Why There Is No Global Referee for Work Inclusion

A gap most people don't notice until they look for it

Almost every major area of cross-border life has a body that sets the rules, keeps the scorecard, and can be pointed to when a country falls short. Trade has the World Trade Organization. Public health has the World Health Organization. Civil aviation has ICAO. Financial stability has the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board. Even something as narrow as postal delivery has the Universal Postal Union, running continuously since 1874.

Work inclusion for disabled people has no equivalent. There is no single international body that sets binding employment standards, audits national performance against them, or publishes a comparable global scorecard the way the OECD's PISA survey does for education. What exists instead is a patchwork of overlapping mandates, each with real value and each structurally unable to do the job on its own.

The patchwork, piece by piece

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD, 2006) is the closest thing to a global framework. It has 194 parties and explicitly recognises the right to work (Article 27). But the CRPD Committee that monitors compliance works mainly by reviewing reports that states write about themselves — due at least every four years — and issuing "concluding observations" and recommendations. It can hear individual complaints only against states that have also joined the Optional Protocol, which has 110 parties. It has no enforcement power, no ability to compel data disclosure, and no budget or mandate to run comparable employment statistics across countries.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) sets relevant conventions — notably C159 on Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (Disabled Persons), 1983 — and collects labour statistics generally. But C159 has been ratified by only 85 of the ILO's 187 member states, ILO supervision relies on the same self-reporting model as the CRPD, and disability employment is one narrow slice of an organisation whose core mandate spans all labour rights, not a dedicated inclusion authority.

The OECD produces genuinely useful comparative analysis — its 2022 report Disability, Work and Inclusion and its country reviews are cited throughout InkludX's own research. But the OECD has 38 members, excludes most of the world, has no enforcement mechanism, and publishes on its own schedule rather than as a continuously maintained public dataset.

The European Union goes furthest of any supranational body: the EU Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021–2030 sets out a programme of flagship initiatives, and the European Accessibility Act carries real legal force. But its writ runs only to EU member states, and a November 2024 European Parliament briefing found that although six of the Strategy's seven flagship initiatives had been implemented, persistent gaps remained in access to jobs — the EU's average disability employment gap was still 21.5 percentage points in 2023. And it has no jurisdiction once you step outside Europe.

National governments run their own definitions of disability, their own benefit systems, their own employment quotas (or none), and their own statistical agencies — each measuring something different, on a different cycle, in a different unit. Norway's NAV data is not built to be compared with Germany's Integrationsamt data, which is not built to be compared with the UK's DWP data. Comparing "disability employment rate" across the countries InkludX currently covers already requires reconciling several different definitions of who counts as disabled and what counts as employed.

Why fragmentation is the default, not an oversight

This isn't a case of an obvious institution nobody has built yet. Employment inclusion sits at the intersection of labour law, health and disability policy, and social security — three domains that are almost everywhere handled by separate ministries domestically, and by separate UN and multilateral agencies internationally (ILO, WHO, UNDP, the CRPD Committee). No single existing body owns the full intersection, and creating a new binding international authority would require the kind of treaty-level consensus that took nearly fifty years to arrive at in trade — from the GATT's signing in 1947 to the WTO's creation in 1995 — for an issue with far less commercial pressure behind it than trade ever had.

The practical result: a Dutch policymaker cannot look up a single trusted source ranking WIA outcomes against Denmark's flexjob system or Sweden's sickness compensation (sjukersättning) on a common scale. A jobseeker with a disability moving between EU countries cannot check one place to see how their rights and support actually differ. A journalist trying to hold a government accountable on disability employment has to hand-assemble data from national statistics offices, Eurostat, the OECD, and NGO reports — sources that rarely agree, and none of which is built for that comparison.

What InkludX is built to do about it

InkludX did not set out to replace the CRPD Committee, the ILO, or the European Commission — no single company can, and the underlying governance gap is a genuine multilateral problem that only real international coordination can ultimately close. What InkludX does is smaller and more immediately useful: it is a working attempt to build, country by country, the comparative layer that no institution currently maintains end to end.

Concretely, that means:

• Standardising country data onto one comparable basis. InkludX's country reports (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway and others) deliberately reconcile national benefit categories, employment definitions, and fiscal accounting onto a common structure, so a reader can compare WIA, flexjob, and sjukersättning outcomes side by side rather than trusting five incompatible headline statistics.
• Aggregating the evidence base, including on interventions with genuinely strong data — Individual Placement and Support chief among them — so policymakers and employers don't have to separately track the 28 randomised controlled trials of IPS themselves.
• Connecting the demand side and the supply side directly — inclusive employers and disabled jobseekers — in the same product, rather than leaving that matching to whichever national job board or NGO happens to operate in a given country.
• Publishing openly, on the premise that a transparent, continuously updated comparison is worth more to accountability than another periodic report that goes stale the year it's published.

None of this substitutes for the binding authority a genuine international body could exert if one existed. But until trade-off politics between labour ministries, health ministries, and social security systems produces the will for that kind of institution — and history suggests that could take decades — the gap has to be filled by whoever is willing to do the unglamorous work of comparison, one country and one dataset at a time. That is the problem InkludX was built to work on.

Sources: UN CRPD (2006), its Optional Protocol and treaty status (UN Treaty Collection); ILO Convention No. 159 (1983) ratification status (NORMLEX); OECD, Disability, Work and Inclusion (2022); European Parliament briefing on the EU Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021–2030 (November 2024); WTO and Universal Postal Union histories; IPS Employment Center evidence summary.