Free Trade and Transnational Labour

Resistance against free trade agreements based on an expanded trade agenda, including issues related to intellectual property rights, trade in services and trade-related investment measures, has increased since the demonstrations at the WTO ministerial conference in Seattle in 1999. While the WTO Doha negotiations have broken down, the EU and USA are increasingly engaged in bilateral free trade agreements, building on this expanded trade agenda.

Free trade strategies have increasingly become a problem for the international labour movement. While trade unions in the North, especially in manufacturing, have supported free trade agreements to secure export markets for their companies, trade unions in the Global South oppose these agreements, since they often imply deindustrialisation.

The purpose of this volume is to understand better these dynamics underlying free trade policy-making. Academics, trade union researchers and social movement activists analyse these issues in detail in order to explore possibilities for transnational labour solidarity.

This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.