Exploring the contentious relationship between trade and labour, this book looks at the impact of the EU’s ‘new generation’ free trade agreements on workers. Drawing upon extensive original research, including over 200 interviews with key actors across the EU and its trading partners, it considers the effectiveness of the trade-labour linkage in an era of global value chains. The EU believes trade can work for all, claiming that labour provisions in its free trade agreements ensure that economic growth and high labour standards go hand-in-hand. Yet whether these actually make a difference to workers is strongly contested. This book explains why labour provisions have been profoundly limited in the EU’s agreements with the CARIFORUM group, South Korea and Moldova. It also shows how the provisions were mismatched with the most pressing workplace concerns in the key export industries of sugar, automobiles and clothing, and how these concerns were exacerbated by the agreements’ commercial provisions. This pioneering approach to studying the trade-labour linkage provides insights into key debates on the role of civil society in trade governance, the relationship between public and private labour regulation, and the progressive possibilities for trade policy in the twenty-first century. This book will appeal to research scholars, post-graduate students, trade policy practitioners, policy researchers allied to labour movements, and informed activists.

Stories and images of collapsed factories, burned down sweatshops, imprisoned migrant workers, child workers and many other violations of internationally recognized labour rights continue to spread across the globe. This highly topical book examines the different instruments which are intended to protect labour rights on a transnational scale, and asks whether they make a difference. With perspectives from law, management, sociology, political science and political economy, the topics discussed include the protection of international labour rights in a globalizing economy, the EU’s social dimension in its external trade relations, Asian and US perspectives on labour rights in international trade agreements, the role of (trade) unions in global labour governance and the transformative capacity of private labour governance regimes. Academics and advanced students from different disciplines will benefit from the up-to-date empirical material in this study. Policymakers, NGOs and Unions will find the discussions of the instruments used to protect labour rights of great value to their work.

This report provides a comprehensive review of all existing trade agreements that include social provisions and discusses impacts for enterprises and workers. It also helps assess the challenges for arising from the multiplication of trade agreements that include different social provisions.

The rise of cross-regional trade agreements is a defining trend of the current international trade system as shown by the signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2015, the negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the USA and the EU as well as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) between countries in Asia and Oceania. These differ from previous agreements in their economic significance and large geographic scale, and the wide scope of trade-related issues. The current rise of nationalist and isolationist ideologies across Europe and the USA has raised questions on the future of cross-regional trade deals and made the need to understand their implications for economic and political governance ever more urgent. Two main forms of governance that are central to this volume are the democratic tensions over new generation trade deals on the one hand, and their geopolitical ramifications on the other, which have come into collision to herald the advent of a highly uncertain period of world politics. Many of the questions tackled in this volume, surrounding the democratic governance of trade agreements – whether long-held debates on the inclusion of workers’ voices, controversies on intrusive "behind the border" provisions undermining national sovereignty and local autonomy or new questions on digital rights – are crucial to understand the ebbing popular support for far-reaching trade agreements. This book will be a useful learning tool for students and scholars in a wide range of fields, including Globalisation, Global Governance, International Political Economy, International Trade and Investment and International Law, and should also be of interest to EU trade negotiators, international policymakers and business associations.

This book provides a timely and in-depth analysis of how two major trade powers, the United States of America (US) and the European Union (EU), contribute to a socio-political dimension of globalization. Myriam Oehri documents US and EU labor standards promotion in Mexico, Morocco, and the Dominican Republic, drawing on an analysis of bilateral and regional trade agreements (NAALC, US-Morocco FTA, CAFTA-DR, EU-Mexico GA, EU-Morocco AA, and EU-CARIFORUM EPA) as well as extensive field research. The case studies reveal that for the advancement of labor norms, both punitive enforcement and cooperative engagement mechanisms are established in relevant agreements. In practice, the latter are more comprehensively used than the former, irrespective of diverse power relations between the US and the EU on the one hand and the three partner states on the other. The book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in the fields of EU and US studies, foreign, trade, and social policy, regional integration, and international labor studies. It will also be of relevance to practitioners active in the international promotion of labor standards.

A 'new generation' of EU trade policies aims to advance public goods - such as promoting sustainable development, protecting human rights and enhancing governance in third states. The pursuit of these objectives raises important questions regarding coherence, effectiveness, legitimacy and extraterritoriality. In Global Governance through Trade leading scholars from different disciplines address these topical questions. The book contains a comprehensive analysis of the concept of governing through trade and investigates how the EU ‘exports’ regulation through conditional market access regulation, bilateral trade agreements and unilateral trade policy. Several case studies complement the general analysis and provide an in-depth assessment of the European Union's new trade policies. This multidisciplinary book will be an enlightening read for a wide-ranging audience encompassing academics, policymakers, policy analysts and students of, amongst others, trade law and policy, global governance, sustainable development, human rights and labor standards.

The EU has established a new architecture of international labour standards governance within the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters of its Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). To examine the operationalization of this framework, we draw upon 121 interviews undertaken with key informants in three FTAs signed with the Caribbean, South Korea and Moldova. We engage with wider debates over external governance and the projection of EU power by showing how operational failings, including a lack of legal and political prioritization of TSD chapters and shortcomings in the implementation of key provisions, have hindered the impact of the FTAs upon labour standards. We also identify significant limitations to the EU's 'common formulation' approach when applied to different trading partner contexts, alongside ambiguities about the underlying purpose of the trade-labour linkage. Reflection about the function and purpose of labour standards provisions in EU trade policy is therefore required.

Examining the relationship between trade and labour regulation in light of the pressing need to promote sustainable development, Tonia Novitz interrogates how international legal architecture could be reformed so that no one in the world of work gets left behind. She highlights the dangers of pursuing labour and environmental issues on parallel tracks without recognising how they interact, ultimately arguing for the crafting of the content and application of trade rules through participatory processes, which involve the inclusive representation of all sectors of the labour market and all parts of the world.

This paper focuses on the nexus between international labour standards and international trade governance, as labour rights provisions (applicable to both local and migrant workers) are increasingly being included in free trade agreements. Nevertheless, for the past few decades, the preservation of working rights and social provisions is increasingly becoming economically unsustainable across the globe. At present, the likely directions in the global governance of labour markets stand at a historic crossroad and face urgent questions posed by the disengagement of the measure of value from the concept of labour. Barriers to human mobility facilitate capital in superseding labour as the only price discriminant in the compensation of both local workers confined to over-supplied domestic labour markets, and cross-border workers confined to a temporary or undocumented status. Over the long term, the failure in the global management of labour markets may also result in labour rights being socio-economically unsustainable, although still necessary for maintaining or improving the current levels of human development across the globe. In the absence of any value-driven dimension of labour, echoed in the decline of large-scale state-subsidised social security systems, international trade law might well be capable of becoming the strongest tidal current changing the patterns of labour governance globally and streaming through the international apparatus of working rights. The overall issue considered here revolves around the question as to whether international trade law provisions on labour rights are a solution or are inconsistent with workers' problems globally. This is ultimately a matter related to seeking a new space for the transforming notion of labour at the intersections of law and society in a globalised environment.

The book offers a comprehensive perspective on the highly topical issue of protecting and promoting labour standards in international economic law and the globalized economy. For the purpose of an in-depth analysis of both the specific and the fundamental aspects in this regard, it combines views from specialized academics of the legal and political sciences as well as experienced practitioners. The contributions to this book do not only reveal recurring obstacles but also point at best practices and potential for synergies, providing important guidance for future research and practice in international economic and labour law and policy.