The World Bank's Doing Business report has been the subject of much criticism since its first publication in 2003. The international labour movement has been particularly vocal in its criticism of what it considers to be an instrument used to pressurise countries to make regulation (in particular of labour markets) lighter at any cost. In this week's GLC, Conor Cradden discusses the - disappointing - report of the recent World Bank-ILO consultative group on the most problematic sub-indicator on 'employing workers': “Three elements of the indicator […] have been changed from being in a simple inverse relationship with the indicator score (the lower the better) to a kind of 'banding' system in which the policy target is to have these protections fall within a lower and an upper limit”. Cradden argues that this has been, unsurprisingly, deemed insufficient by many who would want to include a positive worker protection indicator. The current silence of the ILO on this issue, and itsinability to produce a 'decent work' indicator, may well allow the Bank to continue to promote its reactionary indicator. Conor Cradden is a research fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Geneva and a partner in PublicWorld, a London-based research and policy consultancy.

This brief is written by Global Labour Column and edited by CSID at Wits University.