After the Centenary: Historical Research on the ILO and the World of Work
Chair(s): Dorothea Hoehtker (ILO, Switzerland), Eileen Boris (University of Santa Barbara, USA)
Discussant(s): Andrej Slivnik (University of Redlands, USA)
A range of new historical studies and overviews have explored the roots of the present in the context of the ILO's centenary in 2019. These studies offer an interdisciplinary, nuanced, and often critical analysis of the ILO’s role in a larger historical context. They have also opened up and encouraged more research.
The ILO’s now more than 100 years of history as part of the League of Nations and the UN provide a unique perspective on central questions of socio-economic and political analysis: on the one hand, the internationalization of labour issues and the resulting interaction between the national, regional, and global dimensions of debate and policy action; and, on the other hand, the dynamics of continuity and change as many issues have been addressed for more than a century, e.g., forced labour and occupational safety and health, while others, such as environmental impacts, informality, the influence of multinational corporations or rapid technological change, emerged after the Second World War.
While previous research concentrated on the inter-war years, this session will focus entirely on the post-WWII era, providing insights into the complexity of labour issues, the ensuing academic and policy debates, and the political efforts to find solutions in a geo-political constellation that was subject to profound changes. We will workshop several papers, most of them part of a proposed special issue of the International Labour Review on historical research on the ILO and labour issues. The various topics provide a historical perspective on key areas of ILO’s current activities and debates, such as human and labour rights, paid and unpaid care work, safety and health at work, the environment, and vocational training. We will better understand the often-conflicting viewpoints of the ILO’s constituents and the Organisation's space for concrete manoeuvring in a given historical constellation or local context. Such historical research, with an ILO perspective, either focussing on general questions or on a specific country, can enrich today’s policy debates about regulating for decent work by pointing toward what happened and why, possible alternatives, and persistence and change in social thought and governmental practice.
The panellists display the disciplinary openness of historical research. Grounded in archives and printed, visual, and oral sources, historical research draws upon techniques and methods from other disciplines, such as sociology, economics, political science, law, linguistics, and psychology. Conversely, labour law experts, labour economists, and labour relations specialists have often integrated a historical perspective into their work.
Dorothea Hoehtker, Senior researcher and historian at the Research Department of the International Labour Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, will chair the session. She will also discuss her own contribution, which analyzes the ILO’s controversial debates on occupational safety, health, and the environment through its reaction to the 1984 Bhopal chemical accident. The accident drew attention to the specific role of multinational enterprises in developing countries and played a role in the negotiation and adoption of two ILO conventions on major industrial accidents and chemical safety.
Jill Jensen, Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Redlands, USA, who has written extensively on the ILO and is finishing a book on US relations to the ILO over the last century, will provide a historical overview of the ILO’s strategies to adapt to the changing geo-political context of the 1960s and the 1970s.
Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara, historicizes the centrality of care work to the global economy, notable since the COVID-19 pandemic and underscored by the 2024 ILC “Resolution concerning Decent Work and the Care Economy”. She turns to the half-century discussion after WWII in the ILO and the UN on what was first called “women workers with family responsibilities,” then “workers with family responsibilities,” and, by 2000, care work.
Selin Çağatay, affiliated researcher in the international project “ZARAH: Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally” at the Department of Gender Studies and Department of History, Central European University, Vienna, Austria will draw attention to the under-researched area of adult education and vocational training for women and the role of the ILO focusing on the ILO’s vocational training programmes for women in Turkey.
Benjamin Lelis is a PhD student in the General History Department, University of Geneva and also working for the IOM; his project focuses on the international history of maritime labour standards and on the historical dynamics shaping the ILO's Maritime Labour Convention, adopted in 2006, which consolidated and updated the various maritime labour convention adopted since the Interwar period.
The discussant will be Andrej Slivnik from the ILO Social Finance Unit, who is currently preparing for a PhD on the history of social protection in Brazil.
