Reporting obligations to the ILO
The deadline for submitting comments to the ILO Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) under article 23 of the ILO constitution is approaching, and as per previous practice, the ITUC has sent around a circular (attached) explaining the procedure and its importance, as well as a report of the discussions at the 99th International Labour Conference in the Conference Committee on the Application of Standards (CAS).
As a member of the HTUR network, we encourage you to ensure that your organisation will send in comments to the CEACR on subjects of particular importance to your organisation. Without input from your organisations, the Committee of Experts cannot provide good comments, and we will not be able to discuss these cases during the Conference.
Workers organizations contribute a large number of comments, but a large majority of these comments consist of the country entries of the annual survey, which the ITUC sends to the CEACR every year. It is important that national centers increase their direct participation in the ILO supervisory mechanisms.
In this spirit please go through the list of conventions on which your country has to report this year, and send in comments on their implementation on the conventions of most importance to you.
In addition, the ITUC HTUR has identified some areas of particular concern:
Collective bargaining:
New challenges to collective bargaining, like the erosion of the employment relationship, and the increase in precarious and informal employment.
Crisis:
Employment policy and social security measures undertaken by governments in view of the crisis.
Migrants:
2010 is the 20th anniversary of the UN Convention on Migrant Workers and their Families. ITUC is campaigning this year for ratification and effective implementation of this convention together with ILO C 143 and 97 on equal treatment of migrant workers.
Forced Labour:
New and subtle forms of coercion as a consequence of unbalanced globalization, growing individualisation, informalisation and deregularisation of employment relationship, contract substitution, modern forms of debt bondage to employers, recruiting agents and middlemen as well as abuse of irregular residence status of migrant workers and forced overtime.
Tripartite consultation, labour inspection and occupational health and safety:
Workers organisations always emphasize the importance of these instruments, but rarely send in comments to support this.
Cooperation from you in this matter would enable the ITUC to submit more relevant and thorough comments to the CEACR and thus help strengthen our work in the CAS next year.
Best regards,
The ITUC Department of Human and Trade Union Rights
htur-l@forum.ituc-csi.org