ILO Convention 193: Real Rights or Archive Photo?

Geneva, June 2026. The hall of the International Labour Conference registers consensus. Convention 193 on work in digital platforms is approved. Delegates from a hundred eighty-seven countries, representatives of employers and workers, all on the same page. It's a historic moment in procedural terms. The kind that generates enthusiastic press releases, victory statements, and photographs for institutional archives.

But the question that matters isn't what happened in Geneva. It's what's going to happen afterward.

I've seen in different contexts how well-thought-out designs on paper run into serious problems once applied. International labor law has a particularly clear track record on this front. ILO conventions tend to be formalized aspirations that rarely reach the actual lives of the workers they supposedly protect.

What Convention 193 attempts to do is technically new and politically complicated. For the first time in the history of international labor law, a multilateral instrument not only recognizes rights for platform workers—access to social security, protection against arbitrary deactivation, and the right to organize—but also addresses the algorithm as a form of labor management. Platform assignment systems aren't neutral coordination tools. They're structures deliberately designed to produce legal ambiguity. The worker is never an employee because the algorithm never gives orders, it only suggests. It never sanctions, it only adjusts visibility. The convention attempts to regulate that logic. That's new. That's complicated.

The mirror of what could happen already exists.

Convention 87 on freedom of association was approved in 1948, amid postwar enthusiasm for building a fairer international order. Broad consensus. Enormous symbolic legitimacy. And decades of selective ratifications that left precisely the most vulnerable workers uncovered. The United States never ratified it. Key industrial powers ignored it for years. This pattern isn't an anomaly. It's the structural regularity of international labor law. Convention 189 on domestic workers, approved in 2011, took two years to secure the minimum two ratifications needed to enter into force and more than a decade to achieve meaningful coverage. Domestic workers are, along with platform workers, one of the most invisibilized labor groups in national legal systems. The coincidence isn't accidental.

The process is always the same. Multilateral consensus generates symbolic legitimacy, and then ratification reveals who has real incentives to adopt standards that make their labor more expensive. Countries with greater economic power face less pressure to ratify. Those who most need the protections have the least capacity to enforce them. And companies with market capitalizations larger than the GDP of many member states have the resources to fragment the regulatory response country by country: they negotiate exceptions here, delay legislation there, fund studies showing that regulation will destroy jobs.

This is where Colombia's role in these negotiations stops being anecdote and becomes relevant geopolitical data. Colombia led blocs of emerging economies in the Convention 193 negotiations, in a dynamic that isn't isolated. In recent years, these economies have built their own normative positions on technology and labor with a coordination that didn't exist before. What was documented in Baku—a hundred sixteen countries creating independent digital platforms—and what's observed in Nigeria, India, and Vietnam with digital cooperatives operating under logics of technological sovereignty, indicate that Convention 193 emerges from a deeper process. It's part of a reconfiguration of who defines the rules of digital work. That emerging economies are leading these negotiations matters because it also means they're the ones with the greatest incentive to ratify first and prove the model is viable. But that entails a responsibility they can't avoid. If Colombia signs the convention and then fails to build real enforcement mechanisms—labor inspection with actual capacity, judicial systems that understand algorithms, unions with technical capacity to audit them—normative leadership turns into rhetoric.

The real battlefield where everything gets decided wasn't Geneva. It's every national parliament, every labor ministry, every judicial system in the hundred eighty-seven member states. And on that terrain, tech platforms have clear structural advantages. Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon Flex aren't going to fight the convention head-on. That would generate bad press. They're going to do what they already do with any regulation that threatens their model: fragment it. They'll prefer negotiating country by country rather than accepting a uniform global standard. They'll fund studies on negative economic impact in specific markets. They'll propose voluntary self-regulation schemes that look like compliance but create no enforceable rights. I know these dynamics from other contexts, and the logic is consistent: when you can't block a regulation, you hollow it out during implementation.

There is, however, one actor that conventional analysis tends to ignore: platform cooperatives. Models where workers are also owners and labor conditions are built into the architecture of the system, not into a contract that can be unilaterally modified. These models already operate under standards similar to those Convention 193 establishes. If states ratify and enforce the convention with real mechanisms, platform cooperatives gain a competitive advantage over models that externalize labor costs. Regulation stops being just protection and becomes a leveling of the playing field. In terms of incentives, that's a significant shift. The alliance between unionism and cooperativism that has been building in recent years—using technology to combine collective bargaining with productive ownership—finds in Convention 193 a legal lever that didn't exist before. But only if the convention has real enforcement capacity.

I'm still not clear whether the ILO has that capacity in the algorithmic era. Auditing whether a company complies with a minimum wage is complicated but manageable. Auditing whether a platform's assignment algorithm produces systematic arbitrary deactivations requires access to code, to data, to internal logic. It's a technical problem international labor law had never had to solve before. The convention acknowledges it as a problem. Solving it is another matter.

That's why the real metric isn't whether the convention was approved. That already happened. The concrete question that will determine whether Convention 193 becomes the Convention 87 of the twenty-first century—ignored for decades by those who should adopt it most—or something qualitatively different is this: how many countries ratify it before 2028 with real enforcement mechanisms and resources? If that number is fewer than twenty, and if none of those twenty include a G7 economy, the historical pattern will have repeated itself with near-perfect punctuality. If Colombia, India, Nigeria, and a group of emerging economies ratify as a bloc and create regional oversight mechanisms, we'll be looking at something different. That difference isn't decided in Geneva. It's decided over the next eighteen months, in legislative processes that don't make headlines but that determine whether millions of platform workers will have enforceable rights or just the memory of a historic consensus in a room nobody remembers anymore.

The convention exists. Will this be a real turning point or just another archive photo?

1. ILO — Convention 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise (1948). Historical record of ratifications and notable absences.

2. ILO — Convention 189 on Domestic Workers (2011). Timeline of ratifications and process of entry into force.

3. Laurent, Y. — "Union Repression as Global Competitive Advantage" (2026). Analysis of the structural trend by which labor deregulation functions as a competitiveness strategy.

4. Laurent, Y. — "Digital Cooperatives: Nigeria, India, and Vietnam Converge" (2026). Documentation of organizational alternatives in emerging economies that contextualize Convention 193.

5. Laurent, Y. — "Global South Builds Its Own Platforms vs. Silicon Valley" (2025). Coordination of emerging economies in Baku as a geopolitical precedent for normative leadership on digital labor.