Labor Rights

Core Labor Rights and Social Standards

The term (core) labor rights refers to those fundamental human rights of workers included in the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. All members of the ILO, regardless of whether they have ratified the respective conventions, are committed to respecting the following: (1) freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, (2) elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor, (3) effective abolition of child labor, and (4) elimination of discrimination with respect to employment and occupation.

Yet while the core ILO conventions have achieved the status of universally accepted human rights, the ILO has, at no time, been capable of securing their enforcement. Therefore, there have been several attempts to establish more enforceable multilateral labor rights provisions. In 1948, the draft constitution of the stillborn International Trade Organization included an explicit, albeit vague, linkage of trade and social standards in Chapter II, Article 7. No such labor rights provision was included in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which, in Article XX(e), merely extended to member-states the right to discriminate against products made with prison labor. Starting in 1953, the United States has repeatedly proposed a labor rights provision for the GATT, and then the World Trade Organization (WTO). Based on the international labor movement's and especially U.S. industrial unions’ renewed support of a labor rights provision in the GATT/WTO and other trade agreements, subsequent U.S. administrations have been pressured by Congress to advocate labor rights protections in the WTO regime, but the proposal failed to attract support from developing and newly industrializing countries.

The 1996 WTO ministerial conference in Singapore declined responsibility for the rights of the workers who produce goods for international trade. Instead, in their final declaration on December 13, 1996, the ministers referred primary responsibility to the ILO: