United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Secretary General Dr Supachai Panitchpakdi has said the decisions of the United States and the European Union demanding implementation of controversial labour standards in Bangladesh following Savar tragedy pose a serious threat to the rule-based global trading system, Inter Press Service (IPS), a global news agency, reported on Saturday. “Labour rights and standards are something very sensitive to all developing and least developed countries of World Trade Organisation (WTO) and when countries try to impose labour standards, they are just distracting from WTO’s authority,” Panitchpakdi told IPS.
A fortnight ago, the new United States trade representative Ambassador Michael Froman announced in Washington that the U.S. administration is discontinuing benefits offered to Bangladesh under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) scheme because of Dhaka’s poor labour rights.
Close on the heels of the US decision, the EU resorted to trade-linked conditionality to impose labour rights in Bangladesh. The EU has forced Bangladesh to sign a “compact” that lays out the labour reforms that Bangladesh will have to carry out in a time-bound framework to avail duty-free and quota-free market access in the EU market.
Since the violent Seattle ministerial conference in 1999 which broke down due to irreconcilable differences between the rich and the poor nations over attempts to bring labour standards into the WTO rule book, the industrialised countries have stayed away from linking labour rights with trade at any multilateral forum.
The latest actions signal a change. If anything, they seem to stoke the fires of the Seattle meeting all over again. “If countries get away with doing all this, then, it results in a shift away from WTO in rule-making which is quite threatening,” Panitchpakdi said.
Brussels not only threatened Bangladesh but also warned other least developed countries that it would deny market access under the “Everything but Arms (EBA)” scheme if they failed to implement labour standards in their textiles and garments industry on a war footing.
“If trade majors want to impose labour rights,” said the UNCTAD Secretary General, “They should bring the issue to WTO.” It is unfair to punish countries outside WTO by threatening denial of market access, he said.
“They have been doing this with Cambodia and now with Bangladesh,” Panitchpakdi said. Instead of labour rights, the industrialised countries must look at the business practices of their retail and wholesale industry because the problem with global value chains is the way they are exploiting the sweat shops in poor countries which are providing cheap labour, he added.
-With The Independent input
