<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Linkage.html>
Just linkage: The power of positive sanctions
International Trade and Labor Standards: A Proposal for Linkage Christian Barry and Sanjay G. Reddy (Columbia University Press, New York: 2008)
by Michael Pollak
This is an important book. It could change how people think. It could even affect the world—and even if it does neither, it’s kind of a dazzling argument just by itself. But because it is dense and maieutic, I’m afraid that very few people will read it if they aren’t persuaded beforehand that it will be worth their effort. So my goal in this review will be to summarize the authors’ argument in bold strokes in order to make people curious enough to read it in its full form.
The problem linkage is supposed to solve
Many books have been written on the question of whether globalization is good or bad. This book starts with this question of moral evaluation but takes it in a new direction. Having read seemingly every polemic on the subject, the authors claim they have distilled out the common evaluative principle shared by all sides. This they call Proposition O (as in the Objective): international economic system A is morally better than system B if it better improves the lot of the least advantaged (and worse if it makes them worse off).
Globalization has been created in large part by a cumulative succession of international agreements. As soon as we initial one, we start the round of negotiations on its successor. It has become an article of faith among globalization’s supporters that such continual revision is a necessity. As they put it, economic liberalization is a bicycle that has to keep moving or it will fall over. So the moral question then becomes, What would be the best way to reform our agreements to best advantage the least advantaged? This then brings us to the argument about linkage.
Linkage is the idea that the best way to reach Objective O would be to make raising labor standards, i.e., wages and working conditions, a condition of membership in the system of international economic cooperation. The beauty of the idea is how direct it is. If you want to make the poor less poor and exploited, then raise their wages and improve their working conditions. And if globalization is such a powerful force—perhaps the only other thing its critics and supporters both agree on—then yoking that power to raising those standards sounds like a pretty great idea.
There’s only one big obstacle: at the moment, almost everyone who has given it some thought believes linkage is a terrible idea. It is one of the rare areas of agreement between orthodox economists and critical left activists. The general consensus is that linkage as it is normally conceived would punish the people it is supposed to help and give new leverage to the powerful to frustrate and abuse them.
This is what makes this small and unassuming book feel like such a Copernican revolution. It sets out to prove we’re all wrong....