Author: rjglbadmin

An Essential Element of Fair Trade and Sustainable Development in the FTAA is an Enforceable Social Clause

By: Terry Collingsworth

 

Multinational companies (“MNCs”) and governments that are fantasizing about a Free Trade Area of the Americas (“FTAA”) should accept the reality that the FTAA is not politically viable for the time being unless the issues of labor rights and other social conditions are addressed in a manner demonstrating that these rights are consistent with commercial rights that are protected in careful detail in many pages of the draft FTAA agreement.

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The Economic Case for Labor Standards: A Layman’s Guide

By: Thomas I. Palley

 

The place of labor standards in the global economy has figured prominently in recent discussions of trade and globalization. Labor standards figured prominently in the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, and they promise to figure prominently in discussions about a proposed Free Trade Area of Americas (FTAA). Labor standards represent a critical issue for both the American labor movement and the international trade union movement as they are central to making globalization work for working people.

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Does Free Trade Cause Hunger? Hidden Implications of the FTAA

By: Jonathan B. Wight

 

This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effects of any human wisdom, which forsees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

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The Geography of Injustice: Borders and the Continuing Immiseration of California Agricultural Labor in Era of “Free Trade”

By: Don M. Mitchell

 

Why is it that when the reigning ideology governing the expansion of “free trade” is anti-regulatory”, all agree that the movement of people, or rather laborers, must be carefully regulated? Indeed, why are borders strengthened for people just as states of the Western Hemisphere embark on a thorough reconfiguration, and even a dismantling, or borders for capital and goods.

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Better Patent Law for International Commitment- The Amendment of Chinese Patent Law

By: Jiwen Chen

 

On August 25, 2000, the Chinese National People’s Congress (“NPC”) passed and amendment to the Chinese Patent Law. The Chinese Patent Law was enacted in 1984 and first amended in 1992. This second Amendment, in August of 2000, was made in anticipation of China’s accession to World Trade Organization (“WTO”) and in response to the need for protection of domestinc intellectual property rights.

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