Various international conventions (such as the ICCPR and the ICESCR) recognise the right of employees to form a union, to partake in collective bargaining and to strike. All of these conventions state that these rights can be restricted by law. Different Member States have interpreted this in vastly different ways, leading to very different expressions of these rights between various Member States. The goal of this issue is to harmonise these legal restrictions, and to formulate some common principles on the basis of which restrictions on the rights of workers are permissible.
