I was drawn to this topic by a contest of ideas about the effects of globalization on uh labor conditions around the world and what I noticed was most of the debate was rested on anecdotes and that there had been no large effort to bring evidence to bear on this question and so I decided to do the research necessary to bring a broad body of evidence from a number of countries to Bear to try and answer this question about how globalization affects working conditions and labor rights around the world yes well the oldest idea the effects of globalization on labor conditions really goes back to International Trade Theory where uh in very brief form the idea is that free trade leads resources to move towards their most productive uses uh and when they're in their most productive uses uh they have the maximum scope for monetary and non-monetary compensation so the idea is the kinds of adjustments that go with free trade while painful in the short run lead to improved labor conditions in the long run the uh I should say that in recent years that uh oldest idea has been countered to some extent by assertions that globalization sets off a kind of race to the bottom and uh the assertion involved in most race to the bottom arguments is that as countries compete to improve the scale of their exports and to attract foreign direct investment they will degrade their labor conditions well I try to muster the evidence on the effects of free trade uh on the effects of international migration and the activities of multinational corporations on a set of working conditions and a set of Labor rights the working conditions that I focus on are the usual wages hours of work and uh measures of job safety the labor rights that I focus on are the four labor rights that are currently stressed by International organizations uh those are freedom of Association non-discrimination abolition of forced labor and reduction of child labor oh a long list of things the um I suppose the uh broadest findings is at the end of the 20th century which was certainly a period of expanded globalization uh you find improvements in all measures of Labor conditions both working conditions and labor rights secondly when you look at the data you find that the improvements were greatest in countries that were open to free trade uh and the levels and rate of improvement and conditions were poorest in countries that were closest to International Trade Clos International Trade the um effective economic growth is uh quite noticeable basically all measures of working conditions and labor rights improve when countries grow uh and this is important because the burden of the evidence is that countries that shift from closed trade policies to open trade policies grow more rapidly so free trade has an effect on working conditions by stimulating the GDP per capita of most countries Ries free trade also has an additional effect uh on labor rights that is in addition to the improvements in labor rights that come through trade's Improvement of uh GDP uh there's some somewhat mysterious additional effect in improving these rights another finding um excuse me another Finding pertains to international migration here the evidence is mostly historical particularly from the first wave of globalization uh in which there were a few barriers to international migration uh the international migration particularly across the Atlantic Ocean that occurred then greatly narrowed wage differences between uh Europe and in the United States nowadays the incentives to move between countries are at least as great um but on the other hand there are more political barriers to to migration so to some extent the potential for international migration to produce greater World equality is being uh thwarted by the um restrictive immigration policies of many destination countries also uh the research found that um multinational corporations on average um are associated with better rather than worse labor conditions uh in the countries they operate they pay higher wages they have Superior non-pecuniary conditions of employment on average uh and also when you look at the patterns of foreign direct investment you find that most of the investment flows between uh countries uh that are already quite industrialize you do not find a pattern of foreign direct investment flowing towards the countries with the poorest working conditions the final finding I guess I should emphasize pertains to International labor standards because part of this debate has argued that we need a system of strongly enforced International labor standards in order to prevent globalization from eroding labor conditions uh the findings uh of my research are first of all that the existing system of international labor standards has not produced uh advances in labor conditions really powerful effects have been the effects of globalization the reason for that is that while there is a positive correlation across countries between the extent to which they sign on to the labor standards and the the quality of their labor conditions uh in effect that correlation ref reflects a tendency for countries to sign on to standards that they have already achieved rather than sign on to commitments to change their standards so one could say that the overall conclusion of the book is that the mechanisms of globalization thus far have proven to be a more reliable method of advancing labor conditions than uh the International System of Labor condition of labor standards well what it says is that there's no evidence that I've been able to find in the data for over a hundred countries uh that the race to the bottom view is correct uh specifically you do not find that greater export performance is associated with poorer labor conditions and as I mentioned earlier you do not find that foreign direct investment is attracted to countries with with uh poor working conditions and very poor labor rights um on the on the other hand you do find that um labor conditions are improved in countries that shift to open trade policies and that expand their uh exports and imports you find that uh the multinational corporations that are a part of the foreign direct investment flows uh use on average Superior working conditions and provide Superior labor rights to the local companies uh that they compete within the host countries so um what I get out of this is the original contest is that the older vision of international trade theory about how free trade would affect labor conditions uh seems to have uh the bulk of the empirical support uh well two very interesting sorts of responses most the economists who read it or discuss sit with me says well every Economist knows that and I suppose that's because that is because most economists are brought up with International Trade Theory um on on the other hand if I asked the people well where would you send someone who wanted to see the evidence on this issue they agreed there there was no evidence out there before um I have not heard uh I've not had extensive feedback from uh people who uh believe the race to the bottom argument um most of those race to the bottom assertions uh flow from specific anecdotes and my view is that by and large those anecdotes are probably true but they are not typical of the general situation and I think that's the contribution of the book it shows that when you take a broad look at trade and migration patterns and and foreign direct investment and relate that to labor rights and working conditions um you you don't see the patterns that are implied by different anecdotes so these anecdotes as true as they may be individually just to not adequately describe the typical situation or typical relationship between these forces of globalization and labored conditions