The ILO at 100: Reflections on Marcel van der Linden's Critique

In 2009 some colleagues and I published a history of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its ideas, The ILO and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009 (henceforth The Quest).¹ We were all working at the ILO, indeed three of the four authors had had long careers in the organization. In the course of this work, a historian who had been helping us asked, "Why do international organizations always want to write their own history?" I suppose that she had two principal criticisms in mind. The first is that organizations will usually instrumentalize their history, and so whatever is written from within the organization needs to be considered with a skeptical eye. And the other is that authors working within the organization are subject to biases based on their own perceptions and interests, and might have a rather rose-tinted view of the organization.

I was thinking of these concerns as I read the article by Marcel van der Linden. Concerning our biases in The Quest, that is for readers to judge. But this article is hardly an advertisement for neutral, balanced, well-documented academic analysis. On the contrary there are errors of fact, significant omissions, and interpretations that are not backed up by careful assessments or systematic research. Of course, objectivity in the social sciences is a chimera. But it is odd to start with a heavily slanted question, "Is the organization truly inconsequential?" And on many points I have a different understanding of the history of the organization, both from my reading of the literature and from my own firsthand experience.

Let me give an illustration, concerning the World Employment Programme (WEP), where I was a researcher in the 1970s and 1980s. In the article it is commented that "while the program officially remained in operation into the 1980s, it had lost its momentum by around 1976–77 and failed miserably." The timing here is wrong because 1976 was the high point of the program, when the World Employment Conference was held, and throughout the 1970s a large group of researchers within and outside the ILO delivered a torrent of publications that influenced the employment agenda worldwide. New country-level employment strategies were developed. There was a large program of policy advice. The WEP did lose momentum in the 1980s, faced with the increasing influence of the neoliberal agenda, but "failed miserably"? What is the criterion of failure? Where are the references to evaluations and assessments that might support this assertion? Let me give one small illustration why this is wrong. An important part of the WEP consisted of regional employment teams in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For instance, the Regional Employment Programme for Latin America (PREALC), operated from 1969 to 1993. During this period it not only provided a haven for researchers in difficult times because of military dictatorships (especially during the 1970s) and deep recession (1980s) but it also delivered quality, influential research and advice on issues ranging from policies for the informal sector to macro-economic policy for employment creation. There was a substantial influence in the region, which I know from personal experience because I headed the technical team that partly replaced PREALC in 1994 (in southern South America) and found that many of my government, trade union, or employer counterparts had collaborated with PREALC, or had participated in its training programs, or were familiar with and used its work, and they carried its ideas and messages into policy in the countries concerned. There are many other examples of how the WEP helped build a policy agenda and provided a foundation for future work. If this is a miserable failure I wonder what would be a success.

The story told in this article is one of relative ILO success up to 1970, and relative failure thereafter. The success, it is grudgingly admitted, consisted of building up a framework of international labor standards. It is nevertheless odd that no mention is made of the successful efforts to entrench a range of important human rights in the standards system after the Second World War (freedom...