The ILO and compliance

Abstract

Since the end of the World War II, there has been a proliferation of international organizations and treaties that regulate behaviour, create norms of conduct, and enforce international law. The question, however, arises whether in the context of international labour standards the ILO does make a difference. Does the ILO for instance alter state behaviour or simply codify existing behaviour? Does it promote cooperation that would not have existed otherwise? These questions are closely related to the discussion that evolved around the topic of compliance. The ILO offers the unique possibility to observe compliance mechanisms described by diverging theoretical approaches working in practice in one single organization and thereby promises to at least answer some of the above posed questions. The ILO allows examining in detail how compliance mechanisms function in reality: when and how does the ILO apply different compliance mechanisms – explicitly or implicitly. Objective of the following parts is specifically not an empirical test of the degree to which different compliance mechanisms work in terms of changing state behaviour. Neither is the objective to explain the extent to which each of the applied mechanisms work in different degrees in the context of the ILO. Main obstacle for doing so is the fact that the compliance mechanisms applied by the ILO strongly correlate which makes empirical testing of single mechanisms difficult. Apart from that, in order to carry out empirical test of the effectiveness of specific compliance mechanisms, the data base would have to be improved. So far, only for parts of the mechanisms sound data exist, whereas for others this is not the case. Despite these methodological constraints, the ILO is worthwhile studying given that it is one of the few international organizations in which basically all of the mechanisms to induce compliance described in theory are applied in practice and can be observed. Specifically, we can examine how different mechanisms, formulated as abstract alternatives, interrelate and interfere in practice. The ILO, as hardly any other case, allows for observation of compliance mechanisms at work, which allows providing insight into the effect, effectiveness and conditions of the strategies proposed by the four compliance schools. These findings are not so much empirical results, but are treated as deductively and inductively elaborated hypotheses to be studied and eventually refuted or confirmed in future research. Vice versa, the ILO experience with different compliance mechanisms can shed light on the practical preconditions, the interactions and to a certain extent effectiveness of the theoretically founded strategies.