What difference does the International Labour Organisation make? Freedom of association norms, supervision and promotion vis-à-vis Brazil.

Drawing on a case study of Brazil, this paper explores the extent to which and how International Labour Organisation's (ILO) freedom of association norms, supervision and promotion affect domestic provisions for workers' associational power. In terms of its legislative, judiciary and executive dimensions, ILO illustrate key challenges of a ‘soft law’ regime; indeed, it has allowed successive Brazilian governments to escape key freedom of association obligations. I detail what this means for workers in agriculture: crucially, Brazil's non-standard provisions for associational power exacerbate, rather than countervail, labour's structural disadvantages vis-à-vis capital. ILO norms have nevertheless been of great political significance. They sat at the heart of the discourse through which oppositional labour framed repressive labour–state relations during the late 1970s and 1980s. However, in the context of neoliberal globalisation, the meanings that Brazilian labour inscribed in these norms saw ‘rightwards’ slide, while the political connotations of the previously discredited corporatism slid in the opposite direction. Eventually, labour failed to support Lula's attempt, during the 2000s, to align Brazil's labour relations system with ILO's standards. Still, the deep historical identification of Brazil's left with ILO norms has, in combination with ILO's regularly issued denunciations and recent domestic ‘decent work’ promotion, helped a certain permutation of legal and political practice. The case suggests that the force of ILO is highly contingent on particular structural conjunctures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]