The international landscape on the regulation of domestic work is changing dramatically. At the hundredth session of the International Labour Conference (ILC) in June 2011, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the historic Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) and accompanying Recommendation No. 201. These new international labor standards come sixty-three years after the ILO adopted its first resolution on the conditions of employment of domestic workers and forty-six years after its second such resolution, which recalled the "urgent need" for standards "compatible with the self-respect and human dignity which are essential to social justice" for domestic workers. The robust, comprehensive international norms were adopted after two decades in which the ILO's standard setting has been deeply criticized and its tripartite structure repeatedly challenged to become more representative. Since additional critique of the ILO standards system emerged at the ILC's 101st session in 2012, it would be an overstatement to suggest that the new instruments reflect an unequivocally positive trend in standard setting. Even so, they offer a critical realist basis for considering that ILO standard setting remains salient and that international social dialogue remains possible.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.