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This article examines the development of the global Social Protection Floor proposal inside the International Labour Organization (ILO) from 2009 (when the ILO was designated as a lead agency in the process) through to the adoption of Recommendation 202 in 2012. While there was a considerably more high-profile external process under the auspices of the Advisory Group chaired by former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, the article argues that it was in the internal ILO process that debates regarding the most important substantive elements of the Recommendation were resolved. The United States was vigorously involved in this process and had a crucial influence on the substantive development of Recommendation 202. First, US involvement played a key role in limiting the degree to which – and manner in which – the recommendation would apply to medium- and high-income countries with established social protection systems. Second, the United States contributed to successfully blocking the definition of social protection as comprising sets of legally enforceable entitlements enshrined in national legislation. This marked a significant shift in the substantive meaning of the recognition of a human right to social protection. US efforts in this regard can be understood as the result of its concern regarding the uneasy fit between a potential recommendation and its own domestic social protection provision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the social policy and the U.S.-Canada bilateral relationship. The relationship between social policy and bilateral relations is reciprocal with social policy having important implications for bilateral relations and vice versa, asymmetrical with a much closer relationship between social policy and bilateral relations existing in Canada than in the U.S. and, in the Canadian case, paradoxical. Policy similarities between the two countries generate public concern in Canada that Canadian social policy is becoming Americanized and, in turn, generate resistance to deepening the bilateral relationship.