Trade Conditions and Labor Rights

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In this remarkably wide-ranging study, the author asks whether trade restrictions stimulate actual labor reform. Taking Caribbean Basin nations as evidence, Frundt evaluates the successes and failures of labor requirements in the United States' Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) and Caribbean Basin Initiative.As Frundt demonstrates, GSP conditions have been responsible for limited success in El Salvador, where agreements broke down in formulating and implementing new labor codes. Compliance hardly fared better in Guatemala, although attitudes improved. In Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, GSP achieved temporal successes, and in the Dominican Republic the trade requirements displayed their greatest effectiveness, resulting in substantive labor reform.The usefulness of labor-rights trade conditionality as an incentive for respecting worker organizing, bargaining, and living standards has been hotly debated in recent years. Frundt acknowledges the barriers to labor code enforcement. However, he challenges the widespread notion that conditionality inhibits trade and worker benefits by encouraging an "informal sector" of laborers with little access to legal remedies.Evenhanded and impressively researched, with hundreds of firsthand accounts and a broad synthesis of empirical data, this book is an important contribution to the debate over the value of trade-related requirements and social clauses in securing basic rights for the world's low-income workers.