The Future of the ILO: A Renewed Purpose in Promoting a Global Living Wage

Abstract

It is close to 100 years since the Treaty of Versailles, 1919, was enacted creating the International Labour Organization (ILO) and enshrining the principle of a living wage in international law. A century later, we lack the means to guarantee a living wage to a large proportion of the world’s population, leaving an estimated 327 million people to live in extreme poverty and 967 more in moderate and near poverty. In India alone, around 360 million people currently live in poverty, though this figure varies greatly depending on the measure used to account for poverty. Most adults living in poverty are workers in non-standard arrangements in the sense that they do not work in an employment relationship and they are informal, in the sense that their work is not regulated by labour laws. Many work in supply chains. This paper examines why the ILO has been unable to deliver this most important of labour rights—a living wage—and how the ILO could reform both its strategy and its institutional structure so as to be more effective in this important domain. The chapter proposes a renewed role for the ILO as a body that would promote and assist in the enforcement of living wages.