I want to begin by thanking Professor Stolle for her thoughtful and generous review of my book. Professor Stolle accurately reviews the argument of the book as well as the evidence used to support the argument and she does an excellent job reminding us the importance of these issues (“Every 15 seconds a worker dies from a work-related accident or disease (ILO 2015”) in an economy shaped by global supply chains.

I agree with Professor Stolle on the continuing importance of these issues and the limits of private initiatives aimed at addressing them. I also agree that one of the weaknesses of my analysis is the lack of attention I gave to consumer activism around these issues and how these activists pressure global brands and large retailers to promote better working conditions among their suppliers. Stolle’s own work nicely fills this gap, as I describe in my review of Political Consumerism. The array of different types of political consumerism described in that book also shows great promise in the sense of pressuring global corporations to reform their purchasing and supply chain practices.

Where we may disagree is on the limitations of consumer activism. Boycotts, campaigns, and ethical consumption have been around for decades. And while these efforts have succeeded in changing the behavior of some corporations, in some countries, some of the time, they often have not been able to redress the underlying structural issues that drive poor labor standards in the supply chains that crisscross our global economy. More needs to be done to translate consumer awareness of ethical sourcing and purchasing practices into activism around the structures and incentives that drive less than ethical behavior along different stages of most global supply chains and not simply at the point of production. How can we take the growing awareness of fair trade, organic, non-GMO, ethically sourced products and encourage millions of consumers to go the next step to understand and then mobilize to change the working conditions of the millions of workers who make the products we purchase and consume every day? This is not an easy task given the complexity of this reality and thus the not-so-easy narrative needed to explain how global supply chains actually work. This task becomes even more difficult when these same consumers benefit from and are thus implicit in supporting this system by demanding the latest model of whatever consumer product they want to purchase at the same or lower price from the last year’s (or season’s) model. Until we as consumers address our own role in supporting/shaping the current model of global production, activism around these issues will change business practices at the margins, not at their core.