By JoAnne Pow!ers
The International Labor Organization Committee on the Application of Standards collapsed this week at the ILO’s International Labor Conference, ending today in Geneva. Representatives of business at the ILO refused to endorse the committee’s consensus findings on a range of serious cases involving labor violation cases.
Jeffrey Vogt, Legal Advisor to the International Trade Union Confederation, says that since 2012 the employers have tried to disrupt the way the ILO functions by insisting that the right to strike does not exist at the international level.
[Jeff Vogt] “They’re trying to undermine the ILO generally by saying that its expert interpretations on a whole range of conventions are incorrect, but doing it’s gonna disrupt the oversight of cases on some of the worst labor violators in the world.”
For decades, ILO Convention 87 on freedom of association and the right to organize has been consistently interpreted by experts within the ILO as guaranteeing the right to strike:
[Jeff Vogt] “Their arguments are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of freedom of association, and the entire international legal framework in which the ILO’s worked…in the UN, in regional courts of the Americas, of Europe, even the African commission. There’s very well settled that a right to strike does exist as a part ILO convention on Freedom of Association and to argue otherwise is wishful thinking on their part”.
The United States is one of the few countries that has not ratified ILO convention 87.
Leave a Reply