This research examines the effects of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on labour rights. Critics of the IMF contend that participation in an IMF programme is detrimental to workers’ rights as the IMF tries to impose pro-business labor policies via conditionality. In this paper, we argue that while the IMF might have tried to make IMF programs more beneficial to workers, those efforts are too little to reverse the overall negative effects on labour rights in both short term and long term.

[Update] The paper was presented at the Political Economy of International Organizations (PEIO)’s Annual Meeting in January 2017 at the University of Bern. We are currently checking the robustness of our findings with additional data sources from the 2018 IMF Lending Arrangements & the CIRI Human Rights Dataset.