Monitoring International Labor Standards

Book excerpt: This new report provides a framework within which to assess compliance with core international labor standards and succeeds in taking an enormous step toward interpreting all relevant information into one central database. At the request of the Bureau of International Labor Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Research Council's Committee on Monitoring International Labor Standards was charged with identifying relevant and useful sources of country-level data, assessing the quality of such data, identifying innovative measures to monitor compliance, exploring the relationship between labor standards and human capital, and making recommendations on reporting procedures to monitor compliance. The result of the committee's work is in two partsâ€"this report and a database structure. Together, they offer a first step toward the goal of providing an empirical foundation to monitor compliance with core labor standards. The report provides a comprehensive review of extant data sources, with emphasis on their relevance to defined labor standards, their utility to decision makers in charge of assessing or monitoring compliance, and the cautions necessary to understand and use the quantitative information.