International Employment Standards

Submitted By barosbill
Words: 1375
Pages: 6

Nowadays, ‘International Employment standards’ is what international companies and organisations looking for, which is also a major premise in the globalising world. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), it proposes and provides a code of conduct for the labour standards such as protect the childcare, guarantee safe condition, workers’ right and non-discrimination employment to be minimum labour standards for international organisations, governments and Multinational Corporation. There are certain difficulties to achieve the international employment standards in the globalising world. In this essay, it would focus on how the international organisations, multinational companies and non-government institutions strive and difficulties in the global environment.
Hollinshead(2010:132) states that ILO brings governments, employers and labour organisations together to establish the employment standards since it was founded. Moreover, ILO issued the convention to prevent those to happen in both developed countries and developing countries. For example, Minimum Age Convention (1973, No.138) and Forced Labour Convention (1930, No.29), it can prevent children from being child workers and protect people from being forced labour respectively, and most importantly is to maintain the Occupational Safety and Health regulations. These can be references and guidelines for the international organisations and governments. With the help from ILO, a lot of countries are practising to work under the International Employment Standards through supervision and technical aid from ILO. However, ‘In fact, no country has taken such far-reaching action in the area of international trade and minimum labour standards as the USA.’ (Eaton, 2000:169) Furthermore, higher labour standards can cause the third-world economics become more destitute since there have no legal restriction to limit the source of family income on child labour problem.

GCSOs and NGOs can be defined the third power for global since they are not belong to governments. They assist to explain human rights, justice and humanitarian aid and intervention. The keys role of GCSOs and NGOs is to hold the multinational corporations more accountable and keep an oversight on it about the business ethic and international employment standards in a globalising world. On the protection of labour standards hand, they defend people and give pressures to Multination Corporations to enhance the workers’ right and improve working conditions through criticism and actions to attract the public attention that in order to make people who involved can face the problem. On the other hands, GCSOs are not enough for globally representative and corporate with global institutions such as United Nation. Moreover, NGOs may face government repression in developing countries. Both have no substantial power but it promotes the protection of workers’ right in many countries via the pressure from public opinion.
The common views of ITUC and ETUC are to protect trade union rights, equal opportunities and non-discrimination working condition. The ETUC represents the European workers. The ETUC is working with other European social partners and EU institutions. It takes part a Tripartite Social Summit on spring every year and represent the workers in the important meetings such as Council of EU. ETUC helps the trade union to join advisory institutions such as Economic and Social Committee and occupational training and working condition which provided by EU agencies. According to ITUC (2011), ‘Social dialogue and collective bargaining are key instruments for eliminating discriminatory practices. Trade unions’ campaign and mobilisation activities provide the necessary support required to challenge entrenched stereotypes and prejudices and to elicit public policy responses.’ Also, the ITUC protect the workers’ right to hold trade union actions against the invasion of workers’ right which affecting