The ILO and Latin America: The Hidden Transcript of the Good Old Lady

Round numbers are always good for appraisals. How should we celebrate the one hundredth birthday of one of the most emblematic global institutions of the twentieth century? Marcel van der Linden, a central actor of recent global labor historiography, has written an impressive piece to celebrate this birthday. One can read it as an institutional biography or as an essay on the "life cycle" of the International Labour Organization (ILO)—not by chance a methodological approach that he and other labor historians have been promoting in the last years.

If I may pursue the metaphor a little further, van der Linden divides the life of this lady (in Spanish the ILO, or rather OIT—Organización Internacional del Trabajo—is female) into two central moments. The first is that of her birth, childhood, and youth until the apex of her adult life, when she reaches fifty, while the second is that of her mature years and early old age, until reaching a venerable centenary today.

Her first fifty years of existence are a golden era (in van der Linden's words, the "fat years"). Born in the heart of a prestigious and triumphant family of nations, she comes to life with sublime and promising tasks ("to raise labor standards around the world"). During her youthful years she pursues this agenda with great zeal, with the result being spectacular advancements at both diplomatic and policy levels. She stands at the center of that world where she belongs, which she also helps to shape with her actions. Although she does not have the power to enforce her policies directly, she nevertheless has enough moral authority, together with the support of most Western countries, to influence and fashion mainstream reform programs and ideas, and even to inspire national policies related to the world of work. She is, however, a person of her time: raised in a traditional family, she promotes customary values that are coherent with her worldview. So she advocates for the protection of a society based on the patriarchal family, whose livelihood depends on the work of a male salaried formal worker; thus she fights for causes like better wage levels, the continuity of the labor contract, and the limitation of the workday and of women's and children's work. In doing so, this noble conservative lady is nevertheless the promoter of a very progressive global agenda.

By contrast, the second fifty years of Mrs. ILO (the "lean years," in van der Linden's words) are those of a prolonged decay. Starting in the 1970s, the world consents to radical changes in the economy and society, but our illustrious lady experiences evident hardship in adapting to them, that is to say, in understanding them fully. She then starts to feel what many people do when they come to a certain age: an increasing sense of strangeness with the surrounding world. Even more so, since she has lived most of the time in a rather isolated life in her court. So she is puzzled by the new social movements and ideas, or the new trends in the global economy that gradually become structural changes in industrial relations, first with the conservative turn of the 1980s, then with the neoliberal years of the 1990s. Likewise, she does not fully grasp the striking (and ever increasing) differences between the pretty well-off neighborhood in which she lives and the situation in other distant, much more precarious ones. And for those very different worlds she does not know well, and the problems they face, she does not seem to devise any adequate or imaginative solutions.

This state of strangeness, or lack of reaction, did not improve through time. To the contrary, in the years of her early old age, through the 1990s, this lady—who by that time has lost most of her hearing and vision, and in her mind the openness and flexibility of the past—could not "resist the neoliberal offensive more forcefully," in van der Linden's words. Moreover, she seems to be trapped by an unconcealed conservatism of past times...