Dear Colleagues,
Just a brief email to alert you to a forthcoming paper by Keith Ewing, John Hendy and Nicola Countouris which provides arguably the best, current analysis and the profound challenges posed to workers' and trade union rights as a result of the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA).
The full paper will be published this month by the European Trade Union Institute as part of their Policy Brief series. You will be able to get a copy of the paper here:
https://www.etui.org/listing/publication
To provide a flavour of the paper and its analytical perspective, here are the identified policy implications from the TCA for worker and trade union rights:
1. In some limited respects, the EU-UK TCA goes beyond the diluted, and at times tokenistic, protection of multilateral labour standards contained in the other FTAs concluded by the EU, e.g. with countries like Canada or South Korea.
2. However the few additional labour clauses it contains, and the overall weak supervision and dispute resolution procedures applying to them, offer an unsatisfactory regulatory framework, one that is unlikely to deter future UK Government from eroding presentday standards. •
3. The implementation of the labour provisions in the TCA will require close monitoring in the years to come, and should become one of the priorities of the five-year review catered for by Article FINPROV.3.
Please do read the full paper and I welcome any thoughts in response.
In Solidarity
Ian
