International Labour Organization

Encyclopedia : I : IN : INT : International Labour Organization

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The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations to deal with labour issues. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. Founded in 1919, it was formed through the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles, and was initially an agency of the League of Nations. It became a UN body after the demise of the League and the formation of the UN at the end of World War II. Its current charter, the Declaration of Philadelphia, was adopted in 1944. Its secretariat is known as the International Labour Office.

The organization seeks to strengthen worker rights, improve working conditions and living conditions, create employment, and provide information and training opportunities. ILO programmes include the occupational safety and health hazard alert system and the labour standards and human rights programmes.

Historically, one of the functions the ILO has performed has been the establishment of international standards for workers' conditions, which have then become the basis for trade union and other activism in individual countries.

International Labour Conference

The ILO hosts the International Labour Conference in Geneva every year in June. At the Conference, conventions and recommendations are crafted and adopted by majority decision. The Conference also makes decisions on the ILO's general policy, work programme and budget.

Each member state is represented at the International Labour Conference by four delegates: two government delegates, an employer delegate and a worker delegate. All delegates have individual voting rights, and all votes are equal, regardless of the population of the delegate's member state. The employer and worker delegates are normally chosen in agreement with the most representative national organizations of employers and workers. Usually, the worker delegates coordinate their voting, as do the employer delegates.

Adoption of Conventions

The decision-making process of the ILO means that proposed conventions need support of the International Labor Conference to be adopted. Adoption of a convention by the International Labor Conference allows governments to ratify the convention which then holds standing as an international treaty when two or more nations ratify an adopted convention.

Ratification of Conventions

With the ratification of a convention by at least two countries comes a legal obligation to apply its provisions by the nations that have ratified the convention. Governments are required to submit reports detailing their compliance with the obligations of the conventions they have ratified. Every year, the International Labour Conference's Committee on the Application of Standards examine a number of suspected breaches of ILO labour standards. In recent years, one of the member states that has received the most attention is Myanmar, as the country has repeatedly been criticized for its failure to protect against force labor of its citizens.

The Subjects of Conventions

All adopted ILO conventions are considered "International Labor Standards" regardless of how many national governments have ratified them. The topics covered by the various International Labor Standards cover a wide range of issues from workers' freedom of association to health and safety at work to working conditions in the maritime industry to night work to discrimination to child labor and forced labor.

1998 Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work

Under pressure from the World Trade Organization and other external groups to simplify and narrow the dozens of International Labor Standards, the ILO in 1998 created the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. This declaration identified four issue areas as "Core" International Labor Standards. These "core" or "fundamental" standards have all been ratified by an overwhelming majority of ILO member states, with the exception of Burma and the United States, which have ratified only two of the eight conventions considered "fundamental".

Criticism of the Establishment of \"Core\" or \"Fundamental\" Labor Standards

Despite the rapid ratification of the eight conventions identified as fundamental by many countries, a number of academics and activists criticised the ILO for creating a false division among the entire range of International Labor Standards, many of which covered specific and concrete human rights topics but were excluded from the 1998 "Fundamental Declaration." For example, Health and Safety and Working Hours were excluded from the 1998 declaration. To add further confusion, the new "core" conventions are often exclusively referred to as being "human rights" whereas before all International Labor Standards were viewed as being human rights. Philip Alston, the John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University has written on this narrowing of international labor standards in the name of human rights advocacy.

Recommendations

Recommendations do not have the binding force of Conventions, and are not subject to ratification by member countries. Recommendations may be adopted at the same time as Conventions to supplement the latter with additional or more detailed provisions. The intent of these recomendations is often to more precisely detail the priciples of related Conventions.

In other cases Recommendations may be adopted separately, and address issues not covered by, or unrelated to any particular Convention.

Child labour

The ILO has a specialist programme addressing child labour, the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC).

HIV/AIDS

Under the name ILOAIDS, the ILO created the Code of Practice on HIV/AIDS and the world of work as a document providing principles for "policy development and practical guidelines for programmes at enterprise, community and national levels." Including:

• prevention of HIV
• management and mitigation of the impact of AIDS on the world of work
• care and support of workers infected and affected by HIV/AIDS
• elimination of stigma and discrimination on the basis of real or perceived HIV status.

Nobel Peace Prize

The organization received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969.

International Training Centre

The ILO maintains an International Training Centre in Turin, Italy.

Personnel Policy

The International Labour Organization is an agency of the United Nations and as such shares a core of common personnel policy with other agencies.

Same-sex Marriages

Despite their independence in matters of personnel policy, the International Labour Organization and other agencies of the United Nations voluntarily discriminate between opposite-sex marriages and same-sex marriages, as well as discriminating between employees on the basis of nationality. Agencies of the United Nations will recognize same-sex marriages only if the country of citizenship of the employees in question recognizes the marriage. Individual agencies do, in some cases, provide limited benefits to domestic partners of their staff.

In 2004, an employee of the ILO unsuccessfully challenged the organization's stance on recognition of same-sex marriage.

Role in Destabilizing the Democratically elected Haitian government

In June 2006 an American labor magazine Labor Notes documented the role that the ILO, ICFTU, ORIT, and the AFL-CIO played in supporting a destabilization campaign. The ILO ignored massive labor persecution against public sector workers and trade unionist supporters of the ousted government throughout 2004, 2005, and 2006.

See also

• International Labour Conference

References

External links

• [Official site of the International Labour Organization]
• *[Constitution of the International Labour Organization]
• *[International Labour Conference]
• *[ILO conventions]
• *[ILO recommendations]

 

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