Trade in the 21st Century: Rethinking the Trade/Labor Agenda

Kerry Rittich

Abstract

Popular grievances around trade and labour in the North are mostly centered around job losses and declining wages and job security associated with market liberalization and globally integrated production and service delivery. Complaints from workers in the South, for their part, range from brute subjection to employer violence to the inability to extract better terms and conditions of work from those who ultimately exert control in the workplace.

Trade/labour linkage conceived primarily in terms of the inclusion and enforcement of labor standards is turning out to be a limited, arguably ineffective, response to both sets of concerns. Remedying these complaints, and advancing the more ambitious agenda of better work in a globalized economy, engages legal and structural matters about which the labour standards provisions classically included in trade agreements have little to say. Even where remedies are theoretically available, the immense temporal and institutional distance between workplace grievances ‘on the ground’ and the international fora in which they are addressed makes them limited, even unlikely, avenues of progress.

Trade agreements nonetheless often play an important role in workers’ fate, both directly and where they affect domestic rule and policy choices. These limits point to a different agenda, one that links the objectives of workers to a broad range of other rules, norms and policies that organize the generation of gains and losses from trade. Rather than a point of irretrievable division, moreover, linking the labortrade agreements to changed norms and mechanisms around distribution is a project that potentially joins workers in the North and South, even in the face of ongoing conflict and differences among workers at the national level.