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Trade
Conditions and Labor Rights
U.S.
Initiatives, Dominican and Central American Responses
by Henry J. Frundt
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In this remarkably wide-ranging study, the author asks whether
trade restrictions stimulate actual labor reform. Taking
Caribbean Basin nations as evidence, Frundt evaluates the
successes and failures of labor requirements in the United
States' Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) and Caribbean
Basin Initiative.
As Frundt demonstrates, GSP conditions have been responsible for
limited success in El Salvador, where agreements broke down in
formulating and implementing new labor codes. Compliance hardly
fared better in Guatemala, although attitudes improved. In
Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, GSP achieved
temporal successes, and in the Dominican Republic the trade
requirements displayed their greatest effectiveness, resulting in
genuine and substantive labor reform.
The usefulness of labor-rights trade conditionality as an
incentive for respecting worker organizing, bargaining, and
living standards has been hotly debated in recent years. Frundt
acknowledges the many barriers to labor code enforcement.
However, he challenges the widespread notion that conditionality
actually inhibits trade and worker benefits by
encouraging an "informal sector" of laborers with
little access to legal remedies.
Evenhanded and impressively researched, with hundreds of
firsthand accounts and a broad synthesis of empirical data, this
book is an important contribution to the debate over the value of
trade-related requirements and social clauses in securing basic
rights for the world’s low-income workers.
Henry J. Frundt convenes the Latin American
program at Ramapo College, New Jersey, and is the author of Refreshing
Pauses: Coca-Cola and Human Rights in Guatemala.
1998. 416
pp. 6 X 9.
52
tables, appendix, bibliography, index.
ISBN
0-8130-1621-5
Cloth,
$59.95
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"Frundt's book is a model of engaged scholarship. . . , both sobering and encouraging as it deals with the reality faced by workers in developing countries caught up in the new global economy."--
Industrial and Labor Relations Review
"The definitive history of trade-based pressure on behalf of Caribbean Basin workers. The book also reveals a widespread pattern of circumvention and backsliding. Frundt's work will provide an essential point of departure for the many scholars who take up the task."
-- American Journal of Sociology
"Impressively researched. . . .
Digests a mountain of literature and follows up with a dazzling
compilation of anecdotes and specific local knowledge based on
extensive first-person on-the-scenes interviews. . . . Far and
away the best single source on worker-rights struggles and issues
in the Caribbean Basin."--Mark Hager, Washington
College of Law
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