The ILO and international labour standards

In 2009, the ILO celebrated its 90 th anniversary making it one of the oldest international organizations to date. Its long existence and history of international standardsetting and norm-supervision makes it a valuable research object: hardly any other international organization holds sway over such large amounts of official documents and reports, dating back to 1919. This vast information and data allows observing trends in normative changes over time but for the purpose of this study more importantly, observing mechanisms to induce compliance described in theory applied in practice. This chapter presents in brief the basic features of the ILO and provides an overview of its norm setting and supervisory activities given that other scholars have already analyzed the ILO in great detail. The ILO, although a specialized agency of the UN, provides for characteristics not shared by other UN agencies, and understanding these idiosyncrasies is necessary in order to analyze the ILO's attempts in bringing about compliance. International labour standards have their ideational roots not in the establishment of the ILO in 1919 in the course of the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations but date back to early attempts to regulate labour internationally in the 19 th century. The mandate of the ILO is the successive improvement of working conditions among its members, of which it has today 183, thus nearly universal membership. The unique structural feature of the ILO is the principle of tripartism, which includes workers' and employers' organizations in all activities of the organization on an equal footing with members states. In putting its mandate into practice the ILO primarily relies on normative regulation, in the form of legally binding Conventions and non-binding Recommendations, adopted through majority vote by the annual International Labour Conference (ILC), the legislative organ of the ILO. Up to today 189 Conventions and 201 Recommendations have been adopted, although the pace at which these standards are adopted has slowed considerably since the 1990s. The supervision of these instruments rests on two important committees of the ILO: the independent Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) and the Committee on the Application of Standards of the ILC. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.