LABOUR: ILO Shapes Up For The Challenges Of Globalisation

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Apr 1 1997 (IPS) - The rights of women and children at work take special prominence in the International Labour Organisation’s plans for the end of the 20th century; it says the way to defending them lies through respect for workers’ rights and social justice.

The ILO has put women, children and exploited workers in general at the top of their agenda for the two years starting 1998, in plans approved last week by the ILO’s Board of Governors — albeit on a 5.6 percent budget cut on 1996-97 figures to 547 million dollars.

The U.N. workers’ rights body has a 1998-99 policy that will include new initiatives against child labour and continued efforts to apply the recommendations made by the 1996 Beijing Women’s Summit and 1995 Copenhagen Social Summit.

“Increased respect for basic labour rights and an expanding sense of social justice are the foremost challenges we confront at the threshold of the 21st century,” said ILO director general Michel Hansenne in his presentation to the ILO board last week.

Both plans and budget now go to the ILO’s International Labour Conference next June.

The ILO estimates that 250 million children between the ages of five and 14 work, and that 120 million of them work full time. Most of them work in rural areas and in small, often family run business. Contrary to public perceptions, the ILO says, the modern export sector only plays a minor role in absorbing child labour.

Last February a ILO co-sponsored conference in the Netherlands took clear steps towards an international agreement outlawing the most ‘intolerable’ forms of child labour in the ILO’s 174 member states — slavery, forced labour, debt bondage, prostitution and work which is dangerous, or interferes with their education.

The conference also called on the ILO to expand the scope of its work on gathering statistics and reporting on global trends so that progress towards the eradication of child labour could be monitored. The ILO takes its 1998-99 agenda on this issue to an Oslo conference on child labour later this year.

The ILO will also launch a new international programme for more and better jobs for women, geared toward gender equality in full- time employment, remuneration and production.

The immediate objectives of this planned Programme for Women is to support institutional and legal frameworks that permit improvement in the quantity and quality of jobs available to women. An additional task will be to draw attention to the problems faced by women in the workplace.

One of the biggest challenges facing the ILO is the issue of global labour rights in globalising economies. Following a bitter row between states at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in Singapore in December, a dispute only resolved by making the ILO — not the WTO — the official forum for promoting social rights as trade globalisation deepens.

Developed nations had wanted the WTO to tackle labour rights alongside trade development, a position rejected by southern nations, which suspected that the real aim was to shackle their competitive trading power through campaigns disguised as concern for promotion of labour standards.

The United States and France have led calls for establishing core labour standards; Malaysia leads a 17-nation southern caucus arguing that Western nations treat the labour issue as a protectionist tool, disadvantaging developing nations.

Some labour rights NGOs saw the decision to hand over exclusive responsibility for global workers’ rights issues to the ILO, as a deliberate and successful attempt to block effective action.

Hansenne has tried to counter this widespread view by promising efforts to toughen up control of core ILO conventions, including a programme of oversight inspections in non-signatory nations.

At present, the ILO, based around tripartite grouping of employees, unions and workers, can only review labour situations in states that have ratified the seven key ILO conventions.

Hansenne has also promised action in improving the convention ratification rate in signatory states’ parliaments. Despite its stance at the WTO in Singapore, the United States has so far only ratified one ILO convention.

The ILO has found itself in the front line of efforts to challenge breaches of workers’ rights — notably in defence of the right of free association under trade unions. Countries where trade unionists are treated as ‘subversives’ have been singled out by the agency.

The latest report by the ILO’s committee on freedom of association, adopted along with the 1998-99 plans last week, cited 73 cases of trade union rights infringements in 41 countries, notably Nigeria, Colombia and Sudan, charged with staging widespread violence against trade unionists.

The agency said trade unionists in those countries faced murder, intimidation and harassment and called for urgent changes to labour law and government practice in line with the ILO conventions.

“The ILO has to evolve in function with developments at the WTO and that is why it is necessary to enforce our teeth, which means our mechanisms of control,” Hansenne said in Geneva, recently.

The ILO is preparing a document on the promotion and fulfillment of international labour standards in globalised economies. The ILO’s Committee for Legal Affairs has asked that the document “offer options,” and that it also contain concrete proposals and a timetable for their implementation.

Labour unions represented by ILO say that the norms set forth in the document are central to guaranteeing that competitive market pressures not lead to a vicious downward cycle of work and living conditions.

One extra task to be addressed in 1998-99 is the issue of a possible successor for Hansenne. According to media reports in London, Hansenne, a former Belgian labour minister, will not stand for a third term when his mandate expires in two years.

Any list of possible successors will be headed by Kari Tapiola, Hansenne’s Finnish deputy. Likely external candidates may well include Irish president Mary Robinson and former Norwegian premier Gro Harlem Brundtland.