Manufacturing Accountability: Towards Executive Adjudication of Foreign Workplace Injuries

By: Jake Goodman-Palmer

PDF: Manufacturing Accountability

This Article examines four avenues for holding multinational corporations (MNCs) accountable for workplace injuries that occur in their value chains and proposes a fifth solution. The four pathways are: human rights tribunals, the self- regulation of firm activity through the promulgation of private standards, tort or delict liability in domestic courts, and a novel proposal to establish an International Court of Civil Justice (ICCJ). This Article synthesizes the literature on all four and assesses the remedies’ strengths and weaknesses. While each pathway offers unique advantages, all four are unable to deliver

accountability as currently constructed or envisioned. This Article uses comparative legal analysis to argue that home states, especially the United States, should empower a domestic tribunal to adjudicate mass workplace injuries claims that arise abroad. While the Supreme Court’s decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. shut the window for federal courts’ exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ACTA), accountability for US-based MNCs could still be imposed by other branches of government. A special tribunal created by Congress but located under the executive branch (Article II) could circumvent the constraints imposed by Kiobel and offer a trans-jurisdictional pathway for holding US firms accountable for human rights violations committed in their foreign value chains. By tying this proposal to a growing body of legal scholarship focused on Article II courts, this Article proposes a novel accountability mechanism that is both practical and aspirational.