The perspective of social clauses in international trade. WP CSDLE “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 147/2018

Perulli, Adalberto (2018) The perspective of social clauses in international trade. WP CSDLE “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 147/2018. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

In my paper I analyzed in a rather systematic way the linkage between international trade and labour rights, with particular reference to the theme of social clause as a tool capable of connecting different regulatory regimes, namely that of the international labour law and the international economy law. Such regulatory regimes have deep common roots that date back to the inception of international labour law: the first draft of the British delegation in the commission for international labour law, appointed after the first World War by the Peace Conference, declared that one of the main objectives of International labour conventions should be to eliminate unfair competition based on oppressive working conditions and that States signing conventions should reject commodities produced under unfair competition conditions. This is to say that the linkage deals with a recurrent theme in the history of labour law, which has its roots as right of regulation of the competition among States and among enterprises, in an epoch in which the national economies were compared out of a regulatory frame of the international commerce and the United Nation Society had not been founded yet. The links of labour law with this component of the liberal economy - the commerce and the philosophy of the free trade - have marked the history of the 20th century, with alternate stories and different perspectives. If with the foundation of the ILO the respect of the social rights on the part of nations was already conceived as a condition for the advancements of the other States desirous to progress in the social regulation, the perspective of an institutional connection between regulation of the commerce and respect of the social rights will find a consecration in the Havana Charter, in which it is foreseen expressly that the States adherent to the new Trade International Organization must respect equitable conditions of labour.

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