Globalizing Social Rights

The International Labour Organization and Beyond

S. Kott, J. Droux, S. Kott, J. Droux

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137291967
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on the case of the ILO, both as an actor and driver of international social policy, this collection explores the internationalization process of social rights, in a number of national and international contexts. This collection brings together a variety of new scholarship by a group of highly qualified and internationally renowned scholars.

Part 1
Transnational Networks and Milieus around the ILO

1

Social and Political Networks and the Creation of the ILO: The Role of British Actors

Olga Hidalgo-Weber¹

Introduction

The 1919 Peace Conference in Paris which set up the International Labour Organization (ILO) under Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles has primarily been studied in terms of the historiography of international relations. For this ‘realist’ school it was the states constituting the major powers which decided on the various peace plans, and even if these historians attempt to show the role played by the political leaders of each of the nations present, their focus remains primarily on the relations between states.²

This chapter moves away from this traditional approach in order to show that, as far as the social aspects of the peace treaties were concerned, individual actors and networks played a crucial role in shaping the international organization that was to be responsible for developing an international social policy.

According to witnesses from the period who were involved in the work of the commission which created the ILO, the British were its main craftsmen.³ We intend to discuss this claim in order to demonstrate that the role ascribed to the British is often overstated and is out of step with the state of their social legislation at the time. By identifying which British actors within the ‘Great Britain’ group were responsible for the social aspects of the peace, and how much leeway they had, we will show that these Britons were at the heart of a number of transnational networks, and that it was actually these networks which enabled the ILO to be set up.⁴ We thus hope to prove that it was the British actors’ ability to act as a sounding board for transnational social ideas at the time which gave them such an important role. Examining how the British discussed the issues and came up with ideas even before the official work of the Peace Conference began will identify the various influential networks of the period in the international social field: principally the socialist movements within the Second International and the social reformists grouped together in the International Association for Labour Legislation (IALL).

Furthermore, while we will discuss the actual contribution which the British made to the construction of the ILO, we also propose to disentangle the different concerns of the actors involved in order to determine whether it was international social influences or national concerns which were uppermost in British minds, and this will certainly also shed light on the tensions between the various protagonists and the shape of the final outcome. Lastly, we will examine various issues negotiated within the Commission on International Labour Legislation in Paris in order to identify the skills and knowledge used by the British in 1919 to shape an organization that would serve their many interests, especially trade and their Empire.

The post-war social situation in Great Britain

The First World War brought a number of changes to industrial relations in Great Britain resulting in a considerably stronger position for workers, increased trade union membership and growing state interventionism in the economic field.⁵ Throughout the war one of the British government’s chief concerns was to maintain good labour relations in order to prevent disruption to industrial production. From 1916 David Lloyd George led a coalition government, and to avoid being hostage to the Conservatives he attempted to secure the support of the unions and called on members of the Labour Party to join his government, along the lines of the ‘sacred union’ policies adopted by other countries during the war.⁶ It was in this same spirit of industrial conciliation that he also decided to set up a Ministry of Labour in late 1916,⁷ which was responsible for advising the War Cabinet on the political aspects of the labour question.⁸ Lloyd George played a vitally important role in these changes. However, despite his talents as an industrial negotiator, he was also associated with the sort of extraordinary measures taken in times of war which alienated most of the trade unions, and on a political level the Labour movement always mistrusted him.⁹

On the domestic front the Ministry for Reconstruction, set up in 1917, started work on social projects for the post-war period, creating a number of sub-committees to come up with recommendations on health, education, job security and housing policy in particular. However, these projects fairly soon came up against the reality of the economic situation, which deteriorated in the summer of 1919, and the will of the parliamentary majority. There were two opposing views of the post-war situation: experts like William Beveridge¹⁰ who wanted to use the experience gained in the war as a basis for planning the reconstruction work clashed with more conservative elements in the Lloyd George coalition. These more conservative elements joined forces with industrialists to try to force the dismantling of state controls introduced during the war, their main aim being a return to laissez-faire economics. Thus, although the working class won certain gains during the war – often as a result of strike action as much as of government choice – there was, by contrast with the Second World War, no attempt to develop a planned social policy.¹¹

In 1919, then, the British mainly had social legislation adopted by the Liberal government before the war, together with reforms introduced during the war such as the 1918 Fisher Education Act, but no real project or overall social model to disseminate. It was therefore other factors which explained the government’s involvement in the creation of an institution that could potentially result in an international social policy. The government was initially driven down this route by pressure from the unions and by the many promises which Lloyd George had made to the labour movement during the war. Then, by the end of the war, the League of Nations movement had gained considerable influence in Great Britain, and campaigns by the League of Nations Union and the labour movement had won the backing of a number of MPs, which encouraged the government to adopt a position on the possible creation of a league of nations and the setting up of an international organization responsible for drawing up social policy standards.¹² For the Prime Minister and for internationalist Liberals, the idea of having international legislation answered their concerns about social protection. The Conservatives in the government fairly quickly realized that setting up such an organization would usefully serve the country’s economic interests by making competing nations subject to the same social rules, and would channel the workers’ aspirations. In reality the government was scared by the spectre of Bolshevism hanging over Europe, which was at its height in early 1919, and was endeavouring to contain the spread of revolution.¹³ Lastly, involvement in these international organizations gave a victorious Great Britain and its Empire another opportunity to shine on the international stage. There were three main ways in which British imperialism¹⁴ would manifest itself in the social field in 1919: first, the British would draw on the transnational networks and absorb their ideas; second, in their approach to the work of the Peace Conference they behaved like men from a victorious nation, seeking to direct the discussions or else to impose a consensus; and third, they basically wanted to establish an organization that would satisfy workers’ demands at very little cost, while still enabling Britain to appear the champion of the international social cause.

British actors and post-war social projects

During the First World War London was a city of refuge for exiles and a platform for ideas. A number of trade union and socialist conferences were held in Britain, particularly the Leeds Conference in July 1916, which brought together affiliated unions from the Entente countries and laid the foundations for an international social policy programme, a copy of which was sent directly to Prime Minister Asquith.¹⁵ The London Conference in September 1917 enabled trade unions from the Entente countries to state their support for the aims of the war and to ask to be represented at the peace negotiations. Finally, the Allied Socialist and Trade Union Conference in London in February 1918 called for labour clauses to be included in the peace treaties: a labour magna carta, in the words of the American trade unionist Samuel Gompers.¹⁶ The British were thus in a key position to observe and keep abreast of the various resolutions adopted at these meetings, and it was based on the demands from these conferences that they began their own discussions, envisaging two options: either to include a series of labour reforms (such as the eight-hour day) directly in the peace treaties, or to create a body to deal with labour issues at international level. The Britons who were to be involved in this discussion process and responsible for preparing plans for the Peace Conference embodied each of the various networks from which they drew their ideas. Subsequently these same men travelled to Paris to represent British interests in the commission which set up the ILO.

At the Ministry of Labour Sir Harold Butler and Edward Phelan¹⁷ both embodied the traditions of the British civil service. Butler was responsible during the war for coming up with a long-term policy which would redefine the state’s role in labour policy and thus restore better relations with the trade union movement. He took the very opposite line from the bureaucratic approach developed by William Beveridge at the Board of Trade, developing a policy of ‘home rule for industry’, which for the government meant adopting a minimalist approach by encouraging direct negotiations between employers and unions to set employment conditions and pay according to each industry’s needs, while still meeting minimum standards.¹⁸ Phelan, on the other hand, was very active in the Intelligence Division that had been set up in the Ministry of Labour.¹⁹ The Division introduced a system which combined administrative experience with academic knowledge, initially in order to monitor different opinion trends in the trade unions and other workers’ groups, but also to think ahead and anticipate possible labour problems to come. When it was almost certain that the war was coming to an end, this think tank considered the contribution its ministry might make to the future peace negotiations, and it was this think tank that came up with the various successive British plans for the creation of an international labour organization.

A preliminary document dated October 1918²⁰ concluded that workers were determined to have an international organization in order to advance labour legislation, and therefore that such an organization urgently needed to be set up. In formal terms the best option would be for the Peace Conference to establish an international commission to examine the possibilities for regulating labour issues through the creation of an international organization rather than the direct development of new labour standards. In terms of substance, the Phelan Memorandum envisages a number of options for how such an organization might operate, but even at that stage of the discussions the principle of tripartism was already accepted, based on Britain’s experience with the Whitley Councils, joint committees set up at the end of the war to improve the management of relations between employers and workers in industry.

At the Home Office an Englishman, Malcolm Delevingne,²¹ was to play a very important role in the creation of the ILO by incorporating the ideas of the social reformists of the time into the British thinking. In 1905, 1906 and 1913 he was the British government delegate to the Berne international conferences on international labour legislation, thereby becoming familiar with pre-war procedures and social ideas, and coming into frequent contact with men who were actively involved in the work of the IALL,²² such as the Belgian Ernest Mahaim²³ and the Frenchman Arthur Fontaine.²⁴ Delevingne also drafted his own plan for an international labour organization,²⁵ though in the end this was not the model which the British delegation adopted. His idea of having three separate bodies representing government, employers and workers which would meet both separately and jointly did not appear in any later official documents. On the other hand Delevingne had correctly anticipated that acting as a clearing house, a practice previously developed by the IALL, was to become an important role of the future ILO.

In 1918 Delevingne held the post of Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, but it was in a private capacity that he corresponded with Arthur Fontaine from November 1918 to January 1919 about the creation of a possible international labour organization, and told him about the official ideas developed by the Ministry of Labour.²⁶ At that point he was very much in tune with Fontaine, who assured him that the French government generally agreed with these ideas, though it hoped that the future organization would ratify the existing international legislation, in other words the Berne Conventions, before introducing any new rules.²⁷ This relationship forged an important link between the British...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: A Global History Written from the ILO
• Part 1 Transnational Networks and Milieus around the ILO
• Part 2 The ILO and the Production of Social Standards
• Part 3 The ILO and National Spaces: From Social Norms to Social Rights
• Part 4 Competing Social Models: The ILO and Other International Bodies
• Bibliography
• Index