Dealing with Communities

In addition to setting wages, transnational corporations also regularly confront choices about where to locate facilities. This can involve uprooting production to move elsewhere. There is basically no normative work on what issues arise here. This chapter dismisses some unconvincing ways of faulting relocation decisions and explains how complaints about relocation are plausibly understood as complaints about exploitation. It proposes conditions under which relocation is exploitative and explains what policy measures may still render it all-things-considered permissible. At issue is both the decision to relocate from the corporation’s country of origin (often a choice to relocate from the developed to the developing world) and relocation between foreign countries.

Dealing with Workers

The question of a just wage has presumably been contentious ever since there have been wage relations, and philosophical thought on the subject reaches back hundreds of years. Yet the subject remains elusive. This chapter discusses wage payments through the lens of trade justice. It explains how questions about wages arise as a topic of trade justice to begin with, examines prominent ways of thinking about wages, and offers an exploitation-based perspective. While none of the prominent competing perspectives fully succeeds, they capture insights a convincing perspective should accommodate. Deploying the conception of exploitation as power-induced failure of reciprocity shows how certain wages might plausibly be criticized as exploitatively low.

Theorizing the Firm

This chapter explores the corporation as a subject of moral and political theory. Companies have been neglected as a subject of political philosophy and of theories of trade in particular. This chapter defends the idea that firms are actors with moral responsibilities and subject to trade justice. It identifies questions about both the moral requirements applying to the corporation’s internal structure, including treatment of employees, and its responsibility to outside actors, including communities, other firms, or states as matters of trade justice. Firms ought to refrain from violations, and they ought to respect and they ought to support the principles of trade justice. Arguments that firms are, morally speaking, off the hook in matters of trade justice do not succeed. With regards to trade, arguments about market pressure, adversarial practices, obligations to shareholders and a division of labor fail. The chapter introduces a case study about Nike that allows the formulation of several questions about obligations of firms that the remaining chapters answer.

The Moral Force of Exploitation

Exploitation generally is ubiquitous in human affairs, as is the specific injustice involved in exploitation in the domain of trade. This chapter explores how to respond to occurrences of exploitation. It develops a general perspective of constrained agency and an accompanying differentiated vocabulary to delineate obligations of particular agents. The chapter also offers a theory of stepping stones towards as well as of prices worth paying for the creation of a just world. Such an approach allows to distinguish between two kinds of cases: first, cases of exploitation that can be accepted temporarily on a decent progression from the current unjust state of the world to a more just one, and secondly, cases that cannot be put into perspective this way and that must be terminated forthwith. The chapter reflects on how to use such arguments properly since overusing them is tempting.

Dispersed Responsibility

Another aspect of the economic activities of transnationals concerns how they operate in contexts characterized by dispersed responsibility. One such context is the outsourcing of economic activity. Companies hire other companies or individuals not directly under their control to do certain tasks. This final chapter explores under which circumstances companies can deny moral responsibility for wrongdoings of suppliers or sub-contractors, and whether outsourcing might be morally problematic even in cases where suppliers or sub-contractors do not commit any wrongs. Another context characterized by dispersed responsibility is where corporations must make choices related to operating under authoritarian regimes. This chapter applies the “moral force of exploitation”—reasoning to explain when corporations may, or should not, cooperate.

Domestic Trade Policies in an Interconnected World

This chapter explores particular domestic obligations of states in the domain of trade, including obligations and prerogatives to protect their labor force and industries from competition and obligations that arise in the context of dealing with authoritarian regimes. The grounds-of-justice approach dilutes contrasts between domestic and foreign policy. Governments must attend to matters of domestic justice, as well as make appropriate contributions to the global advancement of human rights and to trade justice. There are additional duties of justice and other moral duties that apply to states in domains such as immigration, climate change, or protection of future generations. The state has obligations to protect its labor force and look after its vulnerable citizens. But it also has duties towards people elsewhere. The challenge is to reap gains of cooperation in trade, culture, education, environmental protection, among others, while respecting the world’s many local peculiarities and making sure those gains do not accrue only to a few. The grounds-of-justice approach offers guidance for how to pursue these tasks.

The Political Significance and Philosophical Complexities of Trade

Trade has made the world, but as far as philosophical thought is concerned, it remains elusive. What, if anything, about trade generates obligations, and what is the nature of these obligations? Can we identify a normative ground for trade-specific obligations while recognizing other grounds such as common humanity or shared citizenship? How should we think about such a ground in ideal theory, where everybody does as they ought to, and in non-ideal theory, where not everybody does? These are tough questions, partly because trade touches on many philosophical subjects but must also be properly understood historically and social-scientifically. This chapter casts light on both the political and historical significance of trade and its philosophical complexities. The chapter also introduces the major theses this book defends.

A Much-Needed Organization

One obligation of states is to found an international organization concerned with trade justice. This chapter continues with that theme, explores what obligations such an organization would have, and discusses institutional reform of the WTO in light of these arguments. Such reform is necessary because by the lights of the understanding of trade justice developed in this book the current WTO is exploitative. The chapter argues that the WTO’s multilateralism is a requirement of justice and reflects on how this point bears on how the global trade organization should be organized. That is, this chapter makes suggestions for how the WTO could approximate an organization devoted to trade justice, and thus how the world could approach a New Global Deal.

The State as an Agent of Trade Justice

This chapter theorizes the normative role of states in the global order generally and in trade specifically. One challenge for a theory of multiple grounds of justice is that an assignment of duties is not straightforward. A theory of global justice that recognizes multiple grounds requires a differentiated vocabulary to outline obligations for different agents, some designed to fit the role and importance of states for global justice, and some designed for other actors. The chapter develops the constrained agency perspective from Chapter 6 (which started to work with some of that vocabulary) for the role of the state within a pluralistic theory of global justice.

Trade as One Ground of Justice

This chapter explores more systematically the image of trade that we propose in this book, which we call Trade-as-one-Ground. It does so by way of introducing the grounds-of-justice approach from Risse’s On Global Justice. That approach makes good on the claim that trade is one in several grounds, and indeed is one such ground. Technically the ground is not trade as such but subjection to the global trading system. The chapter explains this notion and explores why one should indeed regard it as one ground of justice. It also investigates differences between inquiries into fairness in trade and trade justice.