Having a job does not necessarily guarantee decent quality of life. Across the world, millions of people are working in insecure jobs, in unsafe conditions, for inadequate pay, or in abusive work environments. One of the major challenges of the 21st century is to ensure that workers across the globe have working conditions that respect their fundamental rights, do not risk their wellbeing, and are secure and fairly remunerated. To this end, the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) has identified eliminating Unacceptable Forms of Work (UFW) as a critical part of its mission.
The UFW Project brought together policymakers, activists, and researchers from across the world to share ideas, experiments, and successful strategies on the legal regulation of UFW. The aim was to identify and investigate legal initiatives on UFW that were being tested locally and globally and to consider whether successful experiments could be applied in other settings. To this end, we identified a set of 9 global challenges to effective regulation of UFW.
Project Report: Unacceptable Forms of Work: Global Dialogue/Local Innovation (2018).
The UFW project was led by Professor Deirdre McCann (University of Durham, UK). Co-Investigators were Professor Judy Fudge (University of Kent, UK) and Dr Sangheon Lee (International Labour Office, Geneva).
The UFW Network has brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers and policy-makers from across the world, based on high-, middle- and low-income countries. Network members are global leaders on research and policy on labour regulation.
ESRC/GCRF Strategic Network country coverage
The ILO emphasises that UFW can take many forms. It has defined UFW as working conditions that ‘deny fundamental principles and rights at work, put at risk the lives, health, freedom, human dignity and security of workers or keep households in conditions of extreme poverty’ (ILO 2013).
Research by Deirdre McCann and Judy Fudge has generated a Multidimensional Model of Unacceptable Work, outlined in a report for the ILO - ‘Unacceptable Forms of Work: A Global and Comparative Study' (2015). Academic articles: McCann, Deirdre & Fudge, Judy (2017). Unacceptable Forms of Work: A Multidimensional Model. International Labour Review 156(2): 147-184; McCann, Deirdre & Fudge, Judy (2019). A Strategic Approach to Regulating Unacceptable Forms of Work. Journal of Law and Society 46(2): 271-301.
The Multidimensional Model of UFW (1) outlines the substantive dimensions of UFW (2) empowers local actors to determine priorities for intervention and (3) calls for strategic regulatory responses that have substantial and systems-wide effects. A central finding of the research was the need for novel legal frameworks – and related social and economic policies – that can target UFW.
The report identifies 12 dimensions of Unacceptable Forms of Work, which highlight the many different ways that UFW can appear in workplaces communities across the world:
An interactive presentation on the Multidimensional Model of Unacceptable Forms of Work is available as a Prezi.
Effective labour regulation is not one-size-fits-all. It needs to respond to the conditions and culture of local settings and be rigorously tested to ensure that it achieves its aim. However, we can often be inspired by successes elsewhere. Our approach isthat countries from different regions and income levels should be investigated to explore how they are each tackling shared challenges to effective labour laws. The aim should be to uncover the most promising national and international interventions and determine whether they can be adapted or expanded.
The UFW Network supported a dialogue that transcended national boundaries and was intended to circulate regulatory ideas and innovations from across the world. Global dialogue is crucial to encouraging meaningful reforms in the design and implementation of domestic and international laws that can reach the most disadvantaged in the global workforce.
To this end, we identified a set of Global Challenges to the effective regulation of unacceptable work. These are the most urgent and complex issues that face lower-income countries in particular in upgrading or eliminating unacceptable forms of work. Network Teams composed of researchers from a range of disciplines and national and international policy actors have produced research agendas to address each Challenge.
Extending Forced Labour Initiatives
Labour Rights in the 'Precarious Economy'
