A/HRC/34/57 increase the risk of financial crises which, in turn, may lead to further deregulation of labour markets.2 12. Labour-related austerity policies have been openly pushed by a number of official key creditors, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), together, more recently, with the European Commission and the European Central Bank — the so-called Troika. Especially since the late 1980s, labour-related conditionality has featured prominently in IMF financial assistance programmes. Indeed, around 50 per cent of all lending programmes have involved one or more labour-related conditions over the period from 1994 to 2007. Since then, the number of IMF programmes with labour conditionalities appears to have fallen, but still, between 25 to 40 per cent of IMF programmes adopted until 2014 contained labour-related conditions relating to the public or the private sector.3 13. International financial institutions have promoted labour law deregulation not only through formal conditionality to financial assistance arrangements. For example, a subtle form of reform pressure was applied in the case of Italy whereby a confidential letter sent to the Government by the President of the European Central Bank and his incumbent successor set out a list of required potential reforms. 4 IMF has also made use of other instruments to advocate for deregulatory labour reforms, such as its Article IV consultations in the context of its bilateral macroeconomic surveillance. 5 These involve a certain amount of pressure and may also affect a country’s capacity to obtain financing elsewhere, given that potential or actual investors and bilateral lenders often have recourse to these reports.6 B. Labour law issues in economic adjustment programmes 14. Faced with financial and economic crises, governments have tended to scale down labour rights, although the specific content of the reforms has varied across the countries concerned, depending, in particular, on the level of protection of the different areas of labour law. 7 This corresponds to the dominant tendency in the approach of international financial institutions to labour reform, notably IMF. While IMF has occasionally supported moderate improvements in labour standards,8 its prevalent stance regarding labour law has been a deregulatory one. Close to one third of the available letters of intent addressed by 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 See Simon Deakin and Aristea Koukiadaki, “The sovereign debt crisis and the evolution of labour law in Europe”, in Nicola Countouris and Mark Freedland, eds., Resocialising Europe in a Time of Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 163-188. Alexander E. Kentikelenis, Thomas H. Stubbs and Lawrence P. King, “IMF conditionality and development policy space, 1985-2014”, Review of International Political Economy (2016), p. 19. Stefano Sacchi, “Conditionality by other means: EU involvement in Italy’s structural reforms in the sovereign debt crisis”, Comparative European Politics, vol. 13, No. 1 (2015), pp. 82-83 and 89. Center for Economic and Policy Research, “Macroeconomic policy advice and the Article IV consultations: a European Union case study” (Washington D.C., 2013), pp. 14-17. See with further references, Franz Christian Ebert, “International financial institutions’ approaches to labour law: the case of the International Monetary Fund”, in Adelle Blackett and Anne Trebilcock, eds., Research Handbook on Transnational Labour Law (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2015), pp. 126127. Christoph Hermann, “Structural adjustment and neoliberal convergence in labour markets and welfare: the impact of the crisis and austerity measures on European economic and social models”, Competition and Change, vol. 18, No. 2 (2014), pp. 123-124. Franz Christian Ebert, “International financial institutions’ approaches to labour law” (note 6 above), pp. 129-131 with further references. 5