Independent Monitoring of Private Transnational Regulation of Labour Standards: a Proposal for a "Transnational Labour Inspectorate" System

Labour law is changing and new forms are arising to govern labour standards. These new forms of labour law are not adopted by governments and/or international organisations, instead they are adopted by private actors, like multinational corporations (MNCs), either alone, by codes of conduct, or together with global union federations (GUFs) by transnational framework agreements (TFAs). These new regulatory forms of transnational governance of labour standards are generally considered as a positive development, however, they also raise many legal challenges. For instance about their legal status, since they are legally non-binding due to the lack of a regulatory framework, but also with respect to compliance mechanisms to uphold the rights and obligations created by these new forms of transnational labour law. Although, research has indicated that these new forms can be more effective than their legal status as soft law suggests, at the same time is has also indicated that monitoring of compliance is often left up to private actors, for instance, by internal audit. A development that is rather undesirable and problematic, because it indicates a lack of external, independent, accountable monitoring. By ensuring independent monitoring these new forms of labour law will win on greater interest and importance as potential means to uphold labour law standards on the transnational level. Therefore, in this article we propose an independant, transparant transnational labour inspectorate system.