Recently in Trade Category

Source: William H. Cooper, Congressional Research Service, RL31356, February 23, 2010

From the summary:
Free trade areas (FTAs) are arrangements among two or more countries under which they agree to eliminate tariffs and nontariff barriers on trade in goods among themselves. However, each country maintains its own policies, including tariffs, on trade outside the region.

In the last few years, the United States has engaged or has proposed to engage in negotiations to establish bilateral and regional free trade arrangements with a number of trading partners. Such arrangements are not new in U.S. trade policy. The United States has had a free trade arrangement with Israel since 1985 and with Canada since 1989, which was expanded to include Mexico and became the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) effective in January 1994.

Source: Peter Cole, WorkingUSA, Vol. 12 no. 4, December 2009
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From the abstract:
This article examines the experiences of two rural communities that, since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement, lost major employers. Rural deindustrialization has struck the Midwest particularly hard. While the disappearance of hundreds or thousands of jobs is devastating, some small towns have adapted faster than others. Farmington, Missouri has, for now, weathered the storm far better than another small town, Galesburg, Illinois. This article seeks to do something other than retell a familiar, if generally accurate, story about the suffering caused by the current wave of globalization, facilitated by trade deals. Rather, it will explore the possibility that corporate-driven globalization is not an unmitigated disaster for rural America and rural Americans. Rather, some towns struggle but persevere, some suffer tremendously, while still others create jobs, although all jobs seem ever more insecure in the increasingly global economy.

Source: Mark Barenberg, Economic Policy Institute, EPI Briefing Paper #246, October 9, 2009

From the summary:
Time after time, the labor-rights provisions of trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA fail the workers they were designed to protect. This EPI Briefing Paper, released as part of its Agenda for Shared Prosperity, lays out a plan to remedy this problem.

Source: United States Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking, September 2009

The List was released as part of a larger report detailing the methodology, scope, and limitations of the underlying research. Included in the List were 122 goods from 58 countries that ILAB has reason to believe are produced by forced labor, child labor or both, in violation of international standards. The countries on the List span every region of the world. The most common agricultural goods listed are cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, coffee, rice, and cocoa. In the manufacturing sector, bricks, garments, carpets, and footwear appear most frequently; and in mined or quarried goods, gold and coal. The report also includes listings of the sources used to make determinations about each good on the List. The primary purpose of the List is to raise public awareness about the incidence of child labor and forced labor in the production of goods in the countries listed, and, in turn, to promote efforts to eliminate such practices.
See also:
The Department of Labor's 2008 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor -- 2009

Source: United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-09-439, July 2009

The four selected FTAs have largely accomplished the U.S. objectives of achieving better access to markets and strengthening trade rules, and have resulted in increased trade, as summarized in the table. While varying in details, the FTAs have all eliminated import taxes, lowered obstacles to U.S. services such as banking, increased protection of U.S. intellectual property rights abroad, and strengthened rules to ensure government fairness and transparency. Overall merchandise trade between the United States and partner countries has substantially grown, with increases ranging from 42 percent to 259 percent. Services trade, foreign direct investment, and U.S. affiliate sales in the largest partners also rose.

FTA negotiations spurred some labor reforms in each of the selected partners, according to U.S. and partner officials, but progress has been uneven and U.S. engagement minimal. An example cited was Morocco's enactment of a long-stalled overhaul of its labor code. However, partners reported that enforcement of labor laws continues to be a challenge, and some significant labor abuses have emerged. In the FTAs we examined, Labor provided minimal oversight and did not use information it had on partner weaknesses to establish remedial plans or work with partners on improvement.

Source: Alan Hyde, Rutgers School of Law-Newark Research Papers No. 048, August 2009

From the abstract:
The International Labor Organization (ILO) is not an effective force for raising labor standards in the developing world and could become considerably more effective by taking account of the two of the most important and interrelated recent theoretical developments in understanding labor standards. First, countries derive no comparative advantage in the global trading system from most very low labor standards. The ILO should therefore concentrate its energies on lifting these, rather than (as it so often does) concentrating on labor standards that are a source of comparative advantage, the elimination of which is resisted strongly and effectively. Second, the tools of game theory may be used to identify the collective action problems that prevent countries from lifting their own labor standards, and create a role for a transnational agency that may assist them.

Source: Jeff Ballinger, Dissent, Vol. 56 no. 3, Summer 2009
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That nearly twenty years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught is suggested by the cost breakdown of a $37.99 University of Connecticut hoodie that appeared in the Hartford Courant a couple of years ago: the workers received a mere 18 cents, while the university received $2.28 in licensing fees. (Mexican factory: profit, 70 cents; overhead, $2.12; material, $5.50--importer [Champion]: overhead, $5.10; profit, $1.75--retailer [UCONN Co-Op]: overhead, $14.49; profit, $4.50). Use of the logo was 80 cents, and the royalty to the National Collegiate Athletic Association was 57 cents. The workers' share could hardly have been lower when the movement began.

Given the worldwide financial crisis, it is a safe bet that fighting sweatshop abuses here and abroad will not be a key policy undertaking for Barack Obama and his team. But this does not rule out a wide-ranging set of initiatives that would significantly empower workers.

Source: Washington Office on Latin America, 2009

From the press release:
After three years of studying the impact of the free trade agreement DR-CAFTA on labor rights, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) published a study today that reveals that labor conditions in the DR-CAFTA countries have not improved and violations have not diminished regardless of promises made by the member countries to improve labor rights and the millions of dollars invested by the United States to meet this objective. Moreover, WOLA anticipates the labor situation in Central America will deteriorate further due to the global economic crisis.

Source: Jeff Faux, Dissent, Vol. 56 no. 2, Spring 2009
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When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pledged to Ohio Democrats last spring to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, they were immediately charged by the mainstream press with pandering to labor, thus re-igniting the simplistic "free-trade vs. protectionism" debate that has dominated the discussion of the U.S. role in the international economy for the last quarter-century. It was clearly and over reaction. After all, both candidates merely suggested strengthening the agreement's labor and environmental protections, which even fierce champions of NAFTA now concede are inadequate. Changing them would have little effect on the rest of the agreement.

However, the world has changed dramatically since the treaty came into effect in 1994, making the economic and political assumptions upon which it was based obsolete. What is needed now is not a revision of NAFTA but an entirely new approach to North American integration in light of the two most important changes.

Source: Global Exchange, 2008

At the heart of the fierce national debate over immigration reform legislation in the United States lie the fates of more than twelve million undocumented immigrants, more than half of whom come from Mexico. This debate, which will return to the center of the political stage sometime after the inauguration of Barack Obama, pivots on whether U.S. policy should account for and integrate these immigrants, or reject and criminalize them. Yet an equally important question--often lost from view amidst the heated rhetoric and political posturing that accompany this issue--is what we can do to better the bleak economic conditions in Mexico that compel an additional half million Mexicans to leave home and enter the United States without documentation every year.

In light of this question and Mexico's leading role in sending immigrants to the United States, we have invited a group of experts from both countries to join in issuing this report, The Right to Stay Home: Alternatives to Mass Displacement and Forced Migration in North America.