ABSTRACT
With Democrats again in control of the Congress, and with the real possibility of a Democratic President in the White House, U.S. citizens are likely to see a push to implement transnational labor protections, according to which basic workplace standards (including health and safety regulations, minimum wage laws, bans on child labor), and fundamental union rights (for example, free association and the right to organize) must be institutionalized transnationally so as to better accord with the realities of a global economy. In sharp contrast to his Republican successor, who amassed the most ferocious antilabor record of any modern U.S. president, Bill Clinton periodically made a point of announcing his fi delity to the idea of enforceable cross-border protections for labor. In particular, he was an outspoken defender of the one type of transnational labor standard (socalled corporate “codes of conduct”) popular in the board rooms of large multinational corporations; his longstanding support for extending trading privileges to China was accompanied by an offi cial promise to encourage U.S. businesses operating there to respect a coterie of voluntary labor standards.1 The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) only made its way successfully through Congress in 1993 because of the simultaneous ratifi cation of a labor “side-agreement” with Mexico and Canada, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), which was similarly predicated on achieving cross-border protections for labor. Within the World Trade Organization (WTO), under the last Democratic Administration, the United States was the most infl uential member-state demanding that global free trade be tied to a proposed “labor clause” requiring respect for core labor rights and workplace standards. In this area of policy, as in so many others, Clinton in fact built on the legacy of his immediate predecessors: Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the United States made the extension of trading privileges conditional on the acceptance of “internationally recognized worker rights,” and a substantial range of decisive trade laws still on the books-for example, the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which helped open the American market to developing countriesincludes express legislative commitments to the maintenance of minimal workplace standards and labor rights in those countries with which the
United States conducts business. With the demise of the most right-wing government in modern U.S. history, Americans can expect to see a renewed push at the national level to build on this legacy.
