What Should the ILO Be Doing?
What should the ILO be doing? Here’s what I would suggest. It may not be glamorous, but we think the ILO could–and should–focus its activities on helping countries improve their capabilities in these areas: • Labor Law and Implementation. The United States strongly supports the principles underlying the ILO’s core conventions in the areas of freedom of association, collective bargaining, forced labor, child labor, and discrimination. These principles are included in our trade laws and are regularly taken into account in making many important foreign policy decisions. I believe that the ILO can and should promote worker rights and democratic labor policies. But the balance between drafting standards and implementing laws and policies must be redressed on a very large scale. Much attention is given to the adoption of new instruments, but implementation, which is what affects most people, receives much less attention. Syria and Iran have ratified numerous ILO conventions, but it is th
