Can Labor Standards Improve Under Globalization

In this study, the authors move beyond the debate on the relative merits and risks of a social clause in trade agreements and focus on practical approaches for improving labour standards in a more intergrated global economy.

This comprehensive Handbook explores the complex and volatile debate over globalisation and labour standards. It offers key insights into the impact of globalisation on workers, the obligations of corporations and international legal bodies in protecting workers’ rights and maximising the opportunities offered by international trade and investment.

This book provides the most thorough empirical assessment to date of the impact of international regulation on labor standards and conditions, and critically analyzes the common race-to-the-bottom view that globalization and international competition can only further degrade labor standards.

This book explains how three major mechanisms of globalization international trade, international migration, and the activities of multinational companies have altered working conditions and labor rights around the world during the late 20th century. Drawing on analyses of a database on international labor conditions assembled for this project and a growing research literature on globalization and labor conditions, the book finds that trade, migration, and multinational companies are associated with improvements in world labor conditions.

This book examines and evaluates various private initiatives to enforce fair labor standards within global supply chains. Using unique data (internal audit reports and access to more than 120 supply chain factories and 700 interviews in 14 countries) from several major global brands, including NIKE, HP and the International Labor Organization's Factory Improvement Programme in Vietnam, this book examines both the promise and the limitations of different approaches to actually improve working conditions, wages and working hours for the millions of workers employed in today's global supply chains. Through a careful, empirically grounded analysis of these programs, this book illustrates the mix of private and public regulation needed to address these complex issues in a global economy.

This paper reviews controversies regarding linkage of international trade and labor standards. Pressures for international harmonization of labor standards arise in the context of increased trade between countries with large disparities in wages, and also reflect the history of labor standards. A critical distinction is made between standards related to fundamental human rights and those related to employment conditions. The main conclusion is that trade sanctions to enforce labor standards should not be an option, but that international agreements on core labor standards, with voluntary compliance, may, apart from being worthwhile on ethical grounds, defuse calls for protection.

The first work in the field of industrial relations to categorize and comprehensively analyze all of the theoretical and practical aspects of international labor regulation. The book focuses primarily on the issues, organizations, and individuals in the United States charged with labor regulation -- NAFTA, the U.S. GSP program, trade unions, activists, and "grass roots" movements. It also gives major attention to the European Union and International Labor Organization.

The authors examine developments in labor standards in global supply chains over the past thirty years, analyzing factors that create challenges and opportunities for improving working conditions. They illustrate the complex dynamics within and among key groups, including brands, suppliers, governments, workers and consumers.

We ask how globalization affects a government's incentives to set labor standards for its workers. In a stylized equilibrium model of global value chains, we find two contrasting results. First, each country chooses stricter labor standards with globalization than it would under autarky, because labor standards are a normal good and the general increase in incomes from globalization increases demand for them. We call this the effect of `globalization in the large.' Second, if more countries join the world economy so that globalization increases at the margin, labor standards worsen (improve) at the margin if a country is competing with countries that are very similar to (different from) itself. We call this the effect of `globalization at the margin.' In equilibrium, labor standards are actually stricter than optimal because each country is able to pass some of the costs of its improved labor standards onto other countries (consumers of the final good, for example).

In February and March 2003, the Committee on Monitoring International Labor Standards (CMILS) of the National Research Council (NRC) convened regional forums in Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. Participants included representatives from the International Labour Organization (ILO), national governments, workers' and employers' organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the academic community. These meetings were designed to provide the CMILS with a broad range of international perspectives on the many complex issues related to monitoring compliance with international labor standards, particularly within developing countries. The CMILS has convened similar forums in the United States and held workshops examining data quality, assessing national legal frameworks, and exploring linkages between human capital development and compliance with labor standards.