Building Safe and Fair Workplaces: The Critical Role of Quality Infrastructure

Dr. Ulrich Harmes-Liedtke
Aug 15
4 min read

Introduction

Quality infrastructure (QI) institutions, which initially focused primarily on technical and industrial sectors, now impact nearly every aspect of our lives. They influence how goods and services are produced and significantly affect the world of work, where safety, fairness, and dignity are essential. On a global scale, the International Labour Organization (ILO) sets the gold standard for workplace rights, creating norms that ensure decent working conditions for all.

ILO: Setting the Standards for Decent Work

The ILO provides a comprehensive architecture of global labour standards to make work environments safer and more equitable. It defines Decent Work as “Opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity.”

This framework is built on four pillars:

Employment creation and enterprise development, offering employment opportunities
Rights at work, including fair wages and working hours, and combating discrimination in employment
Social protection, providing adequate safety nets and protection against vulnerabilities.
Social dialogue, ensuring freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining

Further, the ILO sets standards that promote equal opportunities, including gender equality, support for disadvantaged groups such as people with disabilities and migrant workers, occupational safety and health, and elimination of forced and child labour. Collectively, these instruments ensure that people everywhere can undertake work with dignity, security, and genuine opportunity.

The Nature of ISO Standards: Voluntary, Yet Powerful

ILO conventions establish the legal and ethical foundation for workplace rights globally. In parallel, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) creates voluntary international standards that help organizations exceed mere legal compliance. ISO 45001:2018 is the best-known standard for workplace safety, providing a framework for occupational health and safety management systems. Organizations may voluntarily adopt and become certified to ISO standards to demonstrate their commitment to excellence and ongoing improvement. While not mandatory, ISO standards are trusted benchmarks, encouraging a higher level of worker protection and supporting open, fair global trade. ISO 45001, and related standards (for personal protective equipment, risk management, etc.), often draw inspiration from ILO guidelines, transforming them into actionable requirements for daily operations.

Decent Work and Gender Standards

The ILO is critical in championing decent work for all. Its standards advocate for fair wages, safe working environments, reasonable working hours, and social protection, including the right to organize and bargain collectively, and to work in inclusive workplaces free of discrimination. The ILO’s decent work agenda outlines what fair and humane work should look like worldwide.

Gender equality is another central priority for the ILO. Through conventions and recommendations, the ILO works to eliminate discrimination and ensure equal opportunities and treatment at work for all genders. These instruments support equal pay, protection against harassment, parental leave, and policies promoting work-life balance. In this context, strong QI systems make a real difference: adopting international standards, certified trainers and accredited conformity assessment bodies translate these goals into concrete action. For instance, workplace certification schemes that verify non-discriminatory practices or training programs with recognized quality marks provide visible pathways toward achieving ILO objectives.

Quality Infrastructure Components: Supporting the World of Work

QI’s building blocks—standardisation, conformity assessment, and accreditation—are crucial for safe and fair workplaces:

Standardisation creates technical blueprints for safe and fair practices, translating ILO values into implementable requirements.
Conformity Assessment includes testing, inspection, and certification, ensuring that employers and products comply with relevant labor and safety standards, whether rooted in laws, ILO guidelines, or ISO standards.
Accreditation assures that conformity assessment bodies themselves operate impartially and meet globally recognized criteria, building trust in inspection and certification results, both locally and internationally.

QI and the ILO are linked in practice, even if the ILO itself does not operate certification schemes. However, ILO standards are frequently used as core requirements within private and voluntary schemes (e.g., FSC, SA8000) that rely on accredited certification bodies for independent assessment. Similarly, in its own management, the ILO uses accredited certification for areas like IT security at ITCILO. The ILO actively advocates for strong, credible QI—especially in skills recognition and quality assurance in training to ensure the aims of decent work are credible and globally recognized.

Moving Forward: Closer Collaboration Between Labour and QI Communities

INetQI (International Network on Quality Infrastructure) brings together key QI organizations to strengthen these systems worldwide. While the ILO is not part of INetQI, greater collaboration, such as embedding ILO conventions directly into ISO and industry standards, and closer alignment of audit and verification methodologies, could drive even greater impact. Joint efforts would build more trust in certification for labor and safety standards, increase knowledge-sharing between experts in occupational safety, labor rights and QI, and generate certification and conformity assessment systems adapted to a broader global contexts. Enhanced cooperation would further the decent work agenda, support sustainable global supply chains, and help nations build safe, fair workplaces as a fundamental component of inclusive growth.

Conclusion

Quality infrastructure serves as a powerful engine of social progress, transforming the ILO’s vision for a decent world of work into reliable, practical systems. Strengthening the connections between the ILO and global QI organizations, particularly through collaborative forums like InetQI, offers the opportunity to promote fair and safe working conditions in global economic practices. This ensures that progress is achieved without compromising human dignity or safety.