Dimitrina Dimitrova, Deputy-Director of the ILO’s Meetings Department

This year’s International Labour Conference (ILC) – an annual event often called the world parliament of labour – will take place at the UN Palais des Nations in Geneva from 28 May to 8 June, 2018.

More than 5,700 government, employer and worker delegates from the ILO’s 187 member States will discuss some of the most pressing issues facing the world of work. Here’s a look at some of the main items on the agenda of the 107^th session of the ILC.

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Gurchaten Sandhu, Chief Technical Advisor

Imagine coming into work one morning and sharing with your colleagues the movie or TV programme you watched last night with your partner. Yet because your partner is the same sex as you, you change their name, to one of the opposite sex, or you change the details to conceal their gender. Or imagine going in to work and having someone using a name and pronouns which don’t align with your sex or your gender identity and expression. And you live this every day. It would become exhausting right?

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Susan Hayter, ILO Senior Specialist on industrial relations

A book recently published by the ILO looks at the institutionalization of industrial relations in emerging economies and its contribution to development. Industrial relations in emerging economies: The quest for inclusive development, focusses on five countries.

Between 2010 and 2015, waves of strikes broke out in China, Brazil, India, Turkey and South Africa – which together comprise 42 per cent of the world’s labour force. A remarkable feature of these strikes was that they were all ‘spontaneous’, or ‘wildcat’ strikes, occurring outside the formal procedures and institutions designed to facilitate sound industrial relations.

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