The ILO and the quality of work: an historical overview
Gerry Rodgers[1]
Improving working lives
The drive to create the ILO came in large part from the urgent need to improve the appalling working conditions faced by many workers in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. Long working hours in unhealthy environments, the unchecked use of dangerous materials and equipment, the widespread employment of children and wages which permitted workers and their families only most squalid living conditions mobilized political action throughout the 19th century.
The Preamble of the ILO’s constitution, which dates from 1919,makes a powerful call for improvement in the conditions of labour,
“as, for example, by the regulation of the hours of work including the establishment of a maximum working day and week, the regulation of the labour supply, the prevention of unemployment, the provision of an adequate living wage, the protection of the worker against sickness, disease and injury arising out of his employment, the protection of children, young persons and women …”.
And the Preamble provided two political arguments why action was needed: the first is that if conditions do not improve, there is a risk of “unrest so great that the peace and harmony of the world are imperilled”; and second, that “the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries”.
From the start, then, the ILO aimed to improve peoples’ working lives. That included making work itself more desirable – in terms of the working environmentand the organization of work,protection from disease or injury,and the content and dignity of work itself. A second aspect concerned the balance between work and other aspects of life, and in particular participation in work, and the length and organization of working time. A third concerned the productivity and remuneration of work. And a fourth referred to the security of work, in particular vulnerability to unemployment and to loss of income.
Taken together, these make up what we call “the quality of work”. These are major issues in all societies. They determine the distribution of time and effort between work, family and other pursuits, and the resources which individuals and families can use for other ends. And beyond these utilitarian notions, the quality of work is also about the value of work in its own right – how far people can realise personal goals in their work, apply and develop their skills, claim a social identity, or on the contrary are subject to compulsion and deprivation, to risk, stress or drudgery.
At the same time, these are among the most complex issues in the world of work. They connect the organization of production with fundamental concerns about the purposes that production serves. They take different forms at high and low income levels, in agriculture or in industry, in wage employment or self-employment, for different groups in the population. Safety at work may be a highly technical question concerned with acceptable exposure to chemicals or radiation; or it may be a question of work culture and habits. The organization of working time may be about protection from exploitation, or about balancing production with consumption. Creativity and fulfilment are understood differently in different societies.
Above all, improving the quality of work runs up against economic realities. “Remuneration and conditions of work must, of course, improve”, commented a 1972 ILO report on the Conditions of Work Programme; “But it must be noted that increases in remuneration and improvements in conditions of work are not costless in terms of potential growth or output … or employment”.[2]In the dominant economic model of growth and development, rising wages are the result of rising production and productivity, and by extension the same argument applies to workplace standards, whether of working time, of safety, of security, or of other conditions of work. Social policy therefore cannot get too far ahead of the economic fundamentals.And one enterprise, or one country, could not apply higher standards of working conditions or wages in a competitive market economy.
But there are a number of counter arguments. First, as David Morse, the longest serving ILO Director-General, put it,“social progress and the rising levels of employment on which it depends do not automatically emerge from economic progress”[3]. In other words, improvements in output and productivity do not necessarily lead to improvements in the quantity and quality of work, so that thesegoalsmust be actively promoted in their own right. Secondly, the social goal is as valid as the economic one, and cannot be subordinated to it. Third, while accepting that economic progress is necessary for at least some aspects of social progress, it is an article of faith in the ILO that “humane conditions of labour” are both possible and desirable in all economic and social environments. There are many possible ways by which this can and has been achieved: by regulating and legislating to ensure that minimum standards are followed by all; making better work more productive, and so eliminating the trade-off, if there is one, between conditions of work and competitiveness; promoting forms of production and management in which better conditions of work are an explicit goal; appealing to social solidarity and ethical principles. Ways to achieve the goal may vary across situations and countries, but the goal of better quality work is common. This is a fundamental “ILO idea”.
That is not to say that the idea originated in the ILO. The ILO was born in the Versailles Peace Conference out of ideas on how to achieve social progress which had been circulating for some time. But in 1919 the ILO was a vastly more powerful instrument than those existing hitherto for pursuing and promoting these ideas. The goal of improved quality of work was a high priority for the young organization. Of the nine principles specified in its original constitution, which were to guide its work, two were directly concerned with working time, one with wages, one child labour, while a fifth concerned the enforcement of policies in these areas.
B. A changing policy environment
Over the last century there have been important changes in attitudes to and policies aimed at the quality of work, which have conditioned the ILO’s work and its impact.
