Labour standards, labour-management relations & collective bargaining

A key issue for many lower-income countries, in particular, is to promote the gradual introduction and/or compliance with basic worker rights. The need to foster trade union rights in the context of globalization was stressed in resolution No. 109 of the Thirteenth Session of the Metal Trades Committee. Furthermore, the application of labour standards in the MEE sector, and more specifically in electrical and electronic industries, has been recurrently a focus of reports prepared by ILO member States to the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations and in follow-up to the Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy. The summary of the Fifth Survey of reports on the Declaration (covering 1989-91) includes analyses of trends, issues and challenges in labour-management relations with specific references to the MEE sector in several countries.

Especially in the higher-income countries, there is a growing need to adjust labour-management relations to increasingly diversified collective bargaining arrangements at company and workplace levels. This is emerging also in lower-income countries, although in most of these cases it is a higher priority to improve the basic institutional framework for collective bargaining and the technical capacity of trade unions to cope with the challenges of reduced trade restrictions and the increased freedom of foreign companies to compete directly in national markets.

The increased mobility of MEE enterprises across borders is leading to a search for institutional arrangements for labour-management consultation and/or collective bargaining beyond the national level. Union solidarity campaigns and works councils are examples of initiatives which have enlivened dialogue on international labour issues in the MEE sector, but with hardly any impact on the agenda and outcome of collective bargaining.

Many ILO Conventions are relevant to the MEE sector, and a few are of special significance, such as the Guarding of Machinery Convention, 1963 (No. 119) and the Chemicals Convention, 1990 (No. 170), although none concern it exclusively. Moreover, many of the 111 resolutions and 106 conclusions adopted since the establishment of the Metal Trades Committee in 1945, have provided guidelines for both collective bargaining at national level and specific ILO activities, including some of the work leading to the two above Conventions and a code of practice mentioned below.