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Crafting an International Legal Regime for Worker Rights: Assessing the Literature since the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2009

John D. French  and
Kristin Wintersteen
John D. French
Affiliation:
Duke University
Kristin Wintersteen
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, critical attention has increasingly focused on the remaining world system, capitalist in nature and anchored in the World Trade Organization (WTO), founded in 1994 as the successor to the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As the 1990s progressed, a smattering of exciting new intellectual work began to appear on the social and environmental impacts of the international trade and investment regime, especially given its apparently negative impact on many developing countries and the world's working people. “The distinction somewhat comfortably maintained by ‘trade hands’ who managed the post-World War II international economy—that trade is strictly a commercial function with no immediate connection to social concerns—has evaporated under the pressure of political and social forces generated by the globalization of the economy.”

Type
Rethinking the Left in Victory and Defeat
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 145 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2009

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References

NOTES

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26. Basu et al, International, 186.

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28. Gavin Kitching similarly defends globalization as an “enormous benefit to the poorest and most oppressed.” In a provocative, if anguished, book, this one-time leftist development economist of Africa explains how he came to his antinationalist third position. In his despairing vision of a world divided, he opts for the poorest of the world's poor in face of what he deems to be ignorant and nationalistic protestors at Seattle. [Seeking Social Justice through Globalization: Escaping a Nationalist Perspective (University Park, PA., 2001), xiv, 308].

29. Hepple, Bob, Labour Laws and Global Trade (Oxford, 2005), xiiGoogle Scholar, 3, 16, 135, 271, 274. Unlike Hepple, Philip Alson is skeptical that transnational and domestic law is being woven together even in the European Union whose “approach to collective labour rights enforcement within member state is piecemeal, a product of limited competences and of an apparent lack of political will” (Alston, Philip, ed Labour Rights as Human Rights [Oxford, 2005], 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar). For an empirically-driven study: Gauri, Varun and Brinks, Daniel M., eds., Courting Social Justice: Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economic Rights in the Developing World (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Hepple, Labour, 20–21.

31. Ibid., 3, xi. In his vocabulary, “neoliberal” refers to right-wing Thatcherites, not Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.

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35. Ibid., 1, 3, 23, 25, 40 143. Alston, Labour Rights, 14.

36. Ibid., 27, 171.

37. Stanley L. Engerman, “The History and Political Economy of International Labor Standards,” In: Basu et al., International, 29–30.

38. Conaghan et al., eds., Labour Law, 27, 113, 139.

39. Chloe Arnold, “Russia: Oil Spill Highlights Tragic Environmental Legacy,” Radio Free Europe Nov. 28, 2007; BBC News, “Black Sea faces environmental ‘catastrophe,’” BBC News Nov. 13, 2007.

40. International Maritime Organization (IMO), International Shipping and World Trade, Facts and Figures, available from http://www.imo.org/includes/blastDataOnly.asp/data_id%3D20166/InternationalShipping2007.pdf (updated October 2007, accessed Nov. 30, 2007); Burgherr, Peter, “In-depth analysis of accidental oil spills from tankers in the context of global spill trends from all sources,” Journal of Hazardous Materials 140 (2007): 245–256CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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44. DeSombre, Flagging, 4; Lillie, Global, 42. For a thorough study of this campaign's early development, see Northrup, Herbert and Rowan, Richard, The International Transport Workers' Federation and Flag of Convenience Shipping (Philadelphia, PA, 1983)Google Scholar.

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46. IMO, International Shipping, 7, 9; in 2008 the ITF listed a total of 32 Flags of Convenience states, including several landlocked countries such as Bolivia [ITF, “FOC Countries,” available from http://www.itfglobal.org/flags-convenience/flags-convenien-183.cfm (accessed Aug. 27, 2008)].

47. IMO, International Shipping, 26. Nathan Lillie reports that the monthly median wage for an Able Seaman ranges from about five to 22 times higher than the wage for an onshore industrial worker from the same country, depending on the nationality of the worker (Lillie, Global, 41).

48. DeSombre, Flagging, 3.

49. Ibid., 53, 55.

50. Ibid., 228.

51. Lillie, Global, 7.

52. Ibid., 1–2.

53. Ibid., 16; ITF, “Flags of Convenience.” One study cited by Lillie estimates that a seafarer working on a ship with an ITF contract earns as much as 50% more than s/he would if receiving the market wage rate on a non-ITF ship (Lillie, Global, 40).

54. Lillie, Global, 143.

55. Ibid., 65–66.

56. Ibid., 145; see also 65–88.

57. Ibid., 110.

58. This refers to the Preparatory Technical Maritime Conference of September 2004 (Ibid., 115).

59. Ibid., 116.

60. Ibid., 50.

61. Ibid., 40.

62. DeSombre, Flagging, 210, 216–217.

63. Lillie, Global, 7.

64. Ibid., 16.

65. Ibid., 10.

66. The ITF decides whether to designate an open registry as a FOC based on “whether the nationality of the shipowner is the same as the nationality of the flag” [ITF, “Flags of Convenience Campaign,” available from http://www.itfglobal.org/flags-convenience/index.cfm (accessed Nov. 30, 2007)].

