CROSS-BORDER SOCIAL DIALOGUE AND AGREEMENTS: An ...

Cross-border social dialogue and agreements
so far as corporations retain unilateral control of how these rights are
applied, this trend represents a privatization of rights formally guaranteed
in the public sphere. The case of the ILO Maritime Labour Convention,
2006 (MLC) shows, however, that where there are sufficiently transnational
and coherent global political actors representing labour and capital
(particularly labour), global tripartitism in the International Labour
Organization (ILO) context holds the promise of reintroducing effective
state enforcement of labour standards.
Within the ILO, 181 member country governments and representatives
of the “social partners” (unions and employers) write the international
conventions that are the basis for the current global labour rights
regime. As with international regimes generally, ILO labour standards
exert normative pressure on governments to comply with and implement
standards in national legislation. ILO standards have also become the
basis of private international standards regimes, used by transnational
corporations (TNCs) to respond to or preempt criticisms of complicity
in labour rights violations. In maritime shipping, neither the state-centred
nor the emerging private labour standards regime serves the functional
requirements of existing transnational labour market actors
(unions and employers) 3 particularly well. In 2001, seafaring unions and
shipowners in the ILO’s Joint Maritime Commission proposed a consolidated
maritime labour convention, bringing together in a single instrument
many existing maritime labour conventions, updating them, and
applying an enforcement mechanism. The new instrument, passed after
years of sometimes difficult negotiations in the February 2006 Maritime
Session of the International Labour Conference (ILC), borrows elements
both from the existing ILO global labour rights regime and from the
global maritime safety regime, centred on the International Maritime
Organization (IMO). The MLC will come into force when ratified by at
least 30 member States registering ships totalling at least 33 per cent of
world gross tonnage.
The MLC paradigm applies different aspects of state authority in a
fragmented manner, knit together by practices of maritime industrial regulation.
Beside the traditional member State implementation model, in
which member States commit to respecting ILO standards in their own
sovereign space, the MLC will have member States enforcing labour
3
In the shipping industry, it is accurate to describe both employers and unions as transnational actors
(Lillie, 2004).
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