The International Labor Organization: A Century of Labor Diplomacy

By DAVE SIMCOX

In 1919 President Woodrow Wilson and leaders of nearly 50 other nations gathered in Paris to negotiate a formal end to the World War I – what would become the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations.

Concerned by the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia and radicalized labor strife elsewhere, leaders of major industrial nations sought to improve the labor conditions and economic security of the world’s working people under pluralistic, democratic and free-market principles.  The result was the International Labor Organization (ILO).

 ILO’s watchwords, “Labor is not a commodity” and “poverty anywhere in a threat to prosperity everywhere,” were favorite themes of American Federation of Labor patriarch Samuel Gompers, a major actor at the 1919 negotiations.

Now, a century later the ILO survives as the UN’s oldest intergovernmental human rights body and the only one that is tripartite.  It brings together delegates from government, employers and unions to affirm and codify international labor standards such as freedom of association, collective bargaining, and an end to the evils of child labor, forced labor, and employment discrimination.

ILO in its first century has succeeded as the world’s labor standards-setter,   producing over 180 Covenants and 200 sets of recommendations on a range of labor, social security, union rights, equality, fair pay, and workplace health and safety practices. 

But ILO it is not an enforcement agency.  It cannot force member nations to sign its conventions or comply with them if they do.  It can criticize, shame, or even censure errant countries, but not sanction them. ILO monitors and evaluates worldwide labor conditions through research and reporting requirements on member states. Special committees examine “representations” (complaints) against governments by trade unions and employer groups, or accusations of non-compliance among member nations themselves. 

With decolonization, the 48 founding nations of ILO have become 187, many of them undeveloped with mostly informal economies and weak or non-existent labor protections and institutions.

In its first 100 years ILO has had to adjust and respond to vast changes in the world of work:  recession in the 30’s, World War II, feminism, decolonization, cold war, and globalization. Other changes have been the gig economy and homework, robotics, and multi-national supply chains. Shifts within the U.S. have been the continuing decline of organized labor’s share of the U.S. work force and the rise of social media, creating new, less formal ways for ad hoc worker groups to present grievances and pressure employers.

The rapid expansion of world trade renewed interest in ILO members for raising labor standards in newly competitive export nations.  Abuses such as child, labor, forced labor and unsafe workplaces cannot be simply accepted as “comparative advantages.” ILO labor standards are a common rule of thumbfor nearly all nations and have been at times incorporated by nations or trading blocs into their international trade agreements.    

Under the pro-labor FDR administration, the U.S. finally joined ILO in 1934. It now provides more than 20 percent of its budget.  Since the 1950’s, the U.S. has led in promoting and supporting  ILO’s technical assistance programs as another way of aiding low income countries to move toward ILO standards.    

In more recent decades the ILO has given priority to the need of nearly half the globe’s underemployed labor force for jobs.  Not just any jobs, but what ILO calls “decent work:”  jobs in the formal economy where workers can count on  some job security with adequate wages, safety, equal treatment, a voice in their conditions, and basic social protection against unemployment, old age and disability.  

ILO also works to spur job creation through technical assistance for skills training, efficient labor administration, employment exchanges and promotion of co-operatives and micro-businesses

But over the years the U.S. commitment to ILO’s basic goals has waxed and waned with the priorities in Washington.  The U.S. spurned membership until 1934 – a time of change when FDR’s “New Deal” was pushing through innovative, labor-friendly legislation: the Fair Labor Standards, National Labor Relations and Social Security Acts, some of their content reflecting ILO research, conventions and recommendations.

Disappointing is that in the 85 years since joining the U.S. has ratified only 14 of the more than 180 conventions, far fewer than those accepted by other major industrial nations and by our neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

Most puzzling for fellow ILO leaders and member nations is U.S. ratification of only two of the eight conventions with high human rights content that ILO has designated as “core.” Those disregarded conventions affirm such human rights as freedom of association, right to organize and bargain collectively, equal remuneration, and non-discrimination.  Sadly, America’s abstention here matches its refusal so far to ratify six of the UN’s nine “core” human rights conventions.

Also consistently ignored by the U.S. are special conventions for the protection of highly vulnerable workers – women, minorities, migrants, older workers, domestics, indigenous and tribal people, and other workers often targeted for human trafficking.

The road of any ILO convention to Senate ratification is arduous.   The tripartite character of U.S. government screening committees on ILO makes its considerations intensely adversarial and easily deadlocked.   The several states, with labor legislation of their own, also can object to new federal commitments on labor. Powerful cabinet level agencies forming the President’s Committee on ILO--  State, Labor, Commerce and National Security Council -- must agree whether to  recommend that the President should seek Senate approval at all of individual conventions.  Four ILO conventions are among the some 45 treaties now backed up for years in the Senate’s in-box, one of them going back to 1949.

The U.S. could gain more confidence among its ILO partner nations, uphold human rights and give hope and good example to developing nations by moving on a least some of the buried “core” conventions during this ILO centenary year.  

David Simcox, a State Department retiree, is a former labor attache and active in the United Nations Association, Kentucky Chapter.