WTO’s Small Step Forward on Workers’ Rights

The crowning achievement of a five-day World Trade Organization ministerial conference that ended here Friday was a highly detailed agreement to eliminate tariffs on most information technology products by 2000.

But the most divisive and problematic issue at the 128-nation conference was workers’ rights, a topic finally dealt with in an ambiguous paragraph that everyone knew would have to be completely devoid of any immediate practical meaning.

Such immense energy went into drafting an almost irrelevant statement because the relationship between labor conditions and world trade is inherently in conflict--and of huge importance to the future of the world’s increasingly globalized economy.

The key economic advantage poor countries bring to world trade, which enables them to compete at all with richer societies, is the low wages--sometimes extremely low wages--of most of their workers. Under such conditions, violations of internationally recognized ideals, such as the abuse of child labor, are not uncommon.

Thus the debate here was simply the opening round within the world’s premier trade organization of what is sure to be decades of argument. In the end, the vague agreement on worker rights enabled all sides--from highly developed democracies to poverty-stricken dictatorships--to claim at least modest victory.

Still, it is billed as significant that a global organization with the power of sanctions even attempted to address the difficult issue.

European Union trade commissioner Leon Brittan said the statement on labor standards “does mark a breakthrough . . . on this delicate but vital subject. We have put our foot in the door.”

The ILO recently estimated the number of child workers in the developing world at 250 million, nearly half of them full-time, and many in conditions exposing them to serious risk of injury or illness.

Many workers in rich industrialized countries, on the other hand, fear the loss of jobs to nonunionized, poverty-stricken work forces in other nations.

Some argue that the more the world’s economy is globalized, the greater the ability of multilateral corporations to play off workers of one country against another by implicitly threatening to move investment and jobs to wherever workers are paid the least and have the weakest bargaining rights.

Developing countries fear that rich countries’ expressions of concern for the welfare of oppressed workers in the poorer nations are actually no such thing, but rather are disguised attempts at throwing up trade barriers against products from such nations.

Developed nations concerned about issues of labor rights, including the United States, thus made it a top priority at Singapore to win some kind of linkage between the WTO and “core labor standards,” as a step toward trying to eventually establish rules with teeth. In this they succeeded--but only by promising not to use the concept in ways that could harm the interests of developing nations.

The relevant paragraph in the meeting’s final declaration says: “We renew our commitment to the observance of internationally recognized core labor standards. The International Labor Organization is the competent body to set and deal with these standards, and we affirm our support for its work in promoting them. . . . We reject the use of labor standards for protectionist purposes, and agree that the comparative advantage of countries, particularly low-wage developing countries, must in no way be put into question. In this regard, we note that the WTO and ILO secretariats will continue their existing collaboration.”

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, a Brussels-based organization claiming 124 million members in 136 countries, that has pushed for this issue to be addressed by the WTO, immediately described these words as “a small but important step forward in our drive to bring a human face to the process of globalization.”