ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together the key findings from the book’s three case studies, reflecting on both the national and industry scales of analysis. It finds that labour standards provisions had minimal effects and were mismatched with key concerns of workers in the case study export industries of sugar, automobiles, and clothing. At the same time, the agreements in which they were embedded were having adverse effects on workers’ lives; a dynamic which has been unexplored in previous studies of the trade-labour linkage. It then considers three debates on trade, labour, and global governance. The first is the role of civil society in trade policy, reflecting on the consequences of the formal inscription of civil society actors into the Trade and Sustainable Development chapters of European Union free trade agreements. The second is the way in which labour governance is carried out through trade agreements, examining how traditional differentiation between hard and soft law on the one hand, and public and private regulation on the other, shapes debate in this field. Finally, it engages with the question of whether labour rights should be governed through trade policy at all and, if so, what progressive possibilities there are for such forms of governance in the future.
