About the Index
About the Labour Rights Index
The Labour Rights Index is a de jure index that measures major aspects of employment regulation affecting a worker during the employment life cycle in 135 countries.
The Labour Rights Index covers 10 topics/indicators and 46 evaluation criteria. All of these are based on substantive elements of the Decent Work Agenda. The criteria are all grounded in UDHR, five UN Conventions, five ILO Declarations, 35 ILO Conventions, and four ILO Recommendations.
The Labour Rights Index is based on more than 13 years of research by WageIndicator Foundation (Netherlands) and the Centre for Labour Research (Pakistan). More than 30 WageIndicator team members have contributed to the Index by providing relevant data informing various indicators under the Index.
Why did we want this Labour Rights Index?
The Labour Rights Index is a comparative tool, an international qualification standard, which allows its users to compare labour legislation around the world. In a way, it helps you navigate the labour markets of 135 countries. The labour market regulation affecting around more than 90% of the 3.5 billion global labour force has been analysed and scored under the Index. The aim is to make all this abstract legal information accessible to workers in order to improve their working lives. Similarly, the work is useful for national and trans-national employers to ensure compliance with local labour legislation.
What is Unique?
Despite the availability of multiple indices measuring performance, the Labour Rights Index is the most comprehensive one yet in terms of scope. The Index looks at every aspect of the working lifespan of a worker and identifies the presence of labour rights, or the lack of it, in national legal systems worldwide. It has 10 indicators and 46 components or evaluation criteria. The scoring is based on an analysis of thousands of pages of labour legislation. Instead of engaging outside experts, the work is done by the WageIndicator Labour Law Office, i.e., the Centre for Labour Research with support from WageIndicator global and country teams.
Who needs to use it and why?
The Labour Rights Index is essentially directed at governments and international organisations, targeting trade union federations, multilateral organisations and national level organisations like government agencies. However, most of all, the Index can be used by workers. The importance of labour legislation cannot be overemphasised since well-drafted and inclusive laws are still a precondition for attaining decent work.
National scores can be used as starting points of negotiations and reforms by civil society organisations. Ratings can be made prerequisites for international socio-economic agreements to ensure compliance with labour standards, similar to EU's GSP+ and USA’s GSP which require compliance in law and practice with certain labour standards in order to avail certain trade benefits through reduced tariffs.
The Labour Rights Index is also a useful benchmarking tool that can be used in stimulating policy debate as it can help in exposing challenges and identifying best practices. The Index provides meaningful input into policy discussions to improve labour market protections at the country level.
The Labour Rights Index is a repository of “objective and actionable” data on labour market regulation along with the best practices which can be used by countries worldwide to initiate necessary reforms. The comparative tool can also be used by Labour Ministries for finding the best practices within their own regions and around the world.
What are its uses for workers?
The Labour Rights Index can work as an efficient aid for workers as well to gauge the labour rights protections in labour laws across countries. For migrants as well as posted workers, Labour Rights Index country profiles along with WageIndicator Decent Work Checks, provide necessary information on workplace rights in both origin and destination countries. With increased internet use, availability of reliable and objective legal rights information is the first step towards compliance. The Labour Rights Index helps in achieving that step.
The history of the Index
It was way back in 2009, when a Pakistani scholar from Cornell University reached me online. He identified himself as Iftikhar Ahmad, student of comparative labour law, and wanted to know why Pakistan was not among the 50-odd countries we were working in at the time. Well, simply because we have not yet found a suitable counterpart in the country, my standard answer must have been. 'Could he not qualify?', Iftikhar wrote back. He liked what we were doing, he said, and he also wanted to dedicate his working life to the interests of the common working man, woman and family. He was studying at Cornell and would return home to Islamabad, where he would restart working as a career civil servant for the Pakistani Government. So, indeed, why not, I mused. Let’s give it a try. And that is how we embarked on an adventurous and truly rewarding partnership that, 10 years later, has culminated into the first comprehensive Labour Rights Index with global outreach, covering 115 countries in 2020 - and counting.
Over the past decade, Iftikhar and I have had at least a thousand online conversations and - when travelling was still easy - at least a dozen meetings in Islamabad, Amsterdam, Geneva and some other places where and when our work brought us together. Iftikhar, a methodical and systematic thinker with a strong bent for research, had recognized that we, at WageIndicator, collected data on wages and labour rights in a highly structured way. Our common systems approach provided the framework and directed our mutual brain picking. This happy meeting of inquisitive minds is the second crucial strand in our enduring cooperation - next to our shared drive that the work we do should benefit the working man and woman of meagre means, who make up the public at large in any country.
It so happened that the Decent Work Check, a nascent tool, that we at WageIndicator had been experimenting with (online and in print) in rural Africa and Central America, became the hub of our intense and intensifying exchanges. After much initial tampering, sculpting and a lot of scrutinizing, it today stands as the legal backbone of our pioneering Labour Rights Index 2020 and would continue to do so for its future editions. Moreover, our mature Decent Work Check proves to be of great value for national WageIndicator websites in 115 countries, and also in WageIndicator projects at the factory and plantation level in Indonesia, Ethiopia and Uganda, empowering (female) garment workers and flower growers.
I look forward to our continued cooperation with Iftikhar and his team at the Centre for Labour Research, along the lines that have brought us - and many others - so much: professionally, intellectually and as friends.
Paulien Osse, Director WageIndicator Foundation (November 2020)
Press release - Leading employment lawyer and senator Mirjam de Blécourt receives the new Labour Rights Index 2020 of the WageIndicator Foundation
AMSTERDAM - The Netherlands – Leading Labour & Employment lawyer Mirjam de Blécourt of international law firm Baker McKenzie and Senator of the Dutch Parliament receives the new Labour Rights Index 2020 at the first official presentation. The freely accessible Index is co-created by the WageIndicator Foundation and its affiliate Centre for Labour Research. The detailed market Index provides objective legal data of the labour market in 115 countries. It is the first comprehensive and legally recognized Index and meant to function as the new comparative international qualification standard. “The assumption that only rich countries are the best-performing is a misunderstanding. And that gives hope .” According to Paulien Osse, Director of WageIndicator Foundation.
