focusing on the Ghanaian construction industry and the governance of labour standards prevailing in this less-studied yet rapidly globalising sector in the country. The authors argue that while incorporation into international production networks undoubtedly generates a number of opportunities for workers, adverse incorporation outcomes also originate in parallel and at multiple levels of analysis. A multi-scalar framework of analysis is therefore adopted to study and interpret the findings deriving from a primary dataset collected among 30 firms and 304 respondents.
Such findings depict an unbalanced labour standards governance configuration, where the absence of social governance combined with a weak role of the State leaves labour standards subject to the variegated landscape of firms’ embeddedness in the sector. As the construction industry acquires ever-increasing relevance in the economic trajectory of Ghana and several other African economies, investigating the labour incorporation dynamics it generates represent a complex under-investigated regulatory challenge as well as a policy-making priority. The analysis is one of the first to offer a reconstruction of the governance landscape determining the challenges workers face in the Ghanaian construction sector, from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective.
Read the paper here.
westminsterdpn.com 