This year marks the 50th anniversary of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. To celebrate this milestone, TUAC is launching a series of webinars and articles exploring the Guidelines’ origins, evolution and future. The first webinar will feature Stephen Pursey, who chaired the TUAC Working Group on MNEs in 1976, and John Evans, General Secretary during four of the six revisions of the Guidelines.
Register here for the first webinar on 24 March 2026 at 1pm CET.
The Guidelines are an international framework for ensuring MNEs operate with respect for human rights, labour rights and the environment. Their origins lie in the post-Second World War period, when the need for economic cooperation and stability led to the creation of institutions including the UN, the European Economic Community and the OECD. Yet the Cold War constrained international cooperation on regulating multinational corporations. Meanwhile, MNEs rapidly expanded their supply chains and foreign direct investment, deepening the marginalisation of the Global South.
By the 1970s, Global South demands for change had become impossible to ignore. The 1974 UN Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order laid bare the injustice of existing arrangements. Developing countries demanded trade, not aid. Led by the Group of 77, they pushed for a legally binding, comprehensive and multilateral UN Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations to address detrimental impacts of MNE activities in their countries.
This put direct pressure on the OECD, whose members were the principal home countries of MNEs and had already established investment protection frameworks among themselves, notably the 1961 Code of Liberalisation of Capital Movements. Trade unions were central to that pressure. TUAC and its affiliates – national trade union centres and partner unions worldwide – insisted that governments could not continue to liberalise investment without legitimising the role of MNEs through corresponding rules on corporate conduct – driven by concerns about their bargaining positions in international production networks and likely decrease in job creation in home countries.
The result was the 1976 OECD Declaration on International Investment and Multinational Enterprises, which contained the Guidelines’ recommendations on responsible business conduct by governments to MNEs.
Over five decades, TUAC and its affiliates have actively used the Guidelines to hold MNEs to account – and in doing so, have identified gaps that drove six major revisions. These range from the 1979 introduction of a requirement to establish National Contact Points to promote the Guidelines and receive grievances, to the 2000 implementation procedures, which significantly strengthened the NCP grievance mechanism, as well as the development of new policy tools such as sectoral due diligence guidance. The Guidelines have also served as a foundation for other international and national instruments regulating corporate behaviour. As the Guidelines turn 50, TUAC urges the OECD to harness the momentum of this anniversary to ensure coherent and binding implementation – creating a genuine level playing field for MNEs across home and host countries that protects the interests of workers and their unions.
