3.4.2 Advance fundamental rights through International Framework Agreements

The IMF will seek to challenge TNCs and their supply chains by using IFAs, ILO instruments, OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises, increased union cooperation and, in addition to international solidarity, cooperation with NGOs that share our aims to protect and promote worker and trade union rights.  Trade union organization of worksites is an essential precondition to monitor and implement workers’ rights. IFAs, however, do not replace the need for binding intergovernmental regulations to enforce core labour standards, or the need for national laws to enforce labour standards and to regulate the activities of the TNCs more effectively.

As instruments negotiated at the international level by GUFs in cooperation with their affiliates on one side and a TNC on the other, IFAs are important tools that the IMF and its affiliates can use to establish minimum labour standards across the operations of TNCs and their supply chains. The IMF has adopted a model International Framework Agreement along with policy recommendations covering four key areas: improving the content, initiating, negotiating, and implementation and enforcement.

Drawing on the experiences of the IFAs already negotiated with TNCs, the IMF will:

• Strengthen implementation, monitoring and enforcement through IMF structures and regional offices, and by training and involvement of affiliates with the aim of achieving best practices across TNCs that have signed framework agreements;
• After consultation with unions covered by the agreements, identify opportunities to strengthen existing agreements, and the options and means that are optimal for pursing improvements of their content;
• Coordinate the involvement of affiliates in negotiating additional IFAs;
• Explore possible strategies to encourage resisting TNCs to negotiate, implement, and comply with IFAs; and
• Implement a training programme on IFAs, including a guide, to help affiliates use these instruments in accordance with IMF policy.

Cooperation of affiliates, particularly those in the home country of a TNC, is instrumental to such efforts.