When a country exports goods, it doesn't generally care what happens to those goods once they are sent abroad. There may be some exceptions: treatment of animals; nuclear materials; perhaps the use of guns and other weapons. But for the most part, this is not a big concern.
By contrast, when you are trading services through Mode 4 (presence of natural persons), you do care how these workers are treated when they are abroad. Here is something from the Philippines:
The Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE), through the Philippine Overseas Employment Administrations (POEA), released recently the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of Republic Act 10022, the amended Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipino Act of 1995. The law aims to protect the welfare of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) and the IRR intensifies such protection by defining the responsibilities of recruitment agencies.
With the IRR, several provisions of Republic Act (RA) 10022 are now in effect. These include the repatriation of OFWs if necessary at the expense of their recruitment agencies; prohibition of reprocessing or alteration on an OFW’s contract; and inspection of medical clinics before they are deployed. Foreigners are barred from owning the majority of the shares of a recruitment agency.
This makes me think of Tomer's paper explaining the shortcomings of the GATS on this issue:
In this article I have attempted to tease out the basic principles of an international labour
migration regime that could conform to competing theories of global justice on a pragmatic,
non-ideal basis, and address the multitude of problems associated with the international
labour migration debate. I have shown that these principles should include elements of
global distributive justice, human rights protection, immigration policy enforcement and
contingent emergency safeguards or 'escape clauses'. These principles reflect not only a
philosophical common ground between cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches to
this difficult area, but also a compromise among different political views.However, the GATS Mode 4 spectacularly fails to meet any of these criteria. It is as
ineffective in the promotion of global distributive justice as it is in the strengthening of
migration policy enforcement, and as inadequate in the protection of human rights as it is in
the prevention of seriously detrimental effects of labour migration. The establishment of a
global labour migration regime that is morally permissible, politically possible and likely to be
effective (Rawls: 1999, 89) will no doubt require careful consideration, negotiation and time;
but the GATS Mode 4 does not appear to be the appropriate model, in too many senses.
