Global Decent Work through improved industrial relations - hurdles and hope in a global labour market

The globalized and regionalized labour market has brought about significant scrutiny on how to organize not only labour regulations and legal provisions, but also industrial relations for the development, enforcement and monitoring of working life provisions and agreements. There has been an outspoken need to understand the recent situation and to structure a theory of maintaining established regimes in countries of more developed labour models. This situation has left worker movements, politicians and academics partly conserving previous structures, partly crying over the more recent development. This article discusses the ambition to refocus such efforts to progressive and novel sectors and areas of the World, and monitors recent years corresponding evolution of labour market progress – despite the common understanding of decline and despair. Labour reforms in global supply chains, largely supported by the ILO, but also by emerging understanding in companies and by consumers across the Globe. While previous understanding of labour market reform was predominantly an “in-labour” affair, the future understanding the solutions, the paper argues, is substantiated through a combination of actions by human rights bodies, global and local collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility and national as well as regional regulation