International Labour Standards as a Normative Framework for Social Partnership: A Doctrinal Analysis and Implications for Uzbekistan

Background. Social partnership, understood as cooperation between employees, employers and the state through social dialogue, collective bargaining and tripartite bodies, rests on a body of international standards that shapes national labour law. Uzbekistan has ratified several key instruments, yet its legislation still leaves gaps in the rules on representation, collective bargaining and collective dispute resolution. Objective. To establish what international labour standards require of a national system of social partnership, to classify those standards by the function they perform, and to test the Uzbek framework against them. Methods. Doctrinal and comparative legal analysis of universal, International Labour Organization (ILO) and regional instruments; of the output of the ILO supervisory bodies; and of the 2026 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the right to strike. The ILO instruments were grouped functionally and their requirements were distilled into a set of principles, which were compared with the Labour Code of Uzbekistan. Results. The ILO instruments fall into four functional groups: the legal status of the social partners; collective bargaining; tripartite institutions; and collective dispute resolution. Eleven principles follow from the standards. Three of them (representation determined by objective criteria, good-faith bargaining and the right to information) are not fully reflected in the Labour Code. Eight key instruments reveal gaps in Uzbekistan in the areas of employer representation, definition of collective bargaining, extension of agreements, composition of tripartite bodies, public-sector bargaining and independent mediation. Conclusions. Formal conformity with ratified conventions does not guarantee effective social partnership. National reform should follow the objective-criteria, good-faith and open-access requirements of the standards, and should be tested against the supervisory bodies’ interpretation of freedom of association.