As if trade were more important than people

Now it is trade. Trade is the most important issue on the planet. Or so we are led to believe by news media only able to deal with one issue at a time. Trade is indeed important to most nations, especially since the global liberalisation of trade gained momentum after the signing of the Uruguay Round of GATT and the establishment of the World Trade Organisation, WTO. Trade is used to enhance the wealth of nations - all nations, even if that is not possible - and the wealth of companies. But trade is not a zero-sum-game. Protectionism, trade barriers, and even trade wars are used by the powerful to keep the less powerful in place.

Some countries, i.e. the US and the European Union, have set up systems which allow for the monitoring of their trading partners' performance in, for example, the field of human and trade union rights. Sanctions can be used - an offending country can lose its status as "most favoured nation" which means it has to pay higher tariffs when exporting its goods. The American system may not work wonders, as an article in this issue of FOCUS shows, but it has certain advantages.

Applied on a global scale, this can be called a social dimension in trade or a social clause in trade agreements. For some time, the trade union movement has campaigned for a social clause to be included in the WTO's mandate to promote more open trade. The clause would commit the member states to the universal respect for some core ILO Conventions. The US and the European Union, with the exception of the UK, have supported the claim.

Now the OECD governments have approved a study that provides the basis for pressing ahead with the campaign not just to discuss labour rights and trade at the WTO meeting in Singapore in December, but to have it set up a working party to deal with the issue. The study, which reviewed the relationship between the observance of trade union rights and economic development, found that countries which suppressed these rights did not have a better economic performance. Rather, the opposite may be true. We ought to be grateful to the OECD for taking the trouble to prove that governments normally do not benefit from being bastards.

To the Financial Times, however, this is not enough. The editorial of 24 May requires "the industrial powers which want to give the WTO a "social" dimension (...) to demonstrate clearly why that would promote, not restrict, global free trade".

Apart from being a silly statement - ILO Conventions were not invented to promote trade but to protect workers without whom there would be nothing to trade - the logic is killed at the end of the very same paragraph: "But governments of developing countries also need to show that they are not using that failure (to demonstrate that a social clause promotes trade) as an alibi for delaying essential improvements in basic human rights and labour standards."

That is the point. People believe that workers ought to have rights. These rights ought to be universal and universally observed. The market forces will not provide workers with rights. The next to tooth-less enforcement procedures of the ILO will not provide rights for all. Promoting rights by mechanisms that have economic implications - for example by adding observance of core labour standards to the conditions for free trade - may work.

It is worth a try. It may benefit the WTO and the ILO. Who knows, after some time it may be proven that it also benefited trade. But that is not important. The important thing is that it benefits workers.