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Global supply chains (GSCs) present the International Labour Organization (ILO) with a challenge that goes to the heart of its founding mandate and structure, one built on the prominence of nation states and national representatives of employers and workers. In February 2020, discussions in the ILO on the rise of GSCs reached deadlock. To fully understand why the ILO has been unable to address decent work deficits in GSCs greater attention needs to be paid to contestation, power and legitimacy in the deliberation of labour governance. Drawing on the concept of agonistic pluralism we examine the evolution of the ILO’s attempt to establish a new labour standard on GSCs under three empirical phases between 2002 and 2020. We argue that shifting power asymmetries between the tripartite constituents of governments, employers and workers, increased counter-hegemonic contestation, and intensified questioning of the deliberative legitimacy of the adversaries, explain the dissensual relations at the ILO. This article contributes to the literature on labour standards in GSCs in demonstrating how and why contestation underpins the evolution of labour governance over time.

The question of whether global norms are experiencing a crisis allows for two concurrent answers. From a facticity perspective, certain global norms are in crisis, given their worldwide lack of implementation and effectiveness. From a validity perspective, however, a crisis is not obvious, as these norms are not openly contested discursively and institutionally. In order to explain the double diagnosis (crisis/no crisis), this article draws on international relations research on norm contestation and norm robustness. It proposes the concept of hidden discursive contestation and distinguishes it from three other key types of norm contestation: open discursive, open non-discursive and hidden non-discursive contestation. We identify four manifestations of hidden discursive contestation in: (1) the deflection of responsibility; (2) forestalling norm strengthening; (3) displaying norms as functional means to an end; and (4) downgrading or upgrading single norm elements. Our empirical focus is on the decent work norm, which demonstrates the double diagnosis. While it lacks facticity, it enjoys far-reaching verbal acceptance and high validity. Our qualitative analysis of discursive hidden contestation draws on two case studies: the International Labour Organization’s compliance procedures, which monitor international labour standards, and the United Nations Treaty Process on a binding instrument for business and human rights. Although both fora have different context and policy cycles, they exhibit similar strategies of hidden discursive contestation.

The Korean ‘Safe Trucking Freight Rates System’ (‘Safe Rates System’) was an important effort to address road safety risks by regulating road transport supply chains. In effect between 2020 and 2022, the system set minimum standards for truck driver pay and placed obligations on road transport supply chain parties to comply with these standards. In this article, we explain how the system developed in response to the deregulation and restructuring of the road freight market in the late 1980s and 1990s. We also trace the influence on the system of regulatory development in Australia and debates at the International Labour Organization (ILO). In 2019, workers, employers, and government representatives at the ILO reached an agreement on the main principles of the Safe Rates regulatory model through the adoption of the Guidelines on the promotion of decent work and road safety in the transport sector. We use these principles to explain and evaluate the Korean system. We also summarise assessments of the system’s impact, arguing that the results of the few studies that exist, justify the continuation of the system. By locating Korean Safe Rates as part of a broader global trend, we respond to opponents’ claims that the system is without international precedent and make the system eligible for a global audience. In so doing, we seek to contribute to the ongoing debate about the reintroduction of Safe Rates in Korea and draw lessons from the Korean experience that may be used in other countries.

Two transnational legal regimes aim to counter some of the most severe forms of labour exploitation: one centred on the Palermo Protocol that supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) and the other centred on the International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions. This article focuses on the relationship between transnational criminal law (TCL) and transnational labour law (TLL) and their effectiveness in tackling labour exploitation. Criminalisation and labour regulation have been seen as competing \"paradigms\" in tackling human trafficking and modern slavery. TCL has been effective in diffusing criminal law norms around the world, but the modest number of resulting prosecutions can do little to tackle the huge global market in forced or severely exploited labour. TLL, with its more decentralised and pluralistic structure, offers greater hope of achieving some alleviation of labour exploitation.

In this short contribution, we look at the trajectory of the largest international trade union organization, today ITUC, from the central questions in this exercise; why labor movements have achieved certain successes?, Why they sometimes failed?, And what major failures we have seen?

To enhance the use of life cycle assessment (LCA) as a tool in business decision-making, a methodology for Social life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is being developed. Social LCA aims at facilitating companies to conduct business in a socially responsible manner by providing information about the potential social impacts on people caused by the activities in the life cycle of their product. The development of the methodology has been guided by a business perspective accepting that companies, on the one hand, have responsibility for the people affected by their business activities, but, on the other hand, must also be able to compete and make profit in order to survive in the marketplace. A combined, bottom-up and top-down approach has been taken in the development of the Social LCIA. Universal consensus documents regarding social issues as well as consideration for the specific business context of companies has guided the determination of damage categories, impact categories and category indicators. Discussion, and Conclusion. The main results are the following: (1) Impacts on people are naturally related to the conduct of the companies engaged in the life cycle rather than to the individual industrial processes, as is the case in Environmental LCA. Inventory analysis is therefore focused on the conduct of the companies engaged in the life cycle. A consequence of this view is that a key must be determined for relating the social profiles of the companies along the life cycle to the product. This need is not present in Environmental LCA, where we base the connection on the physical link which exists between process and product. (2) Boundaries of the product system are determined with respect to the influence that the product manufacturer exerts over the activities in the product chain. (3) A two-layer Social LCA method with an optional and an obligatory set of impact categories is suggested to ensure both societal and company relevance of the method. The obligatory set of impact categories encompasses the minimum expectations to a company conducting responsible business. (4) A new area of protection, Human dignity and Well-being, is defined and used to guide the modelling of impact chains. (5) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights serves as normative basis for Social LCA, together with local or country norms based on socio-economic development goals of individual countries. The International Labour Organisation's Conventions and Recommendations, and the Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy, support development of the impact pathway top-down, starting from the normative basis. (6) The obligatory part of Social LCA addresses the main stakeholder groups, employees, local community and society. Social LCA is still in its infancy and a number of further research tasks within this new area are identified.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Background, aim, and scope The authors have suggested earlier a framework for life cycle impact assessment to form the modelling basis of social LCA. In this framework, the fundamental labour rights were pointed out as obligatory issues to be addressed, and protection and promotion of human dignity and well-being as the ultimate goal and area of protection of social LCA. The intended main application of this framework for social LCA was to support management decisions in companies who wish to conduct business in a socially responsible manner, by providing information about the potential social impacts on people caused by the activities in the life cycle of a product. Environmental LCA normally uses quantitative and comparable indicators to provide a simple representation of the environmental impacts from the product lifecycle. This poses a challenge to the social LCA framework because due to their complexity, many social impacts are difficult to capture in a meaningful way using traditional quantitative single-criterion indicators. A salient example is the violation of fundamental labour rights (child labour, discrimination, freedom of association, and right to organise and collective bargaining, forced labour). Furthermore, actual violations of these rights somewhere in the product chain are very difficult to substantiate and hence difficult to measure directly. Materials and methods Based on a scorecard, a multi-criteria indicator model has been developed for assessment of a number of social impact categories. The multi-criteria indicator assesses the effort (will and ability) of a company to manage the individual issues, and it calculates a score reflecting the company’s performance in a form which allows aggregation over the life cycle of the product. The multi-criteria indicator model is presented with labour rights as an example, but the underlying principles make it suitable for modelling of other social issues with similar complexity and susceptibility to a management approach. Results The outcome of the scorecard is translated for each impact category through a number of steps into a company performance score, which is translated into a risk of social impacts actually occurring. This translation of the scorecard results into a company risk score that constitutes the characterisation of the developed social LCA methodology. The translation from performance score to risk involves assessment of the context of the company in terms of geographical location and industry and of the typical level of social impacts that these entail, and interpretation of the company’s management effort in the light of this context. Discussion The developed indicators in social LCA are discussed in terms of their ability to reflect impacts within the four obligatory impact categories representing the labour rights according to the conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) covering forced labour, discrimination, restrictions of freedom of association and collective bargaining, and child labour. Also their feasibility and the availability of the required data are discussed. Conclusions It is concluded that it is feasible to develop indicators and characterisation methods addressing impacts related to the four obligatory impact categories representing the labour rights. The developed indicators are judged to be both feasible and relevant, but this remains to be further investigated in a separate paper in which they are implemented and tested in six separate industrial case studies. Recommendations and perspectives The suitability of multi-criteria assessment methods to cover other social impacts than the obligatory ILO-based impacts is discussed, and it is argued that the combination of indirect indicators measuring a risk of impacts and direct indicators giving a direct measure of the impacts requires an explicit weighting before interpretation and possible aggregation.

Over the past decade, the World Bank has moved closer to accepting the International Labour Organization's (ILO's) core labour standards (CLS) and, in the process, sought to balance its promotion of labour market flexibility with a new focus on labour market regulation. The Bank's change of approach includes the 2009 decision to review and subsequently remove its labour market flexibility indicator (used to score the extent of labour market flexibility amongst its member-states) from its flagship publication, Doing Business. The aim of this article is to chart the softening of the Bank's emphasis on labour market flexibility and distil the contributing factors. With reference to the global financial crisis and the Bank's organizational characteristics, the article evaluates the work of international trade unions and the ILO as agenda-setters and compliance monitors and pro-labour industrialized states as 'insider advocates' in broadening the Bank's commitment to the CLS. The article demonstrates the influential nature of tacit coalitions between state and non-state actors representing a coalescence of normative values and economic interests. The Bank's changing approach to labour markets also contributes new evidence to the emerging, yet tentative, consensus that the neoliberal paradigm is undergoing a rebalancing, rather than an overhaul, in the post-crisis era.

Though industrialized countries are usually the ones indicted when environmental pollution is discussed, over the few last years the rate of emissions in developing countries has increased by a startling amount. The fallout from this increase is evidenced by the struggle of cities like Beijing to improve their air quality. Yet there also exist developing countries such as Thailand that have managed to limit their emissions to more tolerable levels, raising the question: why are some developing countries more willing or able to take care of their environment than others? In this volume, Gabriele Spilker proposes two factors for the differences in developing countries' environmental performance: integration into the international system and domestic political institutions. Focusing on developing countries generally but also closely examining important global powers such as China and India, Spilker employs a rigorous quantitative analysis to demonstrate the importance of considering various aspects of the international system, in order to draw more comprehensive conclusions about how globalization affects environmental performance. She asserts that democratic political institutions can shield developing countries from the negative consequences of either trade or foreign direct investment. But at the same time, developing countries, by avoiding demanding commitments, are more likely to use environmental treaties as a cover than as a real plan of action. Adding a new dimension to the existing body of research on environmental quality and commitment, Spilker convincingly demonstrates how international and domestic political factors interact to shape developing countries' ability and willingness to care for their natural environment.

Based on the case of the ILO, both as an actor and driver of international social policy, this collection explores the internationalization process of social rights, in a number of national and international contexts. This collection brings together a variety of new scholarship by a group of highly qualified and internationally renowned scholars.