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This indicator measures the level of national compliance with labour rights (freedom of association and collective bargaining) based on International Labour Organization (ILO) textual sources and national legislation. 

The indicator will cover all ILO member states seeking to measure the level of national compliance with fundamental rights (freedom of association and collective bargaining, FACB) based on six international ILO supervisory body textual sources and also on national legislation. It is based on a coding process starting from coding the sources relevant to the year evaluated, coding the non-compliance identified in the collected sources and by converting the coding into indicators.

Labour Department

Labour Department

Annual

Range from 0 to 10

In an effort to address some of the shortcomings of previous methods, the ILO developed an alternative coding scheme which provides the foundation for its new method of constructing labour rights indicators (Sari and Kucera, 2011). Among the most important improvements over the previous method are the following:

•  Coding seven rather than just three textual sources and thus making full use of textual sources available through the ILO’s supervisory system, as well as coding national legislation.
• Distinct evaluation criteria for violations of FACB rights in law (de jure) and in practice (de facto).
• Greater emphasis on violations of FACB rights regarding due process.
• Greater emphasis on violations of FACB rights committed against officials of workers’ and employers’ organizations. 
•  Eliminating catch-all evaluation criteria, such as “Other de jure acts of prohibitions, infringements and interference” or “Other de facto acts of prohibitions, infringements and interference”.
•  Coding violations against both workers and workers’ organizations and employers and employer’s organizations.
• Following the prior points, an increase in the number of evaluation criteria from 37 to 180 (103 evaluation criteria for workers’ organizations and 77 evaluation criteria for employers’ organizations).
•  More comprehensive definitions of what constitutes a violation of each of the evaluation criteria.
•  The use of the Delphi method of expert consultation to derive weights for each of the evaluation criteria. 
• Perhaps most fundamentally, whereas the previous method was the work of an economist, the new method was developed in equal measure by a labour lawyer and an economist working in close collaboration, with the coding done by labour lawyers rather than economists.

Freedom of association and collective bargaining rights and their supervision

The principles of freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) are and have long been at the core of the ILO’s normative foundations. These foundations have been established in the ILO’s Constitution (1919), the ILO Declaration of Philadelphia (1944), in two key ILO Conventions (namely the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87) and the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (No. 98)) and the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (1998). They are also rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and other international and regional human rights instruments. With the adoption of the 1998 ILO Declaration, the promotion and realization of these fundamental principles and rights also became a constitutional obligation of all ILO member States.

FACB rights are considered as ‘enabling rights’, the realisation of which is necessary to promote and realise other rights at work. They provide an essential foundation for social dialogue, effective labour market governance and realization of decent work. They are vital in enabling employers and workers to associate and efficiently negotiate work relations, to ensure that both employers and workers have an equal voice in negotiations and that the outcome is fair and equitable. As such, they play a crucial role in the elaboration of economic and social policies that take on board the interests and needs of all actors in the economy.

FACB rights are also salient because they are indispensable pillars of democracy as well as the process of democratization. FACB rights, together with other international labour standards, are backed by the ILO’s unique supervisory system. The ILO regularly examines the application of standards in member States and highlights areas where those standards are violated and where they could be better applied. The ILO’s supervisory system includes two kinds of supervisory mechanisms: the regular system of supervision and the special procedures. The prior entails the examination of periodic reports submitted by member States on the measures taken to implement the provisions of ILO Conventions ratified by them. The special procedures, that is, representations, complaints and the special procedure for complaints regarding freedom of association through the Freedom of Association Committee, allow for the examination of violations on the basis of a submission of a representation or a complaint.

is by sex and migrant status. 

The indicator has a range from 0 to 10. The lower the number, the better the country scores in compliance with labour rights (FACB), the higher the worse. After coding 1 an observed non-compliance and 0 as no observed non-compliance, the identification of a number of evaluation criteria for which noncompliance is observed (weighted and non-weighted), using a Delphi method, weights are defined and then a normalization process is in place to set the range between 0 and 10, 10 being assigned to countries with the all-encompassing prohibition of Freedom of association and Collective Bargaining (FACB) rights.

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All the metadata shown above was gathered from the United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.