Geneva (ILO) Conventions: Located but Not Made There

In a perceptive review of Charles Pearson's remarkable forecast of the rise of China as a global power, in National Life and Character, penned in 1893, a time of unchallenged European ascendancy, the London Athenaeum noted the significance of Pearson's "Australian point of view": "The forecast will take many by surprise, because the view it presents is not only not fashionable, but is fundamentally different from that to which we have been accustomed.… His view is not purely or mainly European.… The reader can indeed discern that Mr. Pearson's point of view is not London or Paris, but Melbourne."¹

In Melbourne, Pearson's point of view was shaped by a remarkable group of Chinese merchant intellectuals who forecast China's future place in the world as a great power. Standpoint determines what can be seen. Point of view creates perspective. My response to Marcel van der Linden's interesting essay on the International Labour Organization (ILO)—its origins and its prospects—is shaped, like Pearson's intervention, by my location in Melbourne—in what the ILO calls the Asia-Pacific region.

Neither "North" nor "South," the Asia-Pacific region has always been a contact zone. From the mid-nineteenth century, migration from the Chinese empire across Southeast Asia and the Pacific led to historic encounters between Chinese and British imperial subjects, including across the Australian continent. As the ILO's International Emigration Commission put it in 1921, Australia was "situated at the point of contact between the white and yellow races," between the "East" and the "West."² Marcel van der Linden writes from a European point of view but seeks to frame his history of the ILO in a narrative about the "global North" and the "global South" with particular reference to Europe and its colonies. It seems to me, however, that these static binaries do little to elucidate the rather more complicated and dynamic global interactions that shaped the context for the development of international labor law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

If we broaden our analytical framework to embrace a world history context, historical agency might be attributed to a set of players different from the Europeans listed in van der Linden's account. And we might identify a different historical dynamic in the modern mobility of Chinese workers, who traveled in the nineteenth century through the Asia-Pacific region in search of better lives and work.³ Many thousands joined the gold rushes—themselves globally momentous events—that drew millions of fortune seekers from all over the world to both sides of the Pacific.⁴ The ensuing encounters between Chinese gold seekers and white working men were historically transformative events. In Australia, under a regime often known as "state socialism," Chinese workers, denigrated as cheap labor, in fact often supported efforts by the state, in the 1890s, to regulate the wages and conditions of all workers.⁵

Van der Linden's is a Eurocentric account, but a footnote reference to George N. Barnes's History of the International Labour Office, published in 1926, alerts us to the possibility of a differently oriented story. Barnes was a British trade unionist and labor leader, who recalled that the founders of the ILO were "specially concerned" to raise "Eastern labour conditions" to deal with the pervasive threat of "cheap labour."⁶ It was the perceived threat posed by Chinese furniture manufacturers underpaying their fellow countrymen that led Australia to become the first country in the world to introduce, in 1896, a legal (compulsory) minimum wage and tripartite wage boards comprising representatives of employers, trade unions, and an independent chairperson. It was an innovation hailed across the world as an experiment in "economic democracy."⁷ American progressive reformers, such as Florence Kelley and Walter Lippmann, saw in this development a new order in which workers would begin, under the auspices of the state, to collectively govern the conditions of their work. British and US reformers traveled across the ocean to see this experiment for themselves.⁸

Australians initiated such state experiments as part of their embrace of what contemporaries...