Just what trade talks needed: another issue to wrestle with. The nascent deal between Congress and the US administration to insert stronger protection of labour rights into bilateral US trade deals, while not disastrous, is a step in the wrong direction.

The deal, and it remains to be seen whether it can get past Democratic trade-sceptics, is substantive but not cataclysmic. The labour standards that it seeks to write into future US trade agreements - freedom of association, right to collective bargaining, and elimination of forced labour, child labour and discrimination - are already well represented in labour law around the world, and particularly in the US's big trading partners.