Free Trade in Labour: A New Global Space for Workers' Rights?

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This paper focuses on the nexus between international labour standards and international trade governance, as labour rights provisions (applicable to both local and migrant workers) are increasingly being included in free trade agreements. Nevertheless, for the past few decades, the preservation of working rights and social provisions is increasingly becoming economically unsustainable across the globe. At present, the likely directions in the global governance of labour markets stand at a historic crossroad and face urgent questions posed by the disengagement of the measure of value from the concept of labour. Barriers to human mobility facilitate capital in superseding labour as the only price discriminant in the compensation of both local workers confined to over-supplied domestic labour markets, and cross-border workers confined to a temporary or undocumented status. Over the long term, the failure in the global management of labour markets may also result in labour rights being socio-economically unsustainable, although still necessary for maintaining or improving the current levels of human development across the globe. In the absence of any value-driven dimension of labour, echoed in the decline of large-scale state-subsidised social security systems, international trade law might well be capable of becoming the strongest tidal current changing the patterns of labour governance globally and streaming through the international apparatus of working rights. The overall issue considered here revolves around the question as to whether international trade law provisions on labour rights are a solution or are inconsistent with workers’ problems globally. This is ultimately a matter related to seeking a new space for the transforming notion of labour at the intersections of law and society in a globalised environment.