The Strategy and Politics of Linking Trade and Labor Standards : An Overview of Issues and Approaches

As globalization gathered pace over the last four decades, workers’ rights advocates championed the use of trade rules and market access as leverage to encourage respect for labor standards, at home and abroad. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the strategies and politics of the actors who have lobbied for and/or created the main instruments linking trade to labor standards and to assess the implementation of those instruments, including through selective case illustrations. The chapter begins with a brief historical review of efforts to create a trade-labor linkage and then turns to the contemporary period. It focuses on instruments created by the two largest governmental actors in this field, the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) and discusses the politics involved in their creation. The next section examines the utilization of these instruments by reviewing broad patterns and four significant cases where they were invoked. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the effectiveness of various approaches and draws lessons from the experience to date that can inform future policy choice