Conference Agenda

Global supply chains are an important driver of growth and development, bringing millions of workers into the global labour market and providing opportunities for firms to expand their market access. However, the fragmentation of production entailed by global supply chains can give rise to significant challenges for ensuring accountability for workers’ rights and the effective governance of the labour market.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has further highlighted the vulnerability of workers in supply chains as well as the regulatory deficit in terms of supply chain governance. In many countries, notably in the Global South, domestic labour laws and institutions are often not sufficient to address labour standards issues in supply chains. At the same time, empirical research suggests that private regulatory initiatives alone cannot sufficiently fill this regulatory gap. This underscores the need for designing new regulatory responses, including at the transnational level, to address the aforesaid decent work deficit.

Given the economic leverage they tend to come with, trade instruments can contribute to inducing relevant change at the national and company-level. Indeed, labour-related requirements have been inserted into a variety of trade instruments, including plurilateral and bilateral trade agreements and unilateral trade preference schemes. Furthermore, an increasing number of trading partners have adopted – or are considering adopting – import bans for goods produced with forced labour. Some trading partners have also experimented with innovative regulatory arrangements in this regard, including a company-level dispute settlement and sanctioning mechanisms in the context of the recently adopted United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement.

This special session explores the potential of international trade instruments to foster the advancement of labour standards in supply chains. Looking at a range of trade agreements and unilateral trade instruments, the presenters will examine different policy levers of trade instruments to improve labour standards on the ground. Contributions will also explore potential synergies with other regulatory instruments to this effect. This includes due diligence laws that have recently been adopted or proposed by several countries as well as the ILO’s role in facilitating the implementation of the relative trade policy elements.

This paper aims to examine what role trade instruments can play in a multi-layered governance approach to address forced labour in global supply chains. Based on an overview of forced labour in trade-related sectors, the paper analyses how trade instruments – including import ban laws, unilateral trade preference instruments and trade agreements – have incorporated forced labour concerns into their design. Subsequently, the paper explores the potential and limitations of forced labour provisions in trade instruments as part of a broader governance approach, involving a variety of instruments and actors at the international, national and local level. It focuses on two case studies, namely the rubber glove and the palm oil industries in Malaysia and the cotton sector in Uzbekistan. On this basis, the concluding section reflects on how the design of the relevant trade instruments could be enhanced to address forced labour issues more effectively.

Within the United Nations system, the ILO is the lead Organization in setting, promoting and supervising international labour standards. This paper seeks to provide insights on the ILO’s contribution, considering the trade policy and labour standard linkages, in enhancing labour standards implementation on the ground. This analysis focuses, first, on the ILO’s on-going Trade for Decent Work project, which covers countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America benefiting from unilateral trade instruments or regional trade agreements involving labour provisions. Subsequently, the paper examines the piloting of an innovative use of ILO action: ILO observations of workplace democratic processes prompted by labour reforms in Mexico in the context of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). On this basis, the paper reflects on possible avenues for reinforcing the work of the ILO towards the advancement of social justice through labour provisions linked in the new generation of trade agreements.

Covering 1.4 billon people in more than 50 countries, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is one of the most ambitious trade initiatives in the world today. This raises the question to which extent the AfCFTA can contribute to achieving Decent Work-related objectives as the African continent recovers from Covid-19. In order to assess this, the paper, first, critically reviews the body of literature that models the expected impact of the AfCFTA in these areas. It is argued that, taken collectively, these studies are inconclusive, which highlights the need for integrating labour considerations into AfCFTA’s design to ensure positive Decent Work outcomes. In this light, this paper examines the institutional and legal framework of the AfCFTA in order to identify practical steps that negotiators, policymakers and their partners can take to better utilise the AfCFTA as a vehicle for contributing to decent work on the continent.