The international labor rights movement, led by the International Labour Organization (ILO), is at the center of a heated debate over labor standards in the developing world. The ILO argues that developing countries are currently ready for the more stringent labor standards in place in developed countries, like the U.S. The resistance of developing countries to such standards has lately led the ILO to push for a formal linkage between itself and the WTO as a means of imposing higher standards on developing countries.
In a recent paper, "Good for the Goose, Bad for the Gander: International Labor Standards and Comparative Development," forthcoming the Journal of Labor Research, Josh Hall and I investigate the ILO's claim by examining the timing of labor standard adoption in highly developed countries. These nations were all once as poor as today's developing countries and made the tradeoff between labor standards and income in the past. Their experience therefore suggests a safe income threshold for adopting similar labor standards in the developing world.
Using current GDP per capita levels and growth rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, we determine how far these developing countries are from achieving the development threshold the highly developed world reached before it created various labor standards. We find that every ILO-proposed labor standard is highly premature for Sub-Saharan Africa. These countries are between 100 and 300 years from reaching this threshold. ILO-proposed policy is exactly backward. A substantial relaxation of labor standards is the appropriate labor policy for this part of the developing world.
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