ABSTRACT
From a historical point of view, the linkage between labour standards and global trade has been recurrent for more than 200 years. Trade and labour nexus was already assumed in David Ricardo’s theory on comparative costs dating back to the eighteenth century. At that time, in 1788, Minister of Finance of King Louis XVI – Baron Jacques Necker – claimed that the abolition of Sunday as a day of rest could provide a competitive advantage to a country if other countries did not act in the same way. Then, many industrialists of the nineteenth century understood that countries that wished to improve the position of their working classes would be negatively affected by competition from other countries that did not. Some of them, for example, Daniel Legrand and Robert Owen, incited discussions about an international regulation of labour. The chapter focuses on the principal milestones in the history of the trade-labour nexus, inter alia: the 1802 Act, which reduced to 12 hours a day the employment of children in the textile factories in England; the establishment of the ILO in 1919 with its Constitution stating that ‘the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries’; the Declaration of Philadelphia with its formulation that ‘poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere’; The Havana Charter on the International Trade Organization (ITO), agreed in March 1948, which constituted an early attempt to include a comprehensive labour provision into the multilateral trade framework; the Marrakesh Agreement of 15 April 1994 establishing the WTO, which reinforced the regime of international trade and constituted a step towards its autonomisation; the Singapore Ministerial Declaration adopted at the first WTO Ministerial Conference on 13 December 1996, which cut off any attempts to form a clear link between trade and labour rights at multilateral level; the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Rights and Principles at Work, which repeated the viewpoint from Singapore on the inappropriateness of labour standards jeopardising comparative trade advantages; the 2008 ILO Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization, according to which ‘the violation of fundamental principles and rights at work cannot be invoked or otherwise used as a legitimate comparative advantage and that labour standards should not be used for protectionist trade purposes’.