67. Seidman, Gay, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

68. Ibid., 47.

69. Ibid., 10.

70. For a wide-ranging treatment of business ethics and “corporate social responsibility” with detailed company studies: Hartman, Laura Pincus, Arnold, Denis, and Wokutch, Richard, eds., Rising above Sweatshops: Innovative Approaches to Global Labor Challenges (Westport, 2003)Google Scholar.

71. Seidman, Beyond, 11.

72. Ibid., 17, 28.

73. Ibid., 34, 37.

74. Seidman, Beyond, 61–62.

75. A similar international child labor campaign resulted in a partnership agreement in 1997 between the ILO, UNICEF, and business interests in Sialkot, Pakistan, which produces seventy five percent of the world's hand-stitched soccer balls, to deal with the twenty percent of the total workforce that were children (Flanagan and Gould, eds., International, 220–221).

76. Seidman, Beyond, 73.

77. Ibid., 91–92.

78. Ibid., 63.

79. Ibid., 139. Labor rights monitoring NGOs, a business scholar noted, include both groups who “wholeheartedly” embrace cooperation with, and financing from, companies and those who opt for a more strictly confrontational strategy (USSAS, unions). From a company point of view, the result is a “good cop, bad cop” routine in which “radically divergent tactics of confrontations and cooperation” prove highly complementary. [Michael Santoro, “Philosophy Applied I: How Nongovernmental Organizations and Multinational Enterprises Can Work Together to Protect Global Labor Rights,” in Hartman, et al., Rising, 109–110).

80. Ibid., 7.

81. Ibid., 140.

82. Ibid., 107–109; Frundt, Henry J., Trade Conditions and Labor Rights: U.S. Initiatives, Dominican and Central American Responses (Gainesville, 1998), 6Google Scholar, 86–87.

83. Rosen, Ellen, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry (Berkeley, 2002), 145–146Google Scholar.

84. Greven, Clash, 82–84.

85. Seidman, Beyond, 120, 143.

86. Armbruster-Sandoval, Ralph, Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement and the Struggle for Social Justice (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

87. Ibid., 9.

88. Ibid., 49.

89. Ibid., 25. The activists involved actively reflected on their own practice: Coats, Stephen “Free Trade and Labor Cooperation across Borders: Recent U.S./Guatemalan Experiences,” Latin American Labor News, 8 (1993): 10, 11Google Scholar.

90. See Ibid., 22–23 drawing on Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's typology of strategies: information, symbolic, leverage, and accountability [Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, 1998)].

91. Armbruster-Sandoval, Globalization, 31.

92. Ibid., 51, 58.

93. Ibid., 83–84, 104–105, 132.

94. Ibid., 107, 107n2; the term “sweatshop warriors” comes from Louie, Miriam Ching Yoon, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Take on the Global Factory (Boston, 2001), 3–4Google Scholar.

95. Armbruster-Sandoval, Globalization, 153.

96. Rosen, Making, 242.

97. See the classic essay by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Lewis, W. Arthur, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” in Agarwala, A.N. and Singh, S.P., eds., The Economics of Underdevelopment (London, 1969), 401–449Google Scholar.

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99. Frundt, Trade. For a sample GSP petition on Guatemala filed in June 1990: see Sugarman, Jim, Field Guide to Labor Rights (Washington, 1993), 47–57Google Scholar. See also LaWare, David, “Solidarismo in Costa Rica: The AFL-CIO Charges Labor Rights Violations,” Latin American Labor News, 10–11 (1994): 6Google Scholar, 14–15.

100. The controversy over the GSP IRWR clause in the Reagan/Bush era stemmed from its use to achieve U.S. Cold War foreign policy objectives. Advocates contested this distorted administration in court: Terry Collingsworth, “International Worker Rights Enforcement: Proposals Following a Test Case.” In Human, ed. Compa and Diamond, 227–250.

101. Frundt, Trade Conditions, 152–153, 141, 257, 264–265, 266.

102. Ibid., 32.

103. Ross, Slaves, 280–299, for an intro to the WTO social clause debate; also French, “Comercio.”

104. Kruger, In Basu, et al., International, 248.

105. Ross, Slaves, 249–266, offers a sociological analysis of the emergence of student sweatshop activism with a sympathetic evaluation of activist outlooks.

106. French, “Wal-Mart,” 39.

107. Ross, Slaves, 9.

108. Ross, Slaves, 44, 300. On sweatshops and activism, both past and present: Bender, Daniel E. and Greenwald, Richard A., eds. Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

109. Ross, Slaves, 37.

110. Compa, Lance, Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards (Washington, 2000)Google Scholar; also available online at www.hrw.org/reports/2000/uslabor/ (accessed Aug. 28, 2008).

111. Ross, Slaves, 308.

112. Brian Langille, “General Reflection on the Relationship of Trade and Labor,” in Bhagwati and Hudec, eds., Fair Trade, Volume 2, 238, 253.

113. French, “Wal-Mart,” 39.

114. Ross, Slaves, 322.