Suchergebnisse

This Paper suggests that the answer to the question "what is domestic labor law for?"—commonly regarded as securing "justice against markets" or a justified tax on market activity—has informed the search for the answer for the question "what is international labor law for." This is reflected in what this Paper refers to as P2, which provides that "the failure of any country to adopt humane conditions of labor is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries." P2 envisions a "race to the bottom" by rational states trapped in a Prisoner's Dilemma game. The author maintains that this cannot be the objective of ILO which cannot stop "the race" given its deficient enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance. This Paper suggests an alternative raison d'etre for the ILO, which is called P1, namely social justice: "universal peace can only be established if it is based upon social justice." P1 reflects what states actually seek to achieve. Following Sen, this Paper suggests that there is no tradeoff between social justice and economic efficiency. Therefore the promotion of labor rights by the ILO will contribute both to social justice and to economic success. Thus the ILO should promote international labor law so as to lead member states to pursue their self-interest which is consistent with the collective goal of humanity.

"This book theorizes the law of the household workplace, and how ongoing multilevel regulatory innovation regarding domestic work can be fostered"--

This comment on Brian Langille's article agrees with Langille's claim that inter-state competition should not be viewed as the main challenge to the global efforts to regulate labor rights. The comment suggests, however, that there is another type of competition that poses a challenge, namely a transnational competition which takes place among sub-state actors. Focusing on this "transnational conflict paradigm," the ILO has the tools to engage domestic constituencies in an effort to promote labor rights within the respective member states.

Published online: 9 December 2019 ; Domestic laws are shaped by myriad global governance projects, which may attract the support of different organizations, promote contrasting socioeconomic visions, and operate at diverse levels and scales.1 Beyond differences in their whos, whats, and wheres, governance projects are also differentiated by their hows: they may embody different ways of imagining relations between order, authority, and legitimacy;2 operate through different styles;3 or deploy different technologies.4 International legal regimes, which function through a logic of governance that applies norms sanctioned by the political consent of states, have long operated alongside "systems of management and control" drawing their legitimacy from claims of "objective, disinterested scientific knowledge."5 This essay explores how such "governance by knowledge"6 interacts with international law's "governance by norm,"7 through a case study of the World Bank's Doing Business project and the International Labour Organization (ILO)'s responses to it. I contend that Doing Business ultimately rests on "bad science,"8 and thus offers a potent illustration of the power wielded by actors who claim "technical" knowledge. I argue that those who fail to engage with the technicalities of the knowledge claims that ground projects like Doing Business, and who instead meet such projects primarily through the idiom of (international) legal normativity, may have already lost the battle for influence.

In discussions of recent human rights-driven developments in the International Labour Organization (ILO), as well as in other international legal debates, many scholars have suggested that human rights and "neoliberalism" intrinsically tend to converge. Such purported convergence is at once deplored by critics of "globalization" and applauded by its defenders. This article offers an empirical refutation of this convergence thesis by documenting the potential for systematic divergences between human rights, neoliberalism and a third omnipresent discourse, social legal thought (i.e. tropes associated with the welfare state and Keynesianism). I support this claim by taking as a case study three interrelated and historically fateful debates about international labor standards in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the ILO. The debates are those pertaining to (1) the failed 1990s project of conditioning WTO trade status with respect for labor standards ("trade/labor linkage"), (2) the prioritization of human rights-based labor standards in the ILO's 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (1998 Declaration) and (3) the shape of the ILO corpus under the Decent Work Agenda (DWA), a social policy programmatic initiative on labor standards fiercely debated in the 2000s. I argue that human rights, neoliberalism and social legal thought diverge a great deal because they have different degrees of normative malleability. I propose a methodology, structuralist argumentative analysis, to address the question of discursive convergence and divergence, an issue of crucial importance for those interested in the political stakes of debates on international labor standards and the future trajectories of neoliberalism and human rights.