International Labour Organization (ILO)

Coming in from the Cold

Steve Hughes, Nigel Haworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415353830
• eBook ISBN: 9781134259878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The International Labour Organization (ILO) is broadening its agenda and carving out a role as a key player in global economic policy-making, and this volume provides a succinct and comprehensive guide to this important organization.

By charting the history and development of the ILO and examining its key functions and structure the authors offer a clear and detailed account of its work, and provide an important discussion of the current criticisms and debates that surround the organization. The work moves on to discuss the position that the ILO takes in our understanding of global governance and seeks to evaluate the impact of emerging issues such as the global economic crisis, and critically examines the future direction of the organization.

This fresh and accessible account of the International Labour Organization provides an excellent understanding of its purpose and structure and will be of interest to all students of international politics, international organizations and international political economy.

1 A brief history of the ILO

The idea of an international organization dedicated to developing and regulating international agreements on labor protection arose from a challenging mix of social, political and economic unrest following the end of the First World War. The movement for international labor legislation began gathering momentum when the humanitarian concerns of Victorian and European philanthropists such as Robert Owen and Daniel Le Grand were overtaken by the potential for working-class revolution and the problem of international competition. Faced with the threat of new and aggressive competitors in traditional overseas markets, and the increasing strength of organized labor, which now took a global as well as national dimension with the birth of the first Internationals, state legislators, working with civil society interest groups, began examining ways in which social justice could be promoted. Debate considered the best way to do this, either through international treaty or private agreements between “progressive” manufacturers. The outcome of the debate was support for the development of some form of international agreement, subsequently translated into Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles 1919 and the birth of the ILO.

The ILO served the political, economic and humanitarian interests of countries desperate for peace following the savagery of the First World War, and its development has been driven by the same mix of interests ever since. The ILO's unique tripartite decision-making apparatus has served it well and helps explain its longevity. In the ILO context, tripartism means a constitutional arrangement in which member states are represented in ILO activities by three parties (government, employers and trade unions). However, if tripartism is a success, the complex bureaucracy that it requires has at times made the ILO a cumbersome and remote organization for the very people it was set up to protect.

In this chapter, we map the history of the ILO, focusing in part on the leadership and activities of successive directors-general, most of whom have played an influential and lasting role in the ILO's development (see Table 1.1). Our starting point is the immediate post-World War I period when the ILO was first led by the Frenchman, Albert Thomas. We develop our analysis through the actions of successive ILO Directors-General up until the recent tenures of Belgium's Michael Hansenne and Chile's Juan Somavia. Here we are necessarily brief as the rest of the book is largely dedicated to the policy initiatives introduced by Hansenne and Somavia.

The struggle for institutional life

Albert Thomas was elected the first director of the ILO on the basis of his knowledge and experience of the working class and the international labor movement. This experience, gleaned from his years as a socialist politician and wartime minister, was in contrast to the British civil service background of his rival for the directorship, Harold Butler.¹ This experience helped him to procure the vote of the Workers' Group and develop an early but clear vision of the ILO's role. For Thomas, the purpose of international discussion on labor issues was to improve legislative protection for labor. This would be achieved not only by understanding better the forms of labor legislation in different countries but also by understanding how these forms were influenced by the impacts of international trade and competition.

For Thomas, a key task for the ILO was to persuade governments, employers and workers alike that there was always an international dimension to the construction of national labor standards, a dimension that drew on a complex mix of humanitarian, political and economic concerns. It was to be understood as a dynamic process requiring dynamic responses. However, Thomas faced some formidable obstacles to realizing his grand vision. Restricted to a strict interpretation of the articles of the Paris Peace Treaty, the ILO ran the danger of becoming a bureaucratic institution with no real authority and of diminishing relevance in a world still nervously coming to terms with changes wrought by war and revolution.

Table 1.1 Directors-general of the ILO

Director-general	Country of origin	Period in office
Albert Thomas	France	1919–1932
Harold Butler	United Kingdom	1932–1938
John G. Winant	United States	1939–1941
Edward Phelan	Ireland	1941–1948
David A. Morse	United States	1948–1970
C. Wilfred Jenks	United Kingdom	1970–1973
Francis Blanchard	France	1974–1989
Michel Hansenne	Belgium	1989–1999
Juan Somavia	Chile	1999 to date

The First World War had brought the issue of labor legislation to the forefront of national and international debate. Public opinion, prompted by social and political unrest and the threat of further war, had compelled governments to take up labor issues in their international conferences. Thomas argued that workers of the post-war world wanted two fundamental things: stability in daily life and security against the threat of war. From this, he conceived for the ILO a dual role; first, to lessen the tension within nations and, second, to lessen the tension between nations. To achieve this, he had to construct an organization that utilized Article XIII of the Treaty to its fullest effect. This involved moving beyond the establishment of humane conditions of work and the collection of information on the condition of labor, to the promotion and establishment of political, economic and moral rights for the individual, a doctrine which Thomas believed could give to the ILO both unity and identity.² His was an idealism combined with a cold recognition that a failure to take a proactive approach to fulfilling worker interests would result in the political isolation of the ILO and its abandonment, not only by workers, but also by employers and governments, already skeptical of its role and achievements. For Thomas, the ILO was an organization in which the pursuit of peace through social justice required the projection of worker needs into the realm of international relations.

It was a high risk strategy. For it to succeed it needed two conditions to be fulfilled: the continuing support of workers and increased support from countries beyond Europe. Thomas knew that organized workers were still widely seen as a threat to political stability by politicians, who had fresh in their minds the Bolshevik revolution and its promotion of proletarian power. With the support of the reformed International Trade Union Federation, representing some 27 million workers and dominating labor representation on the ILO Governing Body, Thomas was confident of success in relation to the first condition. However, gaining the support of countries outside Europe was in many respects a more politically complex task. The Governing Body of the ILO was dominated by the European powers. As India and South Africa protested the Eurocentric makeup of the Governing Body, moving a resolution to include more countries from outside of Europe, it was clear to both Thomas and his deputy, Butler, that the world was changing and the ILO had to change with it. The post-war European economies were being increasingly challenged by the industrial growth of the United States and Japan, two economies whose burgeoning presence in international affairs seemed to symbolize the decline of the European powers. To survive, the ILO had to distance itself from this decline and demonstrate the global relevance of its activities.

The ILO in the inter-war period

In 1932, the executive leadership of the ILO changed following the sudden death of Albert Thomas. His successor, Harold Butler, was already sensitive to the new currents that were shaping the world.³ While entry of the United States into the ILO remained the key objective of Butler's tenure, he remained committed to ensuring that the ILO remained relevant to smaller nations beyond Europe.

The World Economic Conference, convened in 1933 to discuss the global depression and reach some international agreement on how to revive the ailing world economy, was a failure. Proposals for the restoration of a stable international monetary standard were rejected by the United States. Thus, with little prospect of stable exchange rate arrangements, other questions requiring international agreement could not be addressed. For many, the conference seemed to demonstrate that attempts to solve the economic crisis through international co-operation were condemned to failure. The world political situation was also deteriorating. In March 1933, the National Socialist Party led by the new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, won the German elections, having mobilized popular resentment against the peace treaty and, by June, Germany had stopped paying her foreign debts. In Italy, the National Fascist Party under Benito Mussolini began giving greater prominence to arms expenditure and military conquest. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, Japanese expansionism led to war with China in Manchuria.

The failure of the League of Nations to broker any solutions in the deteriorating global situation rendered it increasingly impotent, and morbid disillusionment began to color its activities. However, while the Great Depression and the reaction of the international community to it had a negative, and ultimately terminal, effect on the League of Nations, it had the opposite effect on the ILO. The autonomy and freedom of action which the ILO developed within the League system protected it from the political decline of its parent organization. During the Depression and in light of the League's decision to impose a general policy of austerity, relations between the two organizations became particularly tense. The determination of Albert Thomas to develop independent and direct channels of communication with government, employer and trade union representatives in member countries led to the political and functional autonomy of the ILO becoming “de facto an inviolable principle.”⁴ Moreover, as the League declined, the political importance of the ILO increased as the United States, and soon afterwards the Soviet Union, became members in 1934.

Concerns over the linkage between the League and the ILO had been a major factor in the United States' reluctance to become a member of the ILO.⁵ As a result, between 1919 and 1934, US policy towards the ILO remained subordinated to broader US policy on the League of Nations. Two factors played an influential part in changing this position; the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the US presidency in 1932, and the impact of the Depression on the US economy. The fact that the United States was no more immune to the effects of the Depression than other countries came as a shock to a nation which had grown prosperous and inward-looking. A few years earlier, and on the eve of the Great Crash of 1929, President Coolidge told the legislators and people of the United States that they could “regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.”⁶ By 1933, GNP in the United States was almost one-third less than in 1929, its credit and banking system required emergency legislation to prevent its collapse, and one in every four of its labor force was out of work. It was also the year the United States sent its first delegation to the International Labour Conference.⁷

The dramatic downturn in domestic economic activity and its impact upon jobs prompted the Roosevelt administration to examine seriously the question of ILO membership. Important in this decision was the impact of competition on the increasingly precarious US trade position. The championing of the ILO was led by Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins,⁸ and stemmed from a fear that a rise in US labor standards would result in a proportional rise in its labor costs and result in a “competitive trade disadvantage and an intensification of an already disastrous unemployment problem.”⁹ Perkins recognized that the years of self-imposed isolationism had left the United States lacking in information on the legislative activities of other economies struggling with the Depression, and that the ILO was a primary source of that information.

For Butler, entry of the United States into the ILO had become a matter of some urgency. The contraction of domestic economic activity not only had a fundamental impact upon the world economy but also on the convention-setting activities of the ILO. Ratifications, which had peaked at 79 in 1928–29, began a downward spiral to 28 by the end of 1933.¹⁰ For an organization whose raison d'être at that point was the setting of international labor standards, the decline was a cause for real concern. The Depression was an obvious factor in this decline. Another was the increasing reluctance of member states to ratify new conventions due to the non-participation of important competitors such as the United States and the Soviet Union.

A shift in the center of gravity: the importance of US membership and involvement

Butler believed that unemployment was the worst of all social evils. He consistently emphasized in his annual reports to the International Labour Conference that economic and financial policy was inseparable from social policy. Any search for a solution to mass unemployment and social injustice could not be conducted in isolation from other policies. It was as essential to examine the social implications of financial and economic policy as it was to consider the financial and economic implications of social policy.

Butler's vision of the general political scene was acute, as was his ability to see the dangers and opportunities that it presented.¹¹ This was reflected in Butler's desire to demonstrate to the United States that the ILO was a “completely independent body that formulated its own policies and administered its affairs without League interference or control.”¹² Butler was also becoming increasingly frustrated at the dominance of European countries in the activities of the ILO and the League of Nations.¹³ In particular, he was aware that the United States would be reluctant to take the ILO seriously until a more representative group of countries were on its Governing Body.¹⁴ At a time when the standard-setting activities of the ILO were falling and countries were calling into question the organization's relevance, fostering the interests of non-European states became critical.

To shift its center of gravity away from Europe and to construct a more representative Governing Body was vital for the ILO's long-term survival. The Depression seemed only to underline the decay of the European powers and with it the necessity to change the focus of the ILO. It had also brought a marked increase in anti-imperialist activity, prompted by the collapse in commodity prices on which the colonial economies depended and the beginning of indigenous political and social discontent directed against European states which could no longer sustain empires “imbued with an infinite complexity of producer interests.”¹⁵ This discontent was fed by the rise of alternatives to the political and economic orthodoxies of the imperialist powers. At a time when the USSR appeared immune to the Depression and kept its workers free from the unemployment lines which grew in its wake, communism offered one alternative. Another was fascism. Its German version (National Socialism) drew from an intellectual tradition in Germany hostile to the orthodoxy of economic liberalism, and offered an apparatus of government ruthlessly determined to eradicate unemployment at all costs.

Both models (communism and fascism) appeared to respond to the Depression successfully, underlining their appeal as alternatives to the failed traditional liberal capitalist policies of the European powers. They also added further to the corrosion already spreading through the foundations of the political institutions and intellectual values of nineteenth century liberal bourgeois society.^16...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The International Labour Organization (ILO)
• Routledge Global Institutions
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedications
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 A brief history of the ILO
• 2 Structure and organization of the ILO
• 3 The ILO and globalization
• 4 The Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work: a new approach to labor standards?
• 5 The ILO and the WTO: the tortuous case of the Social Clause
• 6 Decent Work, Fair Globalisation and strategic planning: Somavia's ILO
• 7 The ILO at work in the 2007 global economic crisis
• 8 Concluding thoughts: whither the ILO?
• Select bibliography
• Notes
• Index