PhD defence: Simon Pahle
Josie TeurlingsThe Evaluation committee has approved his thesis for public defence. Congratulations to Simon! The defence will take place May 3rd.
Simon Pahle
Photo: Evy Jørgensen
The title of the thesis: Bringing the Workers' Rights Back In? The Discourses and Politics of fortifying Core Labour Standards through a Labour-Trade Linkage.
Abstract:
Throughout the 1990s the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) conducted a campaign to convince states to institute a linkage between the international labour and trade regimes (also dubbed a social clause): Trading rights granted to countries qua members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) would be made conditional on their compliance with International Labour Organisation (ILO) core labour standards – i.e., their upholding of the rights that enable workers ‘to claim a fair share of the wealth they have helped to generate’. The proposal was premised on the claim that increasing global competition confers commercial advantages on producers that undercut labour standards, and that this incites a regulatory race to the bottom. With a labour-trade linkage, however, such undercutting would become a commercial liability and presumably unleash a race to the acceptable.
While the campaign was the most wide-ranging in the history of the international union movement, it won limited support: Few trade unions or civil society organisations in the developing world rallied behind it, and developing country governments resolutely refused to make the proposal part of the Doha Round negotiations mandate. However, the question is not if the linkage proposal will return to the international debate, but when and on whose terms.
The present thesis explores whether and how a labour-trade linkage may help to tackle the challenges that confront labour in developing countries. In so doing, it privileges the viewpoints of activists in Brazil and South Africa. It furthermore pays particular attention to the challenge of realising agricultural workers’ freedom of association and right to collective bargaining (i.e., ‘trade union rights’) in the two countries. More>>
Updated: 05.05.11
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Department of International Environment and Development Studies
- Noragric
Phone: +47 64 96 52 00
Fax: +47 64 96 52 01
E-mail: noragric@umb.no
Postal address:
Noragric, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
P.O. Box 5003
NO-1432 Aas
Norway
Visiting/delivery address:
Universitetstunet 1 (Tivoli)
NO-1432 Ås
Phone: +47 64 96 52 00
Fax: +47 64 96 52 01
E-mail: noragric@umb.no
Postal address:
Noragric, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
P.O. Box 5003
NO-1432 Aas
Norway
Visiting/delivery address:
Universitetstunet 1 (Tivoli)
NO-1432 Ås