 무역과 노동의 연계에 관한 글로벌 규범 현황과 시사점(The Linkage between International Trade and Labour Standards: Current Status and Implications)Kyong Hyun Koo (khkoo@kiep.go.kr)
No 22-9, Policy Reference from Korea Institute for International Economic Policy Abstract: 본 연구에서는 FTA 등 양자·복수국 간 무역협정을 통한 무역·노동의 연계, IPEF를 통해 미국이 시도하고 있는 새로운 무역·노동 연계 모델, 국내법 차원의 무역·노동 연계에 관한 글로벌 규범 현황을 살펴본다. 또한 앞으로의 FTA 협상과 IPEF에서의 노동기준, 주요 교역국의 노동·공급망 연계 규제로 인한 대응방향에 관해 정책 시사점을 제시한다. Through the evolution of international trade agreements, the conceptual boundaries of ‘trade’ have expanded beyond the simple movement of goods across national borders to a matter of common economic governance among countries. In particular labor standards have long been a controversial issue in international trade. The linkage between trade and labor standards is expected to emerge as an important trade issue in the future. Internationally recognized labor standards such as those adopted by the International Labor Organization (ILO) have been incorporated into FTAs, and the level of protection of labour rights has been enhanced significantly with respect to both substantive and procedural FTA provisions. Further, there have been a couple of cases where a Party’s failure of FTA labour obligations was referred to judicial review under FTA dispute settlement procedures. This study examines the trade-labour linkage in three main aspects. Firstly, the most traditional approach of linking trade and labour standard has been to improve labour standards in trading partners through bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements including FTAs. This trend is in line with the recent increase in litigation between countries under a FTA dispute settlement procedure. Since 2018, there have been a total of 18 cases where Parties invoked FTA dispute settlement provisions, four of which were labour- or environment-related disputes. It is also worth noting that two out of these four cases were complaints filed against Korea. The main components of FTA labour standards include (ⅰ) incorporation of ILO international labour standards (ⅱ) non-derogation (ⅲ) effective implementation of labour obligations (ⅳ) labour cooperation, and (ⅴ) corporate social responsibility (CSR). More recent FTAs also cover issues such as gender equality, protection of migrant workers' labour rights, and import prohibition on products made by forced labour. With respect to enforceability and dispute settlement, one should pay particular attention to the Facility-Specific Rapid-Response Labor Mechanism or “RRM”, which was introduced by the United States for the first time in USMCA. (the rest omitted) Keywords: labor standards. Free Trade Agreement. International Labor Organization. Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Forced labor; the link between trade and labor; and the current status of global norms (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:kiepre:2022_009 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Policy Reference from Korea Institute for International Economic Policy [30147] 3rd Floor Building C Sejong National Research Complex 370 Sicheong-daero Sejong-si, Korea. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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