International Labour Law

The following databases are useful sources of national legislation and commentary.

For more resources for finding legislation from individual countries, see the ILO Library's Research Guide on Labour Law (National).

The following are useful tools for comparative employment protection research. 

For a critique of the OCED database, see Martin Myant and Laura Brandhuber, 'Uses and Abuses of the OECD's Employment Protection Legislation Index in Research and EU Policy-Making' (7 December 2016) ETUI Research Paper - Working Paper 2016.11. Full-text article available on SSRN (open access).

The following tools are useful for comparing two or more jurisdictions on various workers' rights topics. As well as ILO Conventions, workers' rights are enshrined in several human rights treaties - to see more on comparing human rights in relation to employment/labour, see the Comparative / Global Human Rights tab on the Human Rights Law Research Guide.

US Department of State Human Rights Reports

• These annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices include internationally recognised worker rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements. The Department of State submits reports on all countries receiving assistance and all United Nations member states.
• You can see reports by region, country and human rights topic. A really useful feature is 'Build a Report', which 

  allows you to select one or more human rights topics, then add regions or countries and then build a report to compare those areas. To access this feature:

  1) select an annual report from the left hand menu on the Human Rights Reports page.

2) click on the Build a Report tab on the top menu to see issues across countries.

3) select one or more topics from Section 7: Worker Rights

4) select two or more countries to compare.

5) select Step 3: Build Report and Create my Report.

The Rule of Law Index from the World Justice Project

The latest Rule of Law Index from the World Justice Project provides rankings for 142 countries based on their adherence to protection of fundamental human rights.  See each country's statistics and ranking here. See the full Rule of Law Index report for all countries here.

The factors taken into account in assessing protection of fundamental rights rank are those established under the Universal Declaration, and include:

Factor 4.7 - freedom of assembly and association; and

Factor 4-8 - fundamental labor rights, including the right to collective bargaining, the prohibition of forced and child labor, and the elimination of discrimination.  

To see individual country reports as measured against the Factors, hover over the map to select the country.

The OECD Employment Database (open access) provides up-to-date statistics to make comparisons between countries and identifying trends over time in OECD Member countries. The database includes information on employment, unemployment, earnings and wages, labour market policies and institutions, skills and work, and job quality.  

The OECD Employment and Labour Market Statistics databases (UniMelb staff & student access) provide statistics on labour markets, labour forces, trade unions, job quality, hours worked, average wages, employment and unemployment in OECD Member countries. 

The OECD’s Labour Force Statistics (UniMelb staff & student access) is an annual publication that provides detailed statistics on population, labour force, employment and unemployment, broken down by sex, as well as unemployment duration, employment status, employment by sector of activity and part-time employment. It also contains participation and unemployment rates by sex and detailed age groups as well as comparative tables for the main components of the labour force. Data are available for each OECD member country and for OECD-Total, Euro area and European Union. The time series presented in the publication cover 10 years for most countries. 

The Country Profiles on the ILO ILOSTAT database contain detailed employment statistics for every country. The ILOSTAT database can also be browsed by country or subject.

The ILOSTAT interactive Map (open access) can be used to compare employment rates and statistics of two or more countries.

Books about labour law can be found on the library catalogue via keywords and specific subject terms in the Subject field of the library catalogue.  Add a jurisdiction to your subject term to narrow down results. eg Labor laws and legislation - Australia.