The period immediately following the First World War was a favourable environment for advance on international social and labour policy. There were two main directions of thinking on the quality of work. The first was to find ways to improve work itself – notably, in the early days of the ILO, by eliminating risks and hazards, and extending various protections. The second was to improve the balance between work and other social goals, by putting limits on working time and setting rules to protect particular groups from the obligation to undertake work of some or all types. ILO research addressed these issues in the 1920s, and a series of Conventions was developed.Much of this agenda reflected the demands of workers, and the willingness of governments to respond to those demands, but despite many reservations and an insistence that the ILO be “modest, methodical and circumspect”,[4]employers also participated constructively in the ILO’s work. Mr Olivetti, Italian employer delegate and Employer Vice-Chairman of the Governing Body, wrote that it was
“certain that the decisions of the Conference, the studies and researches of the Office, and the calm discussions of the Governing Body have served to throw fresh light on social questions, to point the way for the solution of unsolved problems, and to give prominence to new methods and new ideas”.[5]
Up to the onset of the Great Depression, the main concern was to simultaneously promote growth in productivity and improved conditions of work. It was the era of Taylorist management methods and the growth of mass production, which continued the process of narrowing of jobs, through the division of labour, and their intensification, which had been underway throughout the Industrial Revolution. But at the same time there was widespread support for an emerging framework of regulation and improved conditions of work. In the 1920s, after the recession of 1919-21 this was combined with recovery in real wages in many industrialized countries, and significant support for a high wage policy, notably in the United States. Industrialists such as Henry Ford believed that high wages were good for business.[6]
The impact of the ILO’s work in this period is not easy to measure objectively. Ratification of the early standards, a majority of which concerned some aspect of the quality of work, was distinctly slower than had been hoped, as governments were cautious about locking themselves into international obligations, or faced national resistance. The most obvious example was the failure of the US to join the ILO until 1934, let alone ratify any standards. But the objections by the French government to the ILO’s work extending to conditions of work in agriculture,[7]and the reticence of the British government to ratify the convention concerning white lead in paint (see below), or the Hours of Work Convention, No. 1, also reflect this political reaction. Albert Thomas, the first Director of the ILO, was bitterly disappointed that ratification of Convention 1 was so slow.[8]Nevertheless, the ILO was clearly a leading actor in efforts to embed social policy objectives in the economic system, at least in Europe. In 1929 over 70 per cent of European countries had ratified 11 or more of the 28 conventions adopted by then. However, this was true of only 2 (Cuba and India) among the 16 non-European countries among the original membership of the ILO.
In the 1930s, mass unemployment modified the picture. As Auer has pointed out,[9] policy interest in the quality of work drops off rapidly when unemployment rises, as it did in the early 1930s. Ratifications of ILO standards tailed away in the first half of the 1930s, and while some further labour standards on the protection of workers were adopted, the main focus of attention was elsewhere. Working time, which we consider in more detail below, remained on the agenda, indeed it received more attention than ever since it was discussed at every ILO Conference in the 1930s. But the issue was now work sharing, i.e. reductions in working time in order to preserve jobs, rather than improved conditions of work. Indeed, in general the pressure on working conditions in this period was downwards.
In a third phase after the Second World War, reconstruction was the initial priority of governments, along with the establishment of a series of basic human rights and social institutions. Conditions of work improved in parallel with progress towards full employment in industrialized market economies, and were an integral part of the broad social and political framework in the socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.The ILO, taken up with the promotion of rights at work, the development of technical cooperation and the difficulties of dealing with the Cold War, contributed to this process through its research and standard setting on wages and occupational safety and healthbut was not a major actor. There were however some significant initiatives during this period. For instance, in 1955 a group of experts led by the Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin prepared a report on the compatibility between labour conditions and expanding trade in the context of European integration.[10] The report argued that while there was no particular need to harmonise social policies or social conditions among European countries, it was important to deal with abnormally poor conditions (of wages, hours of work and other aspects of working conditions) in the process of integration. However, the Ohlin report appears to have had little impact on the design of the Treaty of Rome,[11] and the European Social Charter only emerged much later.
In the early 1970s, an in-depth review was undertaken by the ILO Governing Body of the organization’s activities relating to conditions of work. It found that
“activities concerning the industrialised countries have suffered from a failure to appreciate the significance of emerging trends, to see particular issues in their wider context and to respond quickly to the most urgent needs…. New trends in systems of remuneration and other conditions of work have received only cursory attention, and the larger problem of the humanisation of work virtually none”.
In developing countries the situation was even worse:
“Standards on hours of work, holiday, welfare and minimum wages have little meaning”.[12]
The report concluded that ILO work was fragmented, uncoordinated, and only reached a fraction of the working population.
This and subsequent reviewsled up to the Director-General’s report to the 1975 International Labour Conference, entitled“Making Work More Human”, which called for work which respects the worker’s life and health; leaves him free time for rest and leisure; and enables him to serve society and achieve self fulfilment (the original text uses the masculine pronoun).In the wake of this Conference, and encouraged by Scandinavian interest and support, a new programme was launched to address the problems of the working environment – PIACT, the French acronym for the International Programme for the Improvement of Working Conditions and Environment.[13]PIACT was the brainchild of Jean de Givry, a long serving French official, who had been responsible for ILO work on labour relations and social institutions since the 1950s. It stimulated new research and technical cooperation on working conditions and safety and health at work, raised the profile of these issues and helped to build up institutions to deal with them in a number of countries.
But this embryonic programme faced an unpromising international environment. The oil shocks and their aftermath, and rising unemployment, implied that, just as in the 1930s, the quality of work slid down the priority agenda almost as soon as the programme had been launched.In the neo-liberal environment of the 1980s, labour market regulation which set high standards for employment security, conditions of work or wages came under attack, especially in the “