The Code of International Labour Law, edited by Neville Rubin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 846 pp., ISBN-10: 0521847400 and ISBN-13: 9780521847407.

International labour law is a body of rules and principles regarding issues such as freedom of association as it manifests itself in the labour sector as the right to organize and bargain collectively, equality of employment, child and forced labour, occupational health and safety, wages and benefits and labour administration. Its primary source is the International Labour Organization (ILO), a U.N. agency composed not only of states but also trade union and employer organization representatives. In 1939, and again in 1952, the ILO secretariat assembled a volume intended to bring together the diverse elements of international labour law in a single publication entitled The International Labour Code. The Code of International Labour Law is not an update of those earlier efforts by ILO officials. Instead, it is a massive independent effort by Neville Rubin, a law professor (now emeritus) from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in association with professors Evance Kalula, also of Cape Town and Bob Hepple, Professor of Law Emeritus, Cambridge University. Rubin’s rationale for undertaking this vast project was to make the entire corpus of law more accessible, an important objective, he suggests, given the growing importance of this body of law in the context of globalization. There is a strengthening international consensus that, if globalization is to win general support, its benefits must be broadly distributed. It is for that reason that the ILO’s International Labour Conference adopted a Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights of Labour in 1998, and the U.N. included ILO-developed international labour standards as part of its Global Compact with multinational enterprise. The publication comes in three volumes. Volume one, entitled “Essentials of International Labour Law”, has two parts. Part one, entitled “The Nature of International Labour Law”, reviews the ILO Instruments (constitution, conventions, recommendations, declarations, resolutions and decision), institutions, processes whereby international labour law comes into being, and also supervisory procedures. The second part of Volume one focuses on core standards, those considered to be fundamental human rights. These include: freedom of association and its associated right to organize and bargain collectively, equality of rights and of treatment, and freedom from forced and child labour. Volume II, which is divided into two books, reviews the vast landscape of topics that the ILO has addressed over the years including, for example, aspects of employment such as employment of young people, women, older workers, benefits and conditions of work, occupational health and safety, labour administration and regulations with respect to certain branches of work such as hotels and restaurants, nursing, seafaring, plantations, etc. Anyone who knows a bit about the ILO will know that its principal instrument for creating “law” is the Convention. Once a new Convention is approved by the annual International Labour Conference (which acts as a sort of world parliament for the development of labour law), each member state is required to consider the Convention with a view towards ratifying it, and thereby making it domestic law. But the ILO has other instruments that are also important in fashioning international law. All member states, for example, are bound as a condition of membership, to conform to the Constitution. All of the core labour rights considered to be fundamental human rights are mentioned in the Constitution, thereby binding member states to abide by them. What conformance with those rights and principles means in terms of daily conduct is the province of two ILO committees: The Committee on Freedom of Association that hears complaints alleging infringement of that basic freedom in particular circumstances and the Committee on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations that is charged with overseeing the …