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The re-issuance of Georges Scelle’s seminal L’organisation international du travail et le BIT (The International Labor Organization and the International Labor Office) nearly a century after its initial publication provides a new and timely look at early work on the challenge of creating global labor standards.
Published in 1930, Scelle’s history of the ILO in its first decade of operation contains time-capsule treasures of international, social, and labor issues of the time. Here is the United States, hosting the 1919 founding conference in Washington but refusing to join the ILO as isolationism took hold of American international policy (the United States would join in 1934 under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.) Here are France and Britain and the Netherlands, moving workers’ newly-won footholds in domestic labor legislation and social insurance to an international plane. Here is growing rivalry between the communist First International and the socialist Second International.
Here is defeated Germany, now the Weimar republic, striving to rejoin and play a role in the international community. Here is the USSR renouncing the ILO as a bourgeois institution that blunts class struggle.
Here is fascist Italy inside the ILO with its government-controlled unions.
Here is the colonial question, and the problem of massive postwar migration. Here are China as a new republic, and India with Mahatma Gandhi, who had been a labor lawyer for twenty years in South Africa, leading an independence movement.
With hindsight we know, as Scelle could not, just how fraught these issues were – precursors to the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, World War II, decolonization, the Cold War, developing country dictatorships (Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina, Chile . . .) Neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus, and other historical landmarks that came later in the twentieth century. Still, Scelle’s work was prescient. Throughout the course of events and trends, the same demands for workers’ rights and fair labor standards in the global economy recounted by Scelle in 1930 persist into today.
