International Trade Union Cooperation BRIEFING PAPERS N° 6/ 2008 responsible: rudolf traub-merz Global Trade Union Program www.fes.de/gewerkschaften Core Labour Standards And International Organizations: What Inroads Has Labour Made? By Peter Bakvis and Molly McCoy Over its almost ninety years of existence, the International Labour Organization(ILO) has adopted 188 con­ventions that define international labour standards in a wide variety of areas, such as limits on working time, occupational heath and safety standards, employment policy, and basic working conditions for specific cat­egories of workers. For ILO conventions to have legal status and be enforced in each member state, they must be ratified by the national government. However there is a group of eight fundamental rights conventions, commonly known as the Core Labour Standards(CLS) that apply to all ILO member states whether or not they have ratified them. 1. The ILO Declaration The International Labour Conference decided to make application of the eight fundamental rights conven­tions a de facto condition of ILO membership when it adopted the ILO Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work in 1998. The ILO Declaration defined the four principles concerning the fundamen­tal rights of those eight conventions(ILO Conventions 29, 87, 98, 100, 111, 105, 111, 138 and 182): • Freedom of association and right to collective bargaining • The elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour • The effective abolition of child labour • The elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation In the ten years since the ILO Declaration was adopt­ed, several organizations, foremost among them the international trade union movement, have striven to get other international agencies or agreements to include measures which ensure that their policies and actions are consistent with CLS. Much of the atten­tion of trade unions, grouped together in the Inter­national Trade Union Confederation(and prior to the ITUC’s creation in November 2006, in the ICFTU and WCL), the Global Union Federations(GUFs) and TUAC, has been focused on international trade and financial institutions, whose activities have a huge impact on labour markets. They have also supported efforts by the ILO to extend observance of CLS to all of the United Nations system, of which the ILO is part. Some ITUC affiliates have also recently chal­lenged their countries’ development cooperation and export credit agencies to adopt policies that require the projects they finance to respect CLS. Not a single government voted against the Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work when it was adopted in 1998, yet there has still been oppo­sition to efforts to ensure that the 181 member coun­tries of the ILO live up to their commitment. While other multilateral bodies on which these same governments are represented have expressed support in principle for CLS, they have often been resistant to change practices that entail violation of CLS. The resistance has been the strongest among those agencies that have the most important impact on the