Measuring progress towards the application of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights: A tabular presentation of the findings of the ILO supervisory system (original) (raw)

Freedom of Association as a Core Labor Right and the ILO: Toward a Normative Framework

Law & Ethics of Human Rights, 2009

Freedom of association operates as an organizational "meta-norm," appreciated both as an independent value and as a touchstone for the institutional design of the International Labour Organization (ILO). Despite the renewed interest of the ILO in various aspects of the norm, its understanding of freedom of association lacks a comprehensive normative framework. This article presents such a conceptual framework and a critical in-depth analysis of current ILO freedom of association jurisprudence. Freedom of association should be understood in terms of equitable dialogue (ED), a term offered and developed herein, as an understanding that is already partly embedded in ILO jurisprudence.

Connecting Freedom of Association and the Right to Strike: European Dialogue with the ILO and its Potential Impact

Canadian Labour Employment Law Journal, 2010

bodies responsible for assessing state compliance with "freedom of association" have established an extensive jurisprudence on the right to strike. This jurisprudence is based on their interpretation of the ILO Constitution and various key ILO conventions concerning the right to organize and collective bargaining, in both the private and the public sector. Since the end of the Cold War, the employer lobby within the ILO has increasingly tried to undermine this aspect of ILO jurisprudence, so as to deny that there is any necessary link between freedom of association and the right to take industrial action. This pressure has come at a time when ILO norms are beginning to receive greater attention and respect, and are being applied in the human rights jurisprudence of other legal systems, including those of Canada and Europe. In 2007, the European Court of Justice for the first time explicitly recognized a right to strike, referring to ILO Convention 87 as a source of this entitlement, but limited it by imposing a proportionality requirement on its exercise. In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights indicated for the first time that the right to strike was implicit in Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, again in reliance on ILO standards. This paper compares and contrasts those cases, investigating the extent to which European recognition of a right to strike can serve to reinforce or undermine ILO standards. The paper also considers the more general implications of these developments for Canadian human rights jurisprudence.

The dynamics have changed: the right to strike at the ILO

In 2012 the Employers Group crudely halted the work of a key committee of the International Labour Conference with an argument attempting to strip the right to strike from the concept of freedom of association. This article explores events at the 2015 meeting in which the fundamental right of workers to take strike action was confirmed, and the Employers agreed to allow the ILO to resume its full supervisory role with respect to the ratification and implementation of international labour standards.

Assessment of the Progress of Nations on Core Labor Standards: Measures of Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining

The linkage between labor standards and trade agreements pursued by the US, and the burgeoning corporate codes of conduct that seek to strengthen core labor standards in global supply chains, has resulted in interest in the development of measures (or indicators) of core labor standards by a variety of organizations, such as the US dept of Labor, the ILO and several NGOs. We argue in this paper that measures of freedom of association and collective bargaining that are in use currently are incomplete and flawed, partly because they focus almost exclusively on whether the rights exist, without regard to practice, and partly because they tend to focus on easily available quantitative indicators that are necessary but insufficient indicators of the freedom of association and collective bargaining process. We develop new measures that draw on decades of comparative industrial relations research and which are based on the existing cross-national variation in industrial relations practice. Our suggested measures require national experts to use both quantitative data and qualitative research and judgment in their evaluation, and report it in consistent and transparent ways. Given that the connection between trade and labor standards makes the consequences of violation quite severe for developing countries, reliance on imperfect measures to make decisions about country performance on core labor standards is problematic. The measures advanced in this paper reduce that risk.

Representation, Bargaining and the Law: Where Next For the Unions?

International Employment & Labor Law eJournal, 2009

This article examines the state of the law relating to trade union rights to negotiate on behalf of members employed in Irish firms where the employer refuses to recognise the union(s) in question. The article examines the operation of the Industrial Relations Amendment Acts 2001-2004, which aimed to chart a course between the traditional, Anglo-Saxon voluntary bargaining model and the statutory bargaining model (introduced in the UK in 1999). An empirical approach is used, involving a detailed examination of the Labour Court’s day-to-day operation of the legislation from its introduction in 2001 until the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in Ryanair v. the Labour Court in 2007. The position in Ireland remains unique in the Western world in that the law does not provide any protection for collective bargaining rights; the Acts, therefore, still represent the only legally binding mechanism for members in non-union workplaces to have their union represent their interests (albeit...

Mining Expert Comments on the Application of ILO Conventions on Freedomof Association and Collective Bargaining

2007

This paper explains how text mining was used within the context of a research project on social dialogue regimes, jointly undertaken by the University of Geneva, the University of Lyon 2 and the International Institute of Labour Studies of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The research project, which was made possible through the generous support of the Geneva International Academic Network Foundation (GIAN), is seeking to provide a better understanding of the structural determinants (e.g., economic, social, cultural and institutional), as well as the socio-economic outcomes of "social dialogue regimes." An important part of the research is based on the analysis of the reports of the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR). The CEACR is one of the main bodies within the ILO supervisory system. It is responsible for supervising the application by member States of ILO Conventions and recommendations. Its observations concerning the progress made by members States in the implementation of ratified ILO Conventions are published in its reports. Text mining was used for the purpose of extracting useful information from these reports in semi-automatic way. This paper discusses the text mining approach that was followed, the different steps of the mining process and presents a synthetic analysis of the results obtained.

New labour rights indicators: Method and trends for 2000–15

International Labour Review, 2018

The paper describes a new method of constructing indicators of freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights as defined by the International Labour Organization's (ILO) supervisory bodies and based on the coding of violations in nine textual sources, including six from the ILO as well as national legislation. Central to the method are 108 evaluation criteria representing different violations of FACB rights, with weights derived from the Delphi method of expert consultation, yielding overall, in law and in practice Labour Rights (LR) indicators. The method is applied to 185 ILO member states for five years between 2000 and 2015. Global trends in the LR indicators are described and key drivers of these trends are identified by main categories of violations and regions. Both the LR indicators and the number of coded violations suggest a sustained worsening of FACB rights in law over this period across most categories of violations and regions, but no evident global trend in FACB rights in practice. The LR indicators are accompanied by a website housed at the Center for Global Workers' Rights at Penn State University, in which indicators for any given country and year can be readily traced to specific violations of FACB rights and the passages of text on which coding is based.