James Harrison's research while affiliated with University of Sussex and other places

... Second, an obligation to enforce existing law was of limited value to workers in countries where existing labor laws are weak (Greenhill, Mosley, and Prakash 2009). Third, these treaties provided for nonbinding mediation between states should these commitments not be met, but not for any binding sanctions on violating states (Smith et al. 2020). Moreover, importing states were rarely willing to initiate disputes over labor violations, giving rise to concerns that the main function of labor chapters was as a symbolic concession to domestic protectionists (Hafner-Burton, Mosley, and Galantucci 2019). ...

... Summarizing studies on the effectiveness of TSD chapters, Harrison et al. (2019a) find no evidence of positive impacts on labor standards in the EU or partner countries and identify a series of weaknesses in practically every aspect of the dialogue-based monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. 1 The EU has in only one case, the EU-South Korea FTAand only after eight years of sustained complaints by trade unions and other civil society actorsrequested formal government consultations (Campling et al., 2021). The failure of these led to the establishment of a PoE, which in January 2021 confirmed that South Korea breached its TSD obligations and recommended that labor laws and practices are adjusted to comply with freedom of association. ...

... The CPTPP Labour Chapter commits the parties to adopt and maintain in domestic laws and practices the four fundamental rights as stated in the 1998 ILO Declaration. 11 The CPTPP also requires the member countries to have laws governing "acceptable conditions of work" with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health. 12 The EU FTAs' TSD Chapters impose on the parties the obligation to respect, promote and implement in the laws and practices the principles concerning the fundamental rights as stated in the Declaration. ...

... A number of institutions and policy processes are in place to enforce better surveillance of exchange rates and reduce global imbalances. However, in the time of the rise of global supply chains the question arises as to whether these will be used to set up a more cooperative system of exchange rates at the international level [3]. The challenge of securing agreement is made more acute by the need to resolve difficult questions during the rise of global supply chains [4] about the effectiveness of different policies and their impact on trading partners, the answers to which depend on a number of factors, such as the technology involved, the characteristics of the sector and the markets at issue. ...

... James Harrison and his co-authors aptly note that one of the reasons why labour provisions have not been well enforced in FTAs by the Commission is that 'trade officials may perceive such provisions as impairing the competitiveness of export industries'. 120 This is certainly the case in Korea. The literature on the subject describes that Korean politicians have long served the interests of large conglomerates at the expense of workers in these sectors. ...

... Past studies working with scalar heuristics have tended to conceptualise labour control regimes as structural contexts at various levels that are unilaterally imposed on local workers (see e.g. Pattenden 2016;Smith et al. 2018). In contrast to this dominant 'top-down' conceptualisation, the here-developed relational approach stresses that labour control regimes as structural contexts are constructed through practices and relationships that are situated in space and time and can be challenged and transformed by workers and unions. ...

... The role of trade unions, as stated in Law Number 21 of 2021 concerning Trade Unions, is that workers/laborers are business partners who are very influential and important in the production process in order to improve the welfare of workers/laborers, and have also provided freedom regarding membership and trade union management (Suhartoyo, 2019). In contrast to a lot of literature in various countries where employment relations related to internal policy making and labor-related standards are made by a commission, trade unions also play a role in a company's policy, namely collective bargaining agreements (Harrison, 2019). Trade unions, as an organizing instrument for working class citizens, have the potential to act as a counterbalance to the political power amassed by business interests and the wealthy (Flavin, 2018). ...

... Beyond the initial state-centric focus, a growing social science literature has more recently examined the proliferation of indicators and benchmarks in the realm of business and human rights (e.g., Felice, 2015;G€ otzmann, 2019;Harrison & Sekalala, 2015;Shamir & Weiss, 2012;Veiberg et al., 2019). These regulatory instruments are created because companies impact human rights in numerous ways, ranging from direct impact on individuals to impact on how notions of human rights responsibilities develop (Birchall, 2021). ...

... Third, these labour and environmental provisions are enforced via a so-called dispute settlement mechanism. The structure and functioning of these mechanisms are roughly the same for all FTAs concluded by the EU (see Fig. 9.1), involving a dialogue-based approach to solve conflicts (Campling et al., 2016). The innovative feature regards the role given to civil society in monitoring the disputes. ...