Immigrant Labor exploitation: the development of the “Corporate Due Diligence” as a new response to the phenomenon

Today, many transnational companies rely upon labour exploitation to unlawfully bypass their manufacturing costs, often at the expense of the workforce, which is mainly represented by migrants who leave their countries in search of better living conditions. The traditional top-down approach, consisting in a set of rules of repressive nature imposed by international and national instruments, have not been effective so far.

This paper will focus on the shift from command-control instruments to the “experimentalist governance model” that is emerging in the UN (see 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights) and EU legal orders, where ‘soft law’ and ‘exchange of practices’ across countries and companies are the preferred legislative approach . The rationale is that such an approach is faster, more flexible, and easier to enact. In this paper, I argue that when applied to businesses, this approach is the most effective. This is because many actors are involved in the decision-making process and authorities are called to elaborate a more effective way to face labour exploitation. The bottom-up approach is very innovative for its openness to the participation of many “stakeholders” who perceive the problem of exploitation as a non-hierarchical process. For these actors, an exchange of best practices between companies, in favour of a zero-tolerance and preventive perspective, is the most desirable solution to the problem.