A/HRC/34/57 circulated in the preparation of the report.1 The responses received confirmed that, over the past decade, many States implemented reform measures affecting labour rights in order to stimulate economic growth or support financial consolidation. Some of the submissions also included an assessment as to whether the reforms had a positive or adverse impact on the enjoyment of labour rights or other social rights contained in international human rights treaties. 8. Although the report deals with the labour and human rights implications of austerity, fiscal consolidation should not be considered as the only available response to economic crises. Before implementing austerity measures, States and international financial institutions are obliged to assess whether there are any viable human rights compliant policy alternatives to fiscal consolidation. II. Overview of debt and labour rights A. Financial crises, economic reform and labour standards 9. Financial crises can affect labour rights in a number of ways. Obviously, financial crises may reduce economic growth and employment and impair the right to work. However, in addition, governments have often undertaken reform measures that directly — such as reduction in wages and employment in the public sector aimed at reducing public expenditure or labour market deregulation in the private sector purportedly to increase competiveness — or indirectly — by creating economic conditions which increase pressure on workers, reducing wages or threatening employment, for example through privatization of public enterprises, trade liberalization or cutting domestic subsidies — affect labour rights. 10. While the links between debt crises and labour law reform are complex, it is safe to say that unsustainable public debt levels often play a key role in a government’s decision to adopt economic adjustment reforms, with various implications for labour rights. In this regard, the stimulus for reform can come from external actors, notably key creditors of the State concerned, while, in others cases, the political impulse for reform policies has stemmed from the Government itself. This includes scenarios where a government is facing a financial or otherwise economic crisis and perceives a need to implement such policies to become more competitive to overcome the crisis. Governments may also perceive a necessity to implement such reforms in order to avoid entering into a debt crisis. A looming debt crisis may also be used to implement business-friendly policies that would otherwise be highly unpopular. 11. Financial crises and labour reforms can result in a vicious downward spiral that depresses labour rights. Increased unemployment and weakened trade unions have the potential to entrench income inequality and stagnation of workers’ wages in the bottom half of the labour market and trade unions lose the power to fulfil their traditional role of contributing to redistribution. Consequently, workers may borrow beyond their means to maintain their standard of living; weakened individual and collective labour rights may 1 4 The questionnaire and all the responses received are available from www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/ Development/IEDebt/Pages/DebtAndLabourRights.aspx. The Independent Expert also thanks Franz Ebert, research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, Germany, for his research work for the present report.