Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Formation of the ILO International Labor Regulation Regime and its Impact on Class Power and Inequality within Nations

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This project explores the formation of an international labor regulatory regime in the 20th century, and its effects on working class organization and mobilization, and inequality, at the national level. The research focuses on the labor conventions adopted by the International Labor Organization, and patterns of ratifications of these conventions by the ILO member countries, between 1919-1999. Neo-institutionalist theories of an emergent world culture and world polity provide a useful framework for understanding the diffusion of symbolic constructs and institutional forms on a world scale, but they tend to de-emphasize questions of agency, power and conflict. Global class conflict approaches (world systems theory, dependent development theory, dependency theory) help to situate the formation of the ILO's global labor regime in the context of global patterns of exploitation, stratification, dependence and conflict. These different theoretical perspectives give rise to a number of hypotheses concerning the ILO's adoption of new conventions, the patterns of convention ratifications by ILO member countries, and the effects of ILO conventions on working class mobilization and organization. Network methods are used to describe the formation of the labor regime over time, and to understand the role of various kinds of social ties in the formation of the network of countries and conventions. Event history analysis is used to analyze ILO members' ratifications of ILO conventions, and the effects of member countries' varying levels of integration into the ILO regulatory regime on working class organization and mobilization, and inequality, at the national level. Qualitative Comparative Analyses are used, with richer historical data from a smaller sample of ILO members, to explore in more detail the relationships between countries' integration into the ILO regulatory regime and working class organization and mobilization. The data for these analyses are drawn from a number of sources: archival data collected at the central library of the ILO in Geneva, Switzerland; ILO publications; Penn World Tables; various UN and World Bank datasets; existing secondary literature. This research contributes to our understanding of the factors affecting the formation and impact of a world labor regulatory regime. It sheds light on the role of international governance structures in the process of economic globalization. Findings from this research should contribute to policy debates in the fields of international labor regulation, international human rights, and international development.