ILO Convention 190 Explained: 4 Employer Duties for Psychosocial Risk

ILO Convention 190 gives organizations a practical frame for preventing violence and harassment at work, including behavior that creates physical, psychological, sexual, or economic harm. It matters because psychosocial risk is often treated as a policy topic even when the real exposure sits in workload, power, reporting, and daily work design.

ILO Convention 190 is the International Labour Organization treaty that recognizes every worker's right to a world of work free from violence and harassment. Adopted in 2019 and in force since 2021, it covers unacceptable behaviors and practices that cause or are likely to cause physical, psychological, sexual, or economic harm, including gender-based violence and harassment.

1. What does ILO Convention 190 define?

ILO Convention 190 defines violence and harassment as a range of unacceptable behaviors and practices, or threats of them, that aim at, result in, or are likely to result in physical, psychological, sexual, or economic harm. The definition is broad because harm can arise from a single serious event or from repeated conduct that becomes normalized.

The definition is wider than a narrow incident test. It can include threats, bullying, sexual harassment, abuse of authority, discriminatory conduct, and patterns that make a person reasonably expect harm. The treaty also recognizes gender-based violence and harassment, which includes conduct directed at people because of sex or gender or that affects one gender disproportionately.

The International Labour Organization's overview of violence and harassment at work explains why prevention must address both individual conduct and the conditions that allow harmful conduct to persist. That distinction helps EHS and HR teams avoid treating every complaint as an isolated personality conflict.

2. When does the convention apply?

Convention 190 applies across the world of work, not only inside a fixed workplace. Its relevance can extend to work-related travel, training, commuting where national law provides, employer-provided accommodation, digital communication, and events connected with work, because the exposure can continue when the employee leaves the site.

This scope changes how an employer maps risk. A warehouse may have a formal conduct policy while delivery routes, customer locations, messaging platforms, hotels, and after-hours events remain outside the practical review. A policy that covers only the office misses the places where authority, isolation, customer pressure, and alcohol-related conduct can combine.

The ILO's official text of Convention 190 is the right reference when legal teams need to compare national implementation with the treaty's scope. Employers should not assume that a local policy is complete merely because it names the facility, employee, and manager.

3. Duty one is to identify the hazards

The first employer duty is to identify violence and harassment hazards as part of occupational safety and health risk management. A useful assessment examines work organization, power relationships, customer contact, isolation, workload, conflict, discrimination, and the settings in which people work or communicate.

Risk identification becomes credible when it asks how work is designed rather than only whether employees have read a code of conduct. A night shift with one isolated worker, a sales role with aggressive customer targets, and a supervisor who controls overtime can create different psychosocial pathways to harm.

Use the same discipline applied to other hazards. Define the exposed group, the initiating condition, the possible harm, the existing controls, and the evidence that would show whether the controls work. A psychosocial risk register review is useful when the organization needs to see which work-design hazards remain invisible in a general employee-relations log.

4. Duty two is to prevent and control the risk

The second employer duty is to prevent violence and harassment through appropriate measures, which means changing exposure conditions rather than relying only on awareness training. Controls can include clearer authority, staffing changes, supervision, reporting routes, physical security, workload limits, and consequences that are applied consistently.

Training has a place, although training alone cannot repair a work system that rewards intimidation or makes reporting costly. If a manager can threaten shifts without review, a respectful-work module does not remove the power imbalance. If a team has impossible deadlines and no recovery time, a resilience workshop does not remove the organizational stressor.

Andreza Araujo's safety-culture work is relevant here because prevention becomes real when leadership decisions change the conditions under which people must perform. Her book Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice treats culture as something visible in choices, routines, and consequences, not as a statement displayed on a wall.

5. Duty three is to provide a safe response route

The third employer duty is to provide safe, fair, and effective mechanisms for reporting and resolving violence and harassment. A route is not safe when the person who reports must confront the alleged perpetrator, predict the manager's reaction, or accept retaliation as the price of being heard.

Organizations should offer more than one reporting path, define confidentiality limits honestly, and state how urgent danger will be handled. The process should distinguish immediate protection from a later fact-finding review, because a complaint can require a change to schedule, supervision, access, or contact before the investigation is complete.

Leaders should also measure response quality. Useful signals include time to acknowledge a concern, time to establish protection, whether the reporter receives an explanation of next steps, and whether repeated concerns point to a work-design problem. A workload and role-clarity review can reveal why a conflict keeps returning after individual mediation.

6. Duty four is to protect people from retaliation

The fourth employer duty is to protect complainants, witnesses, and other people involved in a report from retaliation. Protection must cover formal punishment and quieter forms of pressure, such as lost shifts, exclusion from opportunities, hostile scheduling, reputation attacks, or instructions to stop raising concerns.

Retaliation risk is often underestimated because it rarely appears as a written order. It can emerge through discretionary decisions that become difficult to challenge. For that reason, the review should compare treatment before and after a report, identify who controls the relevant decisions, and create a route for escalating concerns about the response itself.

The ILO's Recommendation 206 guidance complements Convention 190 by pointing organizations toward practical prevention, protection, enforcement, and remedy measures. The operating test is simple to state but demanding to prove: can a person raise a concern without losing safety, dignity, or fair access to work?

7. How should employers use Convention 190 in practice?

Employers should use Convention 190 as a design and assurance reference, then translate it into a small set of accountable decisions. The strongest implementation connects hazard identification, prevention controls, reporting, investigation, non-retaliation, and leadership review instead of leaving each activity in a separate policy owner.

Start with one operating population where the exposure is visible, such as lone workers, healthcare staff, customer-facing teams, or remote employees who receive work messages outside scheduled hours. Map the work conditions, identify the decision owner, test the reporting route, and verify whether the response changes the exposure rather than only documenting it.

Organizations that already manage psychosocial risk can connect Convention 190 to their existing review rhythm. The comparison of workload, role ambiguity, and toxic leadership helps leaders decide whether the next action belongs in work design, role clarity, or leadership accountability.

What Convention 190 does not replace

Convention 190 does not replace national law, collective agreements, safeguarding procedures, occupational health support, or fair investigation practice. It provides an international framework, while the employer still has to determine the competent route, legal duty, evidence standard, and protection needed in the jurisdiction where the work occurs.

That boundary matters because a treaty reference can become another compliance label if nobody assigns the next decision. Legal counsel should map applicable law, EHS should integrate the hazard into risk management, HR should maintain a credible response process, and senior leaders should review whether controls reduce exposure for the people who carry it.

ILO Convention 190 is therefore best understood as a prevention architecture. It makes violence and harassment visible as occupational risks, broadens the places where employers must look, and gives leaders a defensible basis for connecting work design with dignity, health, and safety.