All these provisions show how the ILO has addressed issues related to violence and harassment at work throughout the past decades (Chappell and Di Martino 2006; ILO 2017a; Trebilcock 2019). However, it has done so in a fragmented manner, protecting only certain groups and only from certain manifestations of violent and harassing behaviours. There was a need for a comprehensive instrument that could cover all instances of violence and harassment for all workers and other persons in the world of work, and in 2015, the ILO Governing Body decided that this gap needed to be filled. After extensive dialogue at the national, regional and international levels (summarized in figure 1), Convention No. 190 and Recommendation No. 206 were finally adopted at the 108th Session of the International Labour Conference (2019) by an overwhelming majority of ILO tripartite constituents (ILO 2016a; 2016b; 2017a; 2018a; 2018b; 2019b; 2019d). 4 As a binding international treaty, Convention No. 190 lays down the basic principles to be implemented by ratifying countries. Recommendation No. 206 accompanies Convention No. 190 by providing more detailed – although non-binding – guidance on how Convention No. 190 could be applied (ILO 2019a).
4 For the final record vote on Convention No. 190 and Recommendation No. 206, see ILO 2019c; 2019d.