Shrinking the International Labor Code : An Unintended Consequence of the 1998 Ilo Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work?

The World Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalization presented its final report in 2004. In addressing the central issue of what future, if any, international labor standards have in an era of competitive globalization, the Commission focuses heavily on the 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. The authors characterize that Declaration as part of an effort to replace the broader labor rights agenda with a narrow focus on a much more limited corpus of four core labor standards and to move towards an approach that is fundamentally promotional, rather than grounded in firm legal obligations and involving targeted institutional responses to violations of labor rights. They consider three ways in which recent developments undermine the traditional approach: (i) the move from a uniform definition of standards to an ad hoc system; (ii), the privileging of a core set of largely procedural and essentially civil and political labor rights, to the exclusion of vital social rights; and (iii) the use of determinedly soft promotional techniques of implementation. The authors conclude that the World Commission approach reinforces these trends and argue that urgent remedial steps will need to be taken if the ILO is to continue to defend labor rights in the years ahead