The Enforceability of Labour Rights in Bilateral Trade Agreements of the European Union: The Case of CETA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the 30th of October 2016, President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Council Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau signed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between the EU and Canada (CETA). In line with the EU’s external policy on the inclusion of social provisions in its bilateral and regional trade agreements, CETA contains a chapter entirely dedicated to the protection of labour standards in the context of trade relations, as a means of contributing to the overarching objective of ‘sustainable development’. The so-called ‘Trade and Labour’ Chapter includes detailed provisions on the protection and promotion of labour rights, as well as a special mechanism stipulated for the resolution of labour-related disputes. As regards the protection of labour standards, the European Commission has dubbed CETA as a ‘truly progressive’ agreement. Since both partners have experience in including labour provisions in their trade agreements, it could be assumed that the Agreement favours a revolutionary approach towards the trade and labour linkage, that could set a precedent for future trade agreements. This is the exact rationale of the Commission concerning the formulation and contents of the ‘Trade and Labour’ Chapter in CETA: according to the Commission not only have both Parties committed themselves never to undermine EU high labour standards ‘for the sake of commercial interests’, but instead to cooperate in encouraging ‘others around the world - particularly developing countries- to raise their own’. However, a closer examination of the labour provisions in CETA suggests that the Commission’s assertive stance on the preservation of high labour standards may well be unsubstantiated, which would in turn require the EU to revise its normative aspirations. The present thesis will therefore challenge the institutional expectations, arguing that the labour clause in CETA is defined by such crucial weaknesses that labour rights are rendered unenforceable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".