[Excerpt] Labour legislation to address working conditions can cover an array of subjects that affect the employment relationship and workers’ well-being in the workplace. This report will focus on legislation regarding three important elements: working time (Chapter 1), maternity protection (Chapter 2), and minimum wages (Chapter 3). The material used in this study will be drawn predominantly from the ILO Working Conditions Laws Database, which was most recently updated in 2011-2012 (see Box 1 below). Given that the information in the database covers a vast amount of legal information from over 150 countries, this report will focus on selected essential provisions. The framework for presenting the national legislative information in this publication is based on the structure of the relevant ILO Conventions and Recommendations for each subject, which is meant to help provide a simple method for presentation and comparison.
This report builds upon previous editions produced in 2010 and 2008. The reports of 2008 and 2010, which used a similar framework to present the material, were based mainly on regions of the world. However, while the 2008 and 2010 reports disaggregated industrialised countries and CIS and Eastern European countries in Europe, for the 2012 edition a framework is adopted that better reflects the data contained in the Working Conditions Law Database and the working conditions legislation that exists in different regions of the world. Thus, while in the information in all other regions is ordered the same manner, the industrialised countries have been placed in the appropriate regions and the Eastern European countries have been classified with Europe and CIS countries
