The International Labor Organization : Paradox and Promise

The International Labor Organization (ILO) strives to achieve good and admirable goals. The mission of the ILO is to advance opportunities for “decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity.” 1 But the ILO and similar organizations work in a very challenging environment. They are not governments and, hence, do not have direct law-making authority. They often attempt to soften or even counter powerful economic forces. They can succeed only with the cooperation of governments with very diverse populations and labor conditions. Those governments are usually in competition with one another in one or more domains, such as competition to offer “good” regulation or to attract capital. Drawing on a body of research on similar organizations in the United States, this paper suggests that there is often a mismatch between the problems the ILO seeks to address and its governance capacity. This mismatch leads to significant paradoxes. Where violations of labor standards are most severe, international standards are either not needed or ineffective. When international labor standards attempt to address races to the bottom, they may help facilitate them. At the same time, the standards may make races to the top less likely. International labor standards may be least effective on issues that are most important to workers, such as ensuring “decent” or “productive” work. At the same time, while this analysis suggests that the ILO is more limited than we might hope it to be, it also points to the types of problems that the organization may have the capacity to address. Specifically, the ILO may be able to address certain types of coordination problems and to provide important benchmarking functions to help facilitate intra-country democratic discussion and change. Section I of this paper will describe the governance position of the ILO and compare it to a well-known and influential organization in the United States, the Uniform Law Commission