Previously posted on SSRN.

Abstract

This Chapter was initially drafted during the Obama Administration. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) had been negotiated and, although it had not yet been ratified in the United States, the Administration and majority of policymakers were in favor of its implementation. Since that time, the United States Administration changed and the United States withdrew from participation in the TPP. While unfortunate, the Administration’s political decision to withdraw from the TPP does not come as a surprise; an examination of the negotiating history of those provisions illuminates a stark political divide within the United States, even prior to the change in Administrations. Fortunately, the other eleven parties to the TPP persevered, resulting in the Comprehensive and Progressive TPP.

This Chapter seeks to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the TPP's Labor Chapter, and to highlight what could have been (and, the authors argue, what should be replicated or further improved in future agreements). To do so, it identifies ways in which the Labor Chapter harmonized the trade parties’ previous labor-standards commitments and the ways – in particular, through the preconditions set out in the Labor Consistency Plans – that it had added new commitments. Section 2 of this Chapter describes the various labor standards that have been included in the trade agreements of the TPP signatories. Particular emphasis is placed on the United States and Canada, both of which have included labor provisions that have progressively evolved over time and have been a pre-condition for ratifying trade agreements. Section 3 describes the negotiated TPP text and highlights the various political and ideological debates that had to be overcome in order to achieve the objectives of the Chapter. Finally, Section 4 examines the novel provisions in that Chapter, as well as in the three bilateral Labor Consistency Plans between the United States, and Malaysia, Vietnam and Brunei Darussalam.

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