Economic globalisation has affected the bargaining power of workers. Greater mobility of goods and capital, restructuring of enterprises and production, intensified international competition and neo-liberal policies are part of the new setting. There are also several private, public and multistakeholder initiatives to promote labour standards which are at present mostly fragmented and self-regulatory. The evolving global labour and employment relations system is a multi-layer system with both national and international aspects. It is characterised with the expansion of an international normative regime and an international governance mechanism that incorporate setting objectives and rules and their promotion and eventually their enforcement. The challenge is to build up the global governance institutions that can combine expertise and efficiency associated with the ideal type of bureaucracy with representative democratic decisionmaking and control. This model relies on tripartite deliberation and debate for concept development, frame alignment and consensus building at the international level.