Trade Liberalization, Labour Law, and Development: A Contextualization

This paper is a literature review that emphasizes institutional analyses of trade law, and explores some of the linkages with the development literature. The paper contends that the development of trade law needs to be appreciated within its historical context to understand its intimate relationship with labour regulation in the North and labour commodification in the South. It adopts the perspective that from a legal / institutional perspective, the relationship between trade liberalization and labour law was not established autonomously along free trade principles; rather, it was constructed by state action and embedded in social institutions in industrialized market economies of the North during the 1950s – early 1980s. The same was not generally true for many low income states in the South. The author maintains that contemporary challenges to labour regulation in the South therefore warrant less deterministic analysis of the impact of trade regulation. The study considers labour regulatory experiences in Mexico (NAFTA), CARICOM, Mauritius, Cambodia and the Republic of Korea to argue that the relationship between trade liberalization and labour law must be understood as constantly re-constructed across governance levels and with a view to forms of distributive justice beyond national borders.