Transborder Labor Liberalization and Social Contracts

The failure of states to liberalize labor as part of the multilateral trade liberalization project stands in stark contradiction to the liberalization of other fundamental economic inputs, thus undermining the vision for a globalized world. The disjuncture and disequilibrium between international trade law and domestic immigration law foster illegal movement across borders and result in the vulnerability of human would-be mobile labor providers to trafficking and other forms of exploitation. As a result, the transnational labor market is characterized by the illegality and temporariness that is assigned by states to mobile and would-be mobile human providers of labor. Yet, the globalized transnational economy demands and stimulates the movement of labor from one domestic economy to another. Domestic social contracts, to the extent that they exist, are subject to the pressures of transnational economic forces that have altered, fundamentally, the existing contracts between, for example, labor and capital. Concepts of distributive justice require democratization of access to the benefits of trade liberalization. To the extent that individual nation-states’ domestic laws demand that labor be rendered immobile and/or that mobile human labor providers be punished for transgressing the laws created to ensure their immobility, labor is denied full access to the benefits of trade liberalization. To create a rights-protective equilibrium in the transnational labor market, I contend that the economic nature of humans — our economic roles in the global economic system — must be more fully recognized. That recognition will require that human labor providers must have the right to easily enter and exit individual domestic labor markets in response to economic stimuli. I propose that the path to the framing, implementation, and enforcement of a global social contract that protects labor is to liberalize labor from some of the nation-state constraints to which the transborder labor market is subject