Regional integration: a promising tool to advance the international decent work agenda?

Roland Erne, Mark Anner, Michele Ford, Tamara Kay and Vincenzo Maccarrone

Chapter 32 in The Elgar Companion to Decent Work and the Sustainable Development Goals, 2025, pp 396-411 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The role of regional organisations in support of the decent work agenda depends not only on their enforcement power but also on the prevailing views and the balance of social class forces within them. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) lacks any mechanisms to enforce decent work. Elsewhere regional organisations have had more impact. Two American free trade agreements (USMCA; CAFTA-DR) include provisions on labour standards, but progress mostly has been achieved through worker organising and transnational advocacy rather than through the agreements itself. By contrast the EU’s binding laws and governance interventions in the field of employment relations and social policy demonstrate that its greater enforcement capacity can be used to advance both the de-commodification and commodification of labour. In this chapter, we compare processes of regional integration in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe and we assess the extent to which they promote decent work.

Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Sociology and Social Policy; Sustainable Development Goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035300907.00041 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21934_32

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().