Regional integration: a promising tool to advance the international decent work agenda?

The role of regional organisations in support of the decent work agenda depends not only on their enforcement power but also on the prevailing views and the balance of social class forces within them. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) lacks any mechanisms to enforce decent work. Elsewhere regional organisations have had more impact. Two American free trade agreements (USMCA; CAFTA-DR) include provisions on labour standards, but progress mostly has been achieved through worker organising and transnational advocacy rather than through the agreements itself. By contrast the EU’s binding laws and governance interventions in the field of employment relations and social policy demonstrate that its greater enforcement capacity can be used to advance both the de-commodification and commodification of labour. In this chapter, we compare processes of regional integration in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe and we assess the extent to which they promote decent work.