The Protection Of Labors' Rights In International Trade

Trade and labor rights protection has already become a hot topic. Economic globalization has promoted free trade and facilitated economic development and increase of social wealth in the world. Globalization needs production factors to flow freely around the world. Capital and technology flow is boundless and labour flow is limited. Labour is in disadvantageous situation in the competition between labour and capital. International competition leads to the rising of unemployment in developed countries and results in worse working conditions in developing countries. Therefore, international labour standards are not complied with and labour rights are not protected properly. In face of the new challenge, WTO, the so-called Economic United Nations, remains completely unmoved. ILO is more than willing but lacking the power. Both of them have received strong criticism.In the international community, when labour rights are referred to, they are always mentioned in the same breath with labour standards. As labour rights, there is no universal definition for labour standards. In the ILO's Declaration of 1998, the four core standards such as the right to freedom of association and collective bargain, abolishment of forced labour, equal opportunity and treatment and elimination of child labour were separated from the rest of the standards and considered as fundamental rights. Labour rights protection is a long-standing issue. But the modern labour law did not emerge until industrial revolution. Labour rights protection has experienced several historic stages as domestic labour law, domestic labour to international regulation, labour rights in trade law and labour rights in trade agreements.Influenced by domestic political pressure, the United States and the European Union tried to put the issue at the GATT/WTO forum, which was strongly opposed by developing countries worrying about disguised protectionism. On the whole, developed countries support the linkage of trade and labour standards while developing counties oppose the linkage. The supporters think labour standards are relevant to labours'human rights and core labour standards are related to labours'fundamental human rights. Labour rights are moral rights, which are derived from human morality, rational and human dignity. If developing countries decrease labour standards without intervention, social dumping will occur. Employment opportunities will move from developed countries with high wage and high standards to developing counties with low wage and low standards. Opposers think the linking of trade and labour standards is a disguised protectionism, which intends to stifle the comparative advantage of developing countries. Opposers from China even think this kind of linking is an excuse to dump western human rights idea and values which aims at political interference of developing countries.When the suggestion of putting the labour issue at GATT/WTO forum became a deadlock, the United States and the European Union did not give up their efforts of implementing labour standards. On the one hand, they continue to adopt unilateral measures such as domestic legislation and GSP to oblige or entice their trading partners to accept international labour standards, which results in conflicts and clash between domestic law and international law. On the other hand, the United States and the European Union use the strategy of crushing one by one, with the media of bilateral/regional free trade agreements, pursue free trade while implementing international labour standards. US and EU's interest in bilateral/regional free trade agreements has diluted their willingness of negotiating labour rights at the WTO forum. Due to the preferential arrangement to partners than non-partners, the increase of such kind of trade agreements led by US and EU will jeopardize China'global trade interest.Within GATT/WTO agreement, there are several articles thought to be possibly linked with labour rights. As a matter of fact, except that several exceptional clauses in Article XX are relevant to labour rights, the rest are very vague and uncertain. Due to the vagueness of these articles, it is quite possible that the US and EU will make use of them to sanction those countries which don't abide by labour standards. In order to stop this kind of phenomenon, it is necessary to revise these articles and make them clearer. Meanwhile, in order to implement labour rights, it is necessary to reform the implementation mechanism and include labour rights into the Trade Policy Review Mechanism and establish a WTO/ILO joint dispute settlement mechanism. In order to prevent these mechanisms to be abused, the application of them must be limited to the four fundamental labour rights which are relevant to trade.In face the new challenge, we should emancipate our thinking, response actively to the negotiation of trade and labour standards at WTO forum, and properly exercise our discourse right. At the same time, we should realize that gap exists between our domestic law and international standards and speed up the ratification of international labour conventions especially core conventions and reform the domestic law in according to international standards.