Employers' Handbook on ILO Standards-related Activities

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EMPLOYERS’ HANDBOOK ON ILO STANDARDS-RELATED ACTIVITIES
responsibility for issuing binding interpretations of standards. Under article 37 of the ILO
Constitution, that is a power reserved for the International Court of Justice. The report of the
Committee of Experts should concentrate more on the comments of its members. This year’s
report was the longest in the history of the Committee. The “General Report” was twice as long
as the previous year’s.
The credibility of the Committee of Experts is diminished when it urgently calls on member
States to ratify the Termination of Employment Convention, 1982 (No. 158), while the
Governing Body, having discussed the topic, had already decided not to make such a recommendation.
By issuing such a political statement in those circumstances, the experts have gone
beyond their mandate.
The ILO has on its agenda the strengthening and streamlining of the supervisory machinery.
Efforts should be intensified in this sense.
Before addressing the individual topics, I would like to speak of the special meeting we
held to pay tribute to Mr. André Zenger, who passed away recently. He was a very competent
member of this Organization, and a fair and friendly person whom we all got to know over
many years, and we are saddened by his early passing. I am sure we will remember this
honourable man for many years to come.
This being the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Equal Remuneration Convention,
1951 (No. 100), our Committee considered the question of gender equality in remuneration.
While the basic principle of equality and the prohibition of gender-based discrimination was
not in dispute and was acknowledged quite simply as an obligation to respect human dignity,
we believed it was unacceptable to consider differences in pay on the sole basis of statistical
averages. The experts too recognized that these gaps very often resulted from differences in
training and skill levels. This is a difficult question, precisely because there is no single recognized
system for establishing a definition of equal work. That has been left up to evaluations
and re-evaluations. Agreements on these points between the social partners would be decisive.
The Committee held a detailed discussion of the Forced Labour Convention, 1930
(No. 29), as the experts devoted nearly a third of the “General Report” to this Convention. This
was particularly surprising since the experts on many occasions noted that very few reports had
been received from member States and that they had thus often been unable to obtain a general
picture of the national law and practice in this area.
This means that the experts made their comments without sufficient substantiation, producing
a purely abstract, theoretical work. Essentially, the intention was to challenge the stance
taken by the Employers in the past. In our report, we refer to the scope of the discussion, which
reflected the basic elements of this debate. One facet on which all agree is that the main objective
of the Convention – to halt and prohibit all forced labour – warrants unqualified support. In
the discussion, the experts concentrated exclusively on old news, concerning the use by several
member States of partially or totally privatized penitentiary services. The experts’ statements
do not always hold up to examination, though. Because this phenomenon did not exist in
practice when the Convention was adopted in 1930, it is not covered in the instrument. The
wording of the Convention is perfectly valid, even if it does not take this phenomenon into
consideration.
The experts glossed over the fact that a State has the right to oblige an individual to carry
out work as part of an imposed penalty. This is for the State alone to decide. Therefore, we
cannot agree with the experts that work by prisoners in privatized institutions is acceptable only
if it is done on a purely voluntary basis. The experts contend that the working conditions should
be commensurate with those on the open labour market. In practice, this idealistic aim is not
even achieved outside of penitentiaries. Outside of such institutions too, a refusal to accept
work entails numerous disadvantages. The argument according to which competition must be
fair is still less convincing. The purpose of Convention No. 29 is to protect individuals.