This book explores the prospects of a global labour law system. Global labour law is understood as a still non-coherent set of norms that at different levels and with different legal effectiveness regulate legal labour relations, promote respect for fundamental social rights, and condition the behavior of the multinational enterprise, from a social justice and sustainability perspective. The book deals with both international labour law and regulatory instruments of different kinds, such as social clauses in international trade treaties or corporate codes of conduct, transnational collective bargaining, and EU directives on due diligence. This complex normative “system” is partly reconstructed and partly subjected to critique, with the aim of producing a hybrid handbook in which the elements of normative knowledge are accompanied by problematic reasoning about the forms, contents and purposes of a possible global labour law. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of Labour Law, Employment Law, International Human Rights Law and Social Justice.

First published in 1989. The oil crises of the 1970s and increasing international competitive pressures had profoundly changed the structure and performance of labour. Analysis of labour markets, and especially international comparisons, can be difficult, given the differences between definitions, scope, coverage of data, methods, presentation, and economic and social influence in different regions. This book is an invaluable guide for users of international labour statistics. It centralizes and co-ordinates, from a range of sources, basic statistical information regarding the labour force for a large number of countries. Individual chapters, by specialists in the particular subject areas, deal with eight key aspects relating to the labour markets of major, developed capitalist countries (OECD countries); working population, unemployment, wages, consumer prices, labour costs, hours of work, trade union membership, and industrial disputes. The book discusses the nature of the data sources and statistical compilations, highlights cross-national trends over the past fifteen years, outlines the inherent difficulties of making such cross-country comparisons, and points out the potential pitfalls of interpretation of which users are often insufficiently aware. The book includes a summary of key labour market data, on an individual country basis, for twenty-four OECD countries and twenty other countries.

For more than nine decades, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been responsible for setting up, monitoring, and implementing international labour standards in order to ensure that workers around the globe enjoy minimum social protection and workers' rights. Lars Thomann examines the ILO's wide ranging efforts to achieve compliance with international labour standards adopted by the organization and ratified by its member states. The author draws on different compliance schools of various strands of international relations theory and discusses them against the background of the ILO's compliance efforts in general and regarding the abolition of forced labour in particular. He shows that even though the ILO has experience in bringing about compliance – given its seniority – and is in many cases successful in doing so, it is not well equipped to deal with persistent cases of non-compliance. The book is valuable reading for researchers and students in the field of social sciences, as well as for practitioners working on international labour standards.

The International Labour Organization was created in 1919, as part of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War, to reflect the belief that universal and lasting peace can be accomplished only if it is based on social justice. As the oldest organisation in the UN system, approaching its 100th anniversary in 2019, the ILO faces unprecedented strains and challenges. Since before the financial crisis, the global economy has tested the limits of a regulatory regime which was conceived in 1919. The organisation's founders only entrusted it with balancing social progress with the constraints of an interconnected open economy, but gambled almost entirely on tools of persuasion to ensure that this would happen. Whether that gamble is still capable of paying-off is the subject of this book, by a former ILO insider with an unrivalled knowledge of its work. The book forms part of a broader inquiry into the relevance of founding institutional principles to today's context, and strives to show that the bet made on persuasion may yet pay off. In part, the text argues that there may be little alternative anyway, showing that the pathways to more binding solutions are fraught with difficulty. It also shows the ILO's considerable future potential for promoting effective, universal regulations by extending its tools of persuasion in as yet insufficiently explored directions. Starting with an examination of how the organisation's institutional context differs from 93 years ago, the author goes on to evaluate the prospects of numerous proposals put forward today, including the trade/labour linkage, but going beyond this. As a case study in how strategic choices can be made under legal, social and institutional constraints, the book should be valuable not only to those with an interest in the ILO, but to anyone who studies international organisation, labour law, law and society or political economy.

This book, the second of two volumes, explores the transformations to the labour market observed since the offi cial end of the Cold War in 1991. This period is defi ned by the retreat of the state and a move towards more market-based economies, followed by a State comeback with the Great Recession. These bumpy decades for labour and changing labour policies are analysed thematically. The second volume focuses on labour earnings and inequality, underemployment, (in)decent work, and labour market policies. This book aims to examine how labour institutions, both in developed and developing countries, have responded to the challenges faced over the last 30 years. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in labour economics, political economy, and development economics.