ASEAN rejects trade and labor standards link

ASEAN rejects trade and labor standards link

HANOI (Reuter): Labor ministers from ASEAN member countries reaffirmed their stand against linking labor conditions to international trading rules, Vietnamese Labor Minister Tran Dinh Hoan said yesterday.

"There should not be any ... link between labor standards and economic and trade issues," Hoan told Reuters after a meeting in Hanoi of labor ministers from the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). "And we reached a consensus on that."

ASEAN groups Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Hoan said the ministers, who met behind closed doors Tuesday, wanted to reaffirm their position in a dispute which took center stage at a World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in December.

The U.S. and other Western nations have argued that international trade rules should be used to raise Third World labor standards, eradicate sweatshops and stop an estimated 250 million children from working, often in appalling conditions.

Backed by France and Canada, Washington has said it wants the issue to be thrashed out at the WTO, which has its own court to resolve trade disputes.

Other countries, mostly from the developing world, argue that the U.S. is trying to protect jobs at home from cheap Third World labor.

At the WTO conference in Singapore, member countries agreed to observe "internationally recognized core labor standards", confirming that the International Labor Organization (ILO) was "the competent body to set and deal" with them.

Both sides in the argument went away from that meeting proclaiming history.

Vietnam's official media, in reports on the ASEAN ministers' informal meeting in Hanoi, said it had been agreed that the ILO was "the only world agency responsible for setting labor standards -- not the WTO".

Recently, U.S. sportswear firm Nike Inc came under fire following allegations of labor abuse at a factory near Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City which is operated by a Taiwanese subcontractor.