Description
In the academic literature on the trade-labour linkage it is commonly assumed that labour provisions in trade policies are intended to protect or raise the ‘national average’ of workers’ rights, however these might be measured and regardless of whether those jobs are connected to tradable goods and services. This paper instead starts from the premise that there is a political geography to the particular types of work and worker articulated within trade governance discourse. For example, rhetorical and legal references to the need to defend manufacturing jobs or tackle abusive practices in global supply chains carry within them implicit messages about who deserves what kind of support and the subnational or transnational locations where those people are likely to be found. By the same token, work clustered elsewhere tends to be politically marginalised. Interrogating the UK’s unilateral Developing Countries Trading Scheme, its bilateral FTAs that have done more than rollover an EU agreement, and its Export Finance agency, this paper seeks to map the workers who matter in UK trade policy.
