Labour rights promotion in the absence of conditionality ? How the EU and the US engage China and India

Labour standards are one of the most contested issues in economic relations between developed countries and emerging markets. As attempts to codify such standards in the WTO have failed, the EU and the US have intensified their efforts to promote them in bilateral and regional Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). Whereas this practice has been quite consistent across the globe, the lack of corresponding PTAs with China and India restricts US and EU potentials. This article turns the question on its head and explores to what extent the EU and the US promote labour standards in China and India in the absence of conditional clauses, by focusing on more horizontal strategies of cooperation instead. Drawing on the analytical framework of institutional and substantive labour standards promotion in the absence of conditionality and on the supply and demand model of regulatory influence, the study reveals that while conditional approaches in the field of labour standards are highly contested by China and India, the US and the EU are able to engage them via technical cooperation, political dialogues, Memoranda of Understandings (MoUs), and other formal agreements. It furthermore shows that core labour standards are less consistently addressed in their bilateral cooperation than technical and governance labour standards