Guest Report

Jeff Shaw Live from the ILO

Last week I attended the 87th Session of the ILO as part of the Australian delegation and had the benefit of seeing this important United Nations special agency in action.

	Jeff Shaw

The ILO has been described by another member of the Australian delegation as "the ultimate IR club". This comment is indicative of the current federal Government's domestic industrial relations agenda.

The organisation conducts its work in two main forums, the Plenary Session where all delegates can hear speakers on the range of subjects before the conference, and in the Committees where all the hard bargaining and debate on issues occurs. When Committee reports are put to the Plenary Session, they are usually supported, all the negotiation and diplomatic finessing of phrasing having been done.

Two issues were before this Session of the ILO, Child Labour and Maternity Protection. Attending the deliberations of both Committees was informative. Without getting into the fine detail, it became clear that industrial relations is not only one of the most readily identifiable faultlines in domestic Australian politics but that it is still one of the enduring ideological divides.

I will give one example. At present in the Organisation there is particular debate about ILO conventions and whether they should be aspirational documents setting out what labour rights should be or whether the bar should be set much lower to encourage more countries to adopt them. The argument is that the smaller the gap between international standards and national practice, the greater the likelihood that more countries will be either able to comply or will be encouraged to bridge the gap. The concomitant is that the bigger the gap, the less countries will comply or be inclined to try to raise their standards.

While this argument may seem to make a valid point, it ignores two important characteristics of the organisation and its purpose. Firstly, the conventions and recommendations are supposed to be benchmarks of what civilised labour standards should be. Secondly, being the result of exhaustive (not to say exhausting) deliberation between representatives of over 170 governments of widely differing political complexions and their national worker and employer delegates it can hardly be said those documents are radical in their nature. That they are represented as being so is more revealing of the political positions of those asserting it than of the nature of ILO standards themselves.

This dialogue was played out in the Maternity Protection Committee. A series of amendments were being moved to the draft text. One, put forward by a European Government, was the source of particular contention between worker and employer delegates.

The employers offered the view that ILO standards should be expressed as broadly as possible to allow maximum flexibility for national custom and practice to deal with the matters covered by convention texts. In the context of the committee deliberations, this meant that protection for women workers during pregnancy should be limited to just that, the period during which they were pregnant although they were prepared to accept the amendment which provided protection for women workers also during their period of confinement.

The worker representatives took the view that pregnancy was not merely some biological event but one which had a wide range of significant social implications. In particular that however detailed or broadly cast the text might be, three distinct stages relating to pregnancy should be recognised for the purpose of worker protection - the pregnancy itself, the period of confinement, and a further period of nursing. The position taken by the worker delegates and their supporters was that as we approach a new century we should be embracing a wider set of concerns relevant to providing effective protective measures as opposed to precise but narrow forms of protection.

This debate is of relevance in our own domestic politics. When maternity leave was first raised on the political landscape, it was resisted by powerful economic and social forces. Today, however, it is widely referred to as parental leave, is available to both men and women in recognition of their joint obligation, and is uncontroversial.

In the last twenty years, Australia has been transformed by significant changes which have altered the shape of our economy and society. Many kinds of work have shrunk in size and importance while others have grown from nothing into multi-billion dollar industries. One of the products of this has been that employment growth has been largely in part-time and casual forms of work, and most of these workers are women. This means that many benefits and forms of protection won for working people, such as long service, have moved beyond the reach of some workers because of the basis on which work is available to them.

It has long been recognised that as circumstances change so too should forms of regulation change to ensure they are effective. This is the case in many areas of legislation, such as in taxation and commercial law which are being constantly reviewed and updated. In the industrial relations context, it is one of the reasons that the NSW legislation has long had special provision for public vehicles and carriers, because it was seen that their needs were different to other workers.

For this reason, the NSW Labor Government made a commitment during the last election that women workers should not be denied maternity leave rights because they were employed as permanent casuals, after a period of two years. This is not a radical proposition, merely a fine-tuning of existing and widely accepted legal rights to ensure that no one should fall by the wayside. The views we take on such issues say what kind of society we want to live in, and what we regard as civilised standards.

The development of decent labour standards, such as effective maternity protection, should be pursued both domestically and in international forums, like the ILO. While some may criticise such bodies as being slow and cumbersome, that is only an argument for improving them. Deciding how broadly expressed standards should be, or what the level of detail should be is a matter for judgment and discussion. But it is clear that if you set the bar low, you will achieve a minimalist position.

Countries struggling to survive in the wake of natural disaster, war, colonialism or a combination, have many issues to deal with, it is true. The fact they may not be in a position to meet international standards is surely an argument in favour of assisting them to develop their economies and social infrastructure, not an argument to set lesser standards.

Although there is understandable differences between worker and employer representatives at the ILO, it is inherent in the nature of such a tripartite body. However, the record of the ILO shows that despite this there is a degree of goodwill to develop sufficient common ground necessary to produce meaningful international labour instruments.

In this era of unprecedented challenge facing the developing world, and the issues posed by the mobility of international capital and the other effects of globalisation, my experience in Geneva has convinced me that the case for the ILO is stronger than ever. Australia, with its proud history of progressive labour laws, should play an active role in helping to raise the standard.

Jeff Shaw is the NSW Attorney General and Minister for Industrial Relations

  View entire issue - print all of the articles!

  Issue 18 contents

»	Carers Crisis: Victims Turned Away
»	Farmers Back Social Audit
»	Holiday Bugs: Government Asked to Act on Y2K
»	Oakdale Miners Take Message to Canberra
»	United Front for Public Sector Pay
»	Talking Books Silenced
»	Upper House Reform: Lest We Forget Greiner
»	Pregnancy Bunfight Looms
»	Horta Launches East Timor Mercy Ship
»	Sparkies Back Fantastic Plastic
»	APHEDA Helps Beat The Blockade
»	Torture Support Day, June 26

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Piers Watch

»	Chardonnay Debate Lacks Class
»	GST Rally, Town Hall, Monday June 21

Notice Board
- Check out the latest events

Latest Issue

View entire latest issue
- print all of the articles!

Previous Issues

Subject index

Search all issues

© 1999-2000 Labor Council of NSW

LaborNET is a resource for the labour movement provided by the Labor Council of NSW

[ Privacy Statement | Disclaimer | Credits ]

LaborNET is proudly created, designed and programmed by Social Change Online for the Labor Council of NSW