International Trade in Services.pdf - DSpace at Khazar University

Increasing Labor Mobility 57
Bilateral Labor Agreements
The treatment of labor mobility in formal RTAs has focused overwhelmingly on
categories of skilled labor, with only a few recent agreements moving to cover certain
types of semiskilled workers (see elsewhere above). Against this background,
are there other vehicles that can be used to promote labor mobility Bilateral labor
agreements (BLAs) are alternative instruments to the more legalistic and rigid
RTAs; these agreements can serve to promote and regulate the flow of unskilled or
semiskilled workers.
Background
BLAs have provided a means by which seasonal and low-skilled foreign labor may
be employed on a temporary basis. They are instruments that serve to promote
and regulate the flow of unskilled or semiskilled workers by allowing mostly
industrialized countries requiring foreign labor to design labor exchange programs
that steer inward flows to specific areas of labor demand. For destination
countries, the primary aim is to address shortages in the local labor market,
whether this concerns seasonal workers (often in the agricultural sector) or lowskilled
labor. Occasionally, BLAs also involve higher-skilled workers in areas experiencing
labor shortages such as health or information technology.
While BLAs were quite common in Europe and the United States in the 1960s,
they fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s because of the adverse combination of
inflation and high unemployment. Between 1942 and 1964, the United States
operated a program (the Bracero Program) to admit temporary agricultural
workers from Mexico. Admissions under this program peaked at over 450,000
workers per year, but began to shrink as a consequence of the stricter enforcement
of labor market regulations, combined with technological changes. Nonetheless,
the program continued to admit over 200,000 Mexican temporary workers a year
until it was ended. European temporary worker programs differed from the
Mexico–United States program in several respects, including in the locus of
employment, which was nonfarm manufacturing, construction, and mining, as
well as in the policies toward settlement. Unlike Mexicans who filled seasonal jobs
in the United States and were expected to return to Mexico every year, migrants in
Europe filled year-round jobs and eventually earned the right to unify their families
and settle through the acquisition of work and residence permits.
Since around 2000, several developed countries have entered into secondgeneration
BLAs. Many of these are in the form of memorandums of understanding
rather than more formal contractual arrangements. The BLAs take no set
form. In fact, there is such a variety of agreements that the “Compendium of
Good Practice Policy Elements in Bilateral Temporary Labour Arrangements” was