Labor exploitation still divisive issue for talks

By TIM COLEBATCH,
Singapore, Tuesday

Reebok now labels its soccer balls as made without child labor. Bangladesh clothing exporters pledge that no children work in their factories. The big US retailer Wal-Mart says it has cut off suppliers employing child labor.

Yet last month the International Labor Organisation estimated that 250 million children aged from five to 14 were at work around the world, many in hazardous trades or bonded labor, `and about a million in the sex trade in Asia.

And many governments, including some in newly-rich countries, deny their workers such core labor standards as the right to form trade unions, the right to bargain over wages and conditions, and freedom from forced labor.

No issue has divided this week's inaugural ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation more deeply than labor standards, and the campaign by the United States and most of Western Europe to use trade sanctions to force countries to comply with basic labor standards.

Nowhere is the opposition stronger than in South-East Asia, where spectacular economic growth has been accompanied by repression of trade union activity. Most countries, including Australia, have backed their stand, arguing that such issues should be left to the International Labor Organisation.

But to the US, France and their supporters, this is passing the buck. The ILO has no sanctions with which to enforce labor standards. By making trade access conditional on meeting labor standards, the WTO has the muscle to make them stick.

Trade veterans see it as the most dangerous issue on the conference table. Just as when ministers gathered for a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade meeting in Marrakesh in 1994, it seems clear that the US has too few supporters here.

The most likely outcome appears to be a compromise in which the meeting will declare its support for core labor standards, and possibly commission a dialogue on the issue between the WTO and the ILO (neighbors in Geneva), rather than within the WTO.

In a briefing paper for the meeting, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions said the ILO system only worked well ``where a government is prepared to cooperate''. In some cases, governments ``persistently refused to act on ILO recommendations in instances of gross abuse'' thereby winning trade advantages ``at the expense of some of the world's most vulnerable people''.

The debate is continuing.