On the face of it there should be nothing contentious about the International Labour Standards (ILS) movement. It is meant to be a global effort to raise the working conditions and living standards of workers, primarily in developing countries. What is curious is that the biggest opposition to ILS has come from its alleged beneficiaries—to wit, Third World workers, unions, and governments. The fear in the South is that once such a global monitoring scheme is brought into existence, it will get diverted into an instrument of protection for the North. In the name of ILS, arbitrary and inflexible trade sanctions will be imposed on Third World countries. This fear gets heightened if the labour standards are imposed through the World Trade Organization (WTO), via a ‘social clause’ provision, which would allow the WTO to use trade sanctions against any nation that violates minimal labour standards. The other concern stems from the adjective ‘international’, which suggests a uniform global standard for all nations.

Recently, Archon Fung, Dara O'Rourke, and Charles Sabel have come up with an ingenious suggestion for international labour standards to get around some of these criticisms. They call their scheme ‘Ratcheting Labour Standards’ (RLS). They try to bring in flexibility by keeping labour standards away from formal global organizations.