Trade Agreements, Labour Standards and Political Parties. Differences between the U.S. and the EU in their Approach towards the Inclusion of Labour Standards in International Trade Agreements

The connection between labour standards and international trade has become a key issue in the relations between industrialised economies and developing countries. Both the US and the EU are advocates of the inclusion of “labour standards” in trade agreements with developing countries, in multilateral, bilateral and unilateral contexts alike. As the prospects of establishing multilateral rules governing the relations between trade and labour within the framework of the WTO have diminished, both trade blocs increasingly focus on bilateral forums to pursue their policy goals. In this paper, the objectives are twofold. First of all, we aim at describing the main points of difference between the EU’s and the US’s approach towards the inclusion of labour standards in bilateral trade agreements. In a second step we will formulate a possible explanation for these differences based on a theoretical model that focuses on the aggregative role of political parties in the context of European and US policy-making on trade.