Protection Of Labor Rights Under The Multilateral Trade Perspective

The issue of international trade and core labour standards has inspired so intense debate among the World Trade Organization member countries at the WTO Ministerial Conferences. As more developing countries participated in the globalization, more and more conflicts have been generated between developed countries and developing countries. As cheap labour is the main comparative advantage of China and most exporting factories are so poorly equipped and financed that exploiting the labour is almost the only way lowering the product cost, China and her enterprises would lose most of their world market once the labour standards and international trade are closely linked.This paper is composed of five parts:The first part focuses on the definition of the most basic concepts of this paper -- "labour standards" , "international labour standards" , and "core labour standards" . In part two, I analyze the mutual impact between international trade and core labour standards. After introducing the debate on the issue between industrial countries and developing countries, I comment on the reasons they give out and disprove the arguments of the industrial countries. The four main approaches that international trade and core labour standards relate are introduced in the following part. I predict the prospective way the two interact in the future based on the practice and experience of the "combination of social policy" of ELI. And in the last two parts, I compare the international core labour standards with the labour protecting situation of China, briefly analyze the social-economic reasons for that, and put forward some suggestions, not only legislatively, but also executively and economically.