Labour standards application among multinational and domestic firms in Ghana’s manufacturing sector

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the labour standards application patterns and influences among multinational and domestic firms in Ghana. Discourses on labour standards application have continued to attract much interest in recent years. This is because globalization, in tandem with multinational corporations, has made the application of labour standards more challenging and ever more relevant. Yet competing viewpoints raised among social scientists on the subject are inconclusive and still on-going. While some are of the view that multinational companies (MNCs) maintain higher labour standards than the domestic firms of their host countries, others concede that their standards are lower due to their exploitative tendencies. By means of a survey of 248 multinational and domestic firms in the manufacturing sector of Ghana, this paper concludes that there are a number of contingent factors that determine labour standards application, and so it is misleading to put all firms together and make blanket statements as to whether or not one group maintains higher labour standards than the other.