Workers Group - Interview with Mr. Ulf Edström

Gif Interview with Mr. Ulf Edström
Member of the Governing Body of the International Labour Organization and Workers' Group spokesperson on the ILO Committee on Legal Issues and International Labour Standards.
Mr. Edström heads the international department of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO).

The ILO has adopted 184 Conventions to date, but the world of work is constantly changing. Are new Conventions needed?

In fact, over the past ten years or so, there have been a number of critical comments, mainly from the employers and certain groups of governments, saying that there are too many ILO standards. However, a process of reviewing the standards is already under way. We're examining all the Conventions adopted after 1985, except the eight fundamental standards and the four priority standards, in order to see which of them are out of date and should therefore be withdrawn or revised. The ILO is the only international organization that updates its standards so regularly, but it comes in for criticism because, in its history, it has elaborated 184 Conventions. Beyond that, the criticisms are not very precise.

These days, there is talk of an «integrated approach» under which the ILO would group together the various standards in each field, as has already happened for the maritime transport sector. Isn't there a risk that, in the process, certain details might get lost - details that could be important for the workers?

That could be a risk. In the maritime sector, the employers and workers are trying to merge a whole series of elements into one «superstandard». I hope that will be a success because, at present, there are a lot of Conventions for the maritime sector. Some of them overlap on certain points, but not all of them have been ratified by the same number of countries. It's all a bit untidy but if the discussion moves forward, we will have a useful general framework available, and I am convinced that we'll lose virtually none of the details.

This year, an integrated approach will also be launched in the field of occupational health and safety. We'll be taking each existing instrument in that field (Conventions, Recommendations, Codes etc.), looking to see if it has any weaknesses, and then trying to work out a new, more general approach. We'll also be following more closely the way in which these ILO provisions are transposed into national legislation, and we'll be helping countries with this.

A number of ILO recommendations have really not got through to the governments concerned. Are there any ways of tackling this problem?

To get the ILO Governing Body's recommendations taken more seriously at the national level, the Workers' Group advocates the establishment of tripartite national ILO committees, as defined in Convention 144. It should also be realized that, for a whole range of governments and employers' and workers' organizations not represented on the Governing Body, the ILO texts are a bit difficult to understand. That is why the ILO is using a country-by-country approach in which the social partners get together with ILO experts to assess what needs to be done in order to follow our recommendations. In particular, this type of approach was used in Trinidad & Tobago - with excellent results, because everyone then knew what the ILO expected of them.

In 2001, the government of a developed country had intended to ratify Convention 155 on occupational safety and health, but then finally opted instead to ratify Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour, because there had been great pressure from the ILO to ratify this basic Convention. However, workers in that country - where internal procedures make it difficult to ratify more than one Convention per year - would have preferred ratification of 155, as child labour isn't a problem where they are ...

Convention 155 is among the most important ones. As workers, we constantly repeat that attention should not be focussed exclusively on the fundamental Conventions. We ask the ILO to campaign for the ratification of all Conventions that are fundamental at the present time. By the way, we are opposed to the fact that certain governments are using the beginnings of an integrated approach to health and safety as a pretext for postponing ratification of Convention 155. The ratification rate for health and safety Conventions is not very impressive. That is to be deplored.

None of the eight fundamental Conventions is about safety and health. Isn't that surprising?

The idea of singling out some Conventions as fundamental came from the trade union movement, and it was linked to the creation of the World Trade Organization and the debate about the inclusion of a social clause. At that time, we chose seven Conventions. No.182 had not yet seen the light of day. Personally, I was disappointed that none of the standards on labour inspection was included, because without proper labour inspection, how can you guarantee any follow-up at all on issues like health and safety? Fortunately, the Convention on labour inspection (No. 81) and the one on labour inspection in agriculture (No. 129) are among the four so-called priority Conventions, together with No.144 on tripartite consultation and No. 122 on employment policy. We're trying to draw renewed attention to these ones.

How can the number of ratifications be increased?

One pointer could be the cooperation among the trade unions in the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland) on ILO-related matters. Those responsible for these matters meet three times a year. We agreed to carry out a study in each of our countries concerning all the Conventions adopted by the ILO since 1980, in order to see the reasons why certain governments had not ratified certain Conventions. As we have the same kind of culture and the same level of economic development, it made sense to carry out this comparison. The study rekindled the unions' interest in this issue, and they passed the questions on to their governments, in a spirit of dialogue, without virulently criticizing them for not yet having ratified certain standards. In Iceland, the unions realized that more than half of the Conventions adopted by the ILO since 1980 had never even been discussed within the national tripartite ILO committee. So it's not surprising that they weren't ratified. Since this study, the number of ratifications by these five countries has significantly increased. We have suggested to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) that it might organize the same kind of regional trade union cooperation elsewhere.

Despite the quality of the Conventions, very many workers around the world have never heard of them! Isn't that a failure by the ILO?

Yes, and by all its constituents - unions, employers and governments. A number of governments don't take part in ILO activities and don't even bother to answer our letters. In other countries, such as my own, Sweden, the ILO had never been seen as something very important until a conservative government came to power at the end of the 1990s. That government wanted to attack the labour legislation, trade union rights and a whole range of social achievements. Whereas Sweden had generally had standards that were more demanding than those of the ILO, now there was a government that wanted to change everything and make them less demanding! Complaints were lodged with the ILO, which ruled in favour of the workers. The government came to realize that, as Sweden is bound by the Conventions that it has ratified, it doesn't have a free hand to demolish acquired social rights. So then we understood how useful these ratifications are, even for trade unions in the developed countries.

The Swedish workers have access to ILO information, but that is not always the case in the countries of the South.

That's true, and we all have a duty to remedy that - not only the ILO but also the trade unions in those countries, with the support of the international trade union organizations.

What is the long-term challenge for the Workers' Group as far as international standards are concerned?

A few years ago, we found ourselves in a hostile environment, with employers and governments against us. Now, we are trying to start a dialogue with the employers, to see if we can develop some forms of consensus on the question of standards. If workers and employers speak with the same voice, they are in the majority and can take decisions. To achieve that, the two groups have to have confidence in each other. They mustn't see any hidden agenda behind what looks like good faith. More dialogue is essential because it can happen these days that, out of a whole series of agenda items, the ones that get adopted are not the most important, but the least controversial.

Interviewer: Mr. Samuel Grumiau, November 2002.

Updated by LO. Approved by MS. Last updated: 7 June 2003.