Presentations of the Special Session
A World between Yesterday and Tomorrow: The ILO in the “Global” Decades of the 1960s and 1970s
Jill Jensen
University of Redlands, California, USA
Between 1952 and 1962, ILO membership grew significantly, with the majority of new affiliates from the Global South. At the same time, the International Labor Office personnel increased by more than 60 percent, and soon, the governing body expanded its tripartite membership, allowing more nations a voice and the potential for influence. As smaller states and newly independent nations continued to join, rules that had applied to “non-governing territories,” and even the trappings of an earlier Native Labor Code, came under increased scrutiny. Taking place over the course of UN-sanctioned First and Second Development Decades of the 1960s and 70s, my paper outlines the grave challenges facing the ILO, as new members argued for change. Meanwhile, as leadership shifted at the close of the Morse years, the ILO reached its fiftieth year. With this, significant reviews were underway regarding ILO activities. This “global” era put to the test commitment to ILO principles and values in a divided world.
“The Work that makes all Work Possible”: From Women Workers with Family Responsibilities to the Care Work Economy
Eileen Boris
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
The Covid-19 pandemic underscored the centrality of care work to the global economy in terms of unpaid family labor and the paid labor of child and elder care, health professionals, and domestic workers. This paper turns to the discussion after WWII in the ILO and the UN on what first was called “women workers with family responsibilities,” then “workers with family responsibilities,” and, by 2000, care work. It considers knowledge produced on care and compares policies to allocate women’s labor between the home and market with standard setting for paid counterparts: nurses (Convention 149) and domestics (Convention 189). ILO researchers considered the challenges of giving care in the global South, war zones, and under ecological disaster. Finally in 2024, the ILC adopted a resolution on “Decent Work and the Care Economy” that underscored “an urgent need for action” and offered “guiding principles” in tune with earlier human rights declarations.
The ILO and the Politics of Women’s Vocational Training in Turkey and Internationally, 1950s-1980s
Selin Çağatay
Central European University, Vienna, Austria
This paper concerns the formation and implementation of educational programs for women’s vocational training in Turkey and internationally from the 1950s until the 1980s. At the ILO, women’s vocational training emerged as an agenda item in the 1950s and became a priority issue in the 1960s. This overlapped with the transnationalization of vocational training in Turkey as increased interaction between the state, national and international trade unions, and global governance institutions contributed to the making of these programs. Analyzing four decades of the politics of women’s vocational training in Turkey and internationally with a focus on the role of the ILO, the paper offers insight into how global inequalities and the differential treatment of women’s work in the developing world by international actors on the one hand, and the changing local socio-economic and political landscape on the other, have shaped gendered labour policies in a national context
The Evolution of Pre-employment Requirements for Seafarers: Post WWII Dynamics and the ILO’s Maritime Labour Convention
Benjamin Lelies
IOM&UNGE
The Maritime Labour Convention (MLC), 2006, is hailed as a landmark international treaty, consolidating the 37 maritime labour standards adopted between 1920 and 1996 in one instrument while introducing key innovations. To date, except Leon Finks seminal study on maritime labour, this major field of ILO standard setting remains understudied. Despite its significance, the record of proceedings and committee reports of sessions leading up to the adoption of the MLC negotiations did not revisit the historical debates that formed the regulations that the MLC sought to consolidate. Using the record of proceedings and preparatory reports of the ILC (maritime sessions), this presentation re-examines the historical context in which the first maritime regulations were formed, and what changes in the post-World War II order required changes in these regulations. It looks at three of the four regulations of the MLC’s Title I (Minimum Requirements to Work on a Ship): (1) minimum age, (2) training and qualifications, and (3) recruitment and placement. The presentation concludes that actors—split between developed and developing states, and seafarers and shipowners—alternate between promoting seafarers’ rights and ensuring fair competition. Further, while principles remain constant (such as decent work for seafarers), the regulations which are meant to operationalize them may change more quickly (such as the exact minimum age, specific training requirements, and recruitment procedures).
Changing the Perspective on Working Conditions and the Environment? The 1984 Bhopal Disaster and the ILO
Dorothea Hoehtker
ILO, Geneva, Switzerland
This article contributes to the emerging field of historical research on the ILO’s environmental policies. It focuses on the ILO’s reaction to the chemical accident in Bhopal, India, in 1984 by analyzing its impact on the ILO’s debate on the environment and working conditions in the 1980s and 1990s. The accident intensified this debate because it triggered criticism of multinational’s disregard for the safety and health of workers and the environment in developing countries. The ILO, as a tripartite organization with a limited influence on multinational enterprises, depoliticized the accident and proposed preventive technical solutions focusing on chemical safety. Although controversial, the connection between protecting workers’ health and safety and protecting the general environment was recognized and eventually reflected in several ILO Conventions in the 1980s and early 1990s.
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