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About
ChainGE Lab is a five-year interdisciplinary research project led by Prof. Hila Shamir (Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law) and funded by the European Research Commission (ERC).
Labour law gradually protects fewer of the world’s workers.
This is because changes in work, technology, and production methods ("supply chain capitalism") have created a gap between what labor laws were designed for and how businesses actually operate now. This gap hinders workers' ability to organize and exercise agency. Historically developed in industrial economies to address power disparities between capital and labour, labour law is rooted in a dyadic employer-employee paradigm in which it seeks to empower workers vis-Ã -vis employers, the presumed owners of capital. However, in today's "supply chain capitalism," employers are often suppliers in global networks, dependent on larger corporations. To address these challenges, this project aims to collaborate with actors on the ground in order to reimagine and restructure labour law to fit the new patterns of supply chain capitalism.
Research Structure and Methodology
​Workers and their representatives work tirelessly to strengthen worker power in lower-tier GVCs but often lack the legal scaffolding to sustain and scale these efforts. Our research builds on these experiences to identify what works and how legal frameworks can support and amplify such initiatives.
Collaborating with unions, workers' organizations, policymakers, and other stakeholders, we employ interdisciplinary qualitative-comparative research to establish the theoretical and normative foundation for new legal structures that enable workers' organizing, voice, and power in supply chain capitalism.
The Five Pillars
The research project is built on a five-pronged analytical framework addressing fundamental challenges supply chain capitalism presents to current labour law and labour institutions. We seek to reimagine:
The Collaboratory - Our Research Network
An international, interdisciplinary academic community of scholars and activists dedicated to advancing workers' rights in Global Value Chains
The collaboratory creates a space for an ongoing interdisciplinary conversation among scholars—academics and activists—at various stages of their careers researching issues related to workers' rights in global supply chains. We meet monthly online to foster collaboration, networking, access to resources and a supportive, rigorous community of learning and action.
Workers’ Rights Legal Clinic at Tel Aviv University
The project includes a legal 'laboratory' dedicated to studying new labour law and institutions for supply chain capitalism, in collaboration with the TAU Law Workers’ Rights Clinic, led by Adv. Michal Tadjer. The clinic develops litigation and organizing strategies to support workers’ rights in subcontracted and multi-tiered employment arrangements. Its legal activities provide experiential and empirical data to inform and address the project’s research questions.
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Join our research team
We accept applications to join the collaboratory and the lab’s core group of researchers on a rolling basis and will post more specific calls for researchers here when available. If you are interested in joining us, please email: chaincaplab@gmail.com