Social Clauses and Other Means to Promote Fair Labour Standards in International Fora : A Survey

International labour standards can be promoted in different fora and in various ways. The aim of this report is to survey in wich international fora the need of international labour standards has been discussed and wich results the debate has yielded in the form of proposed or adopted conventions and other legal acts. First of all we find international labour standards in from of conventions and recommendations from the ILO. The ILO has been quite successful in working out internationally accepted labour standards, but there are no effective sanctions connected to the standards. This is one of the reasons that the possibility of including social clauses in trade agreements are discussed. By a social clause the parties promise to comply with certain labour standards or run the risk of beeing confronted with trade barriers. Social clauses has been discussed in connection with the ITO, GATT, WTO, but so far no social clause has been included in the agreements. On the other hand we find social clauses in NAFTA and in different bilateral trade agreements and unilateral trade agreements. A different approach to promote labour standards is through consumer or trade union boycotts, voluntary codes of conducts or through systems of labelling. In the review of proposed or adopted legal acts we mainly raise questions on how the international labour standards are adopted (for instance uni-, bi- or multilateral), on wich labour standards do the legal acts cover, how is the observance of the acts organized (review, supervision etc.) and wich santions do the acts provide