Crafting an International Legal Regime for Worker Rights: Assessing the Literature since the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, critical attention has increasingly focused on the remaining world system, capitalist in nature and anchored in the World Trade Organization (WTO), founded in 1994 as the successor to the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As the 1990s progressed, a smattering of exciting new intellectual work began to appear on the social and environmental impacts of the international trade and investment regime, especially given its apparently negative impact on many developing countries and the world's working people. “The distinction somewhat comfortably maintained by ‘trade hands’ who managed the post-World War II international economy—that trade is strictly a commercial function with no immediate connection to social concerns—has evaporated under the pressure of political and social forces generated by the globalization of the economy.â€