Search results

The International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) (the Domestic Workers Convention or Convention), as supplemented by an accompanying non-binding Recommendation (No. 201), on June 16, 2011. Both instruments were immediately hailed as historic. Two years later, on September 5, 2013, the Domestic Workers Convention entered into force, thus bringing the fifty-three to 100 million predominantly women workers—many of whom are migrants—squarely within the corpus of international labor law, with due attention paid to the specificity of their human rights claims.

The international landscape on the regulation of domestic work is changing dramatically. At the hundredth session of the International Labour Conference (ILC) in June 2011, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the historic Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) and accompanying Recommendation No. 201. These new international labor standards come sixty-three years after the ILO adopted its first resolution on the conditions of employment of domestic workers and forty-six years after its second such resolution, which recalled the "urgent need" for standards "compatible with the self-respect and human dignity which are essential to social justice" for domestic workers. The robust, comprehensive international norms were adopted after two decades in which the ILO's standard setting has been deeply criticized and its tripartite structure repeatedly challenged to become more representative. Since additional critique of the ILO standards system emerged at the ILC's 101st session in 2012, it would be an overstatement to suggest that the new instruments reflect an unequivocally positive trend in standard setting. Even so, they offer a critical realist basis for considering that ILO standard setting remains salient and that international social dialogue remains possible.