Trade-and-Labour Regulation and WTO Law, or ‘Never the Twain Shall Meet’? An Analysis of Recent Practice in the WTO and outside It

The present article employs the trade-labour nexus as a deliberate test to explore the limits of the conclusion of plurilateral trade agreements within the WTO. By analysing trade and labour as an ‘extreme case’ in this context, the article seeks to contribute to the doctrinal debate on whether, and under what conditions, plurilateral trade agreements can be compatible with the WTO’s legal and institutional architecture. In Section 1, we outline the evolution of such a debate within the WTO, from the contentious exclusion of labour at the 1996 Singapore Ministerial Conference to its subsequent treatment within the WTO architecture and in inter-institutional practice. In Section 2, we first explore the extra-WTO landscape and examine how WTO Members have responded at the regional level to the elimination of labour from the Organization’s mandate, focusing in particular on the development of unilateral preferences schemes and the incorporation of labour provisions into preferential trade agreements. In Section 3, we return to the multilateral arena and assess whether, and to what extent, these regional developments have influenced the WTO’s own discourse on the trade-labour nexus. We conclude by summarizing the results of the analysis and, in their light, attempt to address the research questions and elaborate further ones.