Labour rights in the globalization debates

The standard account of the role of labour regulation reflected in mainstream neo-classical economic theory is that deregulation facilitates economic growth. This perspective has generated vast bodies of work towards developing theoretical underpinnings for the reform of labour laws and promoting deregulation in a variety of policy arenas. In recent years, deregulatory discourses have gained ground at the international level. A recent manifestation of this approach, for example, is found in the work of the World Bank, which has made highly visible efforts to promote deregulation of domestic labour law regimes in its Doing Business indices

Alternative approaches to labour market regulation

In contrast to this line of deregulatory theory, the work of labour lawyers and institutional economists among others, offers accounts of labour market regulation in which labour standards are understood to be fundamental social rights that can be integrated with the instrumental goal of promoting economic development. Promising avenues of recent scholarship also question how legal measures can be redesigned or enhanced to more readily realize their objectives. This work explores how labour rights can be advanced in more effective ways than available solely in conventional "command and control" mechanisms, through new or overlooked regulatory techniques such as financial incentives, government contracts, codes of practice etc.

The RDW project

The activities of the RDW project have two main objectives: to highlight and advance research on integrating labour rights into economic growth strategies; and to make available to as wide as possible an audience a principled and coherent argument for retaining and advancing labour rights in the globalized economy.