Reconciling Social Rights and Economic Development
The pandemic has wreaked havoc on global economy, forcing governments worldwide to reconcile their competing objectives of saving money through austerity and administering costly social protections. Governments often look to international organizations responsible for social rights and economic development – such as the International Labor Organization, the International Money Fund and the World Bank – to provide advice and policies that strike the appropriate balance. According to Assistant Professor Desiree LeClercq, those organizations have not risen to the occasion.
In her paper, “Why Conflict Between Economic Development and International Social Rights Governance is Inevitable,” forthcoming in the Berkeley Journal of International Law, LeClercq argues that “international organizations are imposing incompatible commitments and policies on member governments struggling to recover from the pandemic. This incompatibility hinders global governance more broadly. It also introduces uncertainty and competing expertise just when governments need coordination.”
For her research, LeClercq, ILR’s Proskauer Employment and Labor Law Assistant Professor, examined overlapping COVID-19 recovery activities in 41 countries. These activities targeted four labor and economic policies: (1) occupational safety and health; (2) labor legislation; (3) wages and employment benefits; and (4) income tax. She found that, aside from safety and health activities, most overlapping activities were either inconsistent or incompatible.
“By inconsistent, I mean that their COVID-19 activities target the same labor-related policy, but apply different legal standards,” LeClercq said. “By incompatible, I mean that governments cannot implement the policy mandated in one organization’s activity without violating the commitment or recommendation within another organization’s activity.”
In the article, LeClercq explains that COVID-19 activities provide a unique opportunity to compare overlapping efforts and policies across international organizations and within recipient governments. They also expose the conflicting approaches of the ILO, the IMF and the World Bank.
The ILO, which takes a rights-based approach, offers assistance to enable its member governments to formulate labor and economic policies, while the IMF and World Bank offer governments financial resources based on prescribed policies – and some of these policies contrast significantly, she wrote.
To lesson these conflicts, LeClercq, who spent several years providing technical assistance to governments on behalf of the ILO, writes that “International organizations, through a pre-existing UN platform, should adopt a mandatory form of coordination that requires staff to discuss in-country projects during the design stage (ex-ante). That limited coordination would allow organizations to negotiate their approaches on a narrow (and thus resolvable) basis before those organizations impose conflicting obligations and priorities in developing countries.”
LeClercq concludes, “By bargaining over their rights and economic policies, international organizations will be better situated to provide cohesive advice and programmatic support to governments without undercutting one another.”