Cambodias competitive edge is our goodlabor practices.

Kantha Phavi Ing

Minister of Womens Affairs

Royal Government of Cambodia1


The US trade agreement with Cambodia was more beneficial to workers than any anti-sweatshop campaign.

Jason Judd

Director, AFL-CIO Wal-Mart Campaign2


I. Introduction


It is widely argued that international economicliberalization through the growing number of regional and bilateral trade agreementsis conducive to weaker international labor standards: employers use lower laborstandards as a source of comparative advantage, and transnational corporationsuse geographic mobility as a continual threat to workerseverywhere, changing the power relations at the bargaining table.3 On the other hand, it is increasinglycommon for U.S. trade agreements to include provisions that support variouslabor standards. Typically, as a minimum, the labor rights and standards inregional and bilateral trade agreements include freedom of association andcollective bargaining, and prohibitions against forced labor and child labor.Since 1993, for example, the United States has included these and other labor standardsin almost every bilateral and regional trade agreement to which it has beenparty.4




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About the Author:


Don Wells* is associated with Labor StudiesProgramme and Political Science Department, McMaster University, Canada.



1. Kantha Phavi Ing, UNDP/World Bank Panel on Gender andMDGs, 49th Sess. of the Commission on the Status of Women, New York, Feb.28Mar. 11, 2005.

2. Jason Judd, US Union Perspective, Conference on PromotingCambodias Competitiveness in a Post-MFA World, Washington, D.C. CarnegieEndowment for International Peace, July 22, 2005, available at http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/index.cfm?fa=print&id=810.

3. Ajit Singh & Ann Zammit, The Global LaborStandards Controversy: Critical Issues for Developing Countries 77 (SouthCentre pub., Oct. 2000), available at http://www.southcentre.org/publications/labour/toc.htm.

4. Sandra Polaski, Protecting Labor Rights Through TradeAgreements, 10 J. INTL L. & POLY 13, 1325 (2003). Exceptionally, the2000 U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement does not include labor rights provisions.

*Labor Studies Programme and Political Science Department, McMaster University, Canada, wellsd@mcmaster.ca. For their helpful comments, the author isgrateful to Bama Athreya, Anita Chan, Sandra Polaski, Tony Porter, and twoanonymous reviewers for the Journal. For research funding for this project, the author is grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada



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