Author's Response

When I accepted the invitation to write an essay on the ILO I knew that it could invoke a wide variety of responses. The ILO has a rich past, marked by numerous conflicts. It is an organization that has been and still is active on all continents, under widely different political circumstances. And it has to incorporate the contradictory interests of employers, workers, and states. Unavoidably, its successes and failures are therefore topics of ever-new controversies. Furthermore, historical research is still at a rather early stage, although the number of good studies has been growing in recent years. The archival materials are overwhelming; ILO's headquarters in Geneva alone keep more than seven thousand linear meters of occupied shelving. In addition there are many relevant archives at other locations in several continents. Besides, the ILO Century Project—a wonderful undertaking initiated by Gerry Rodgers after he had, in 2005, briefly become the director of ILO's International Institute of Labour Studies (IILS) is adding much source material through its growing collection of extensive oral history interviews with constituents and former staff members.¹

Nevertheless it is important that we start the debate on the ILO right now. It is an urgent issue. Alongside the weak international trade-union movement the ILO is indeed the only significant tool that workers across continents have that looks at least after some of their interests. Our analysis of the ILO should therefore not focus on its institutional history as such. It is not primarily about texts, ratifications, and forms of technical assistance but about the question of to what extent the organization has affected "real change and more happiness in peoples' lives."² Remarkably, many historical studies do not ask this question, and neither do most of the ILO's self-evaluations.

Research Perspectives

Eileen Boris, Marilyn Lake, and Juan Manuel Palacio all comment on my research perspective. Their observations will be crucial ingredients for all further work on the ILO's history. In her gracious response, Boris points out that although I consider gender norms, I do not take "the next step to see how they relate to the overall working of the ILO." She is absolutely right. I should indeed have paid more attention to the fundamental function of labor standards in managing "the relation of reproductive to other forms of labor," including women's division of time between subsistence labor in the household and paid work. This is an important point of improvement.

Palacio draws attention to another omission: I focus on the ILO's immediate and intended effects, but, he argues, we should not lose sight of the indirect, and often unintended, consequences of ILO activities. This is, of course, correct. The ILO has indeed contributed to "the formation of a global network of peoples related to the world of work," and thus to "the shaping of a 'global climate of ideas'" in favor of improved labor relations.

Marilyn Lake contributes an important perspective as well. She believes that my narrative is Eurocentric, and she contrasts this with an approach centered on the Asia-Pacific, which would situate the ILO's history within the wider context of global labor relations. She rightly draws our attention to the remarkable Australian social achievements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and their inherent tensions. She raises an important point, but I maintain that we should define the issue differently. Since the historiography of the ILO is far more advanced than the historiography of the world working class, I have focused on the development of the ILO as such. This approach has, of course, a significant disadvantage: it reduces the world at large to "context." It is absolutely clear that in the longer run this approach should be reversed, that is, the development of the world working class will have to become the analytical background against which the ILO is analyzed. I have been aware of this problem for quite some time.³ However, we will first need a more solid labor historiography of the "global South"—admittedly a clumsy term (North Korea is South and South Korea is North), but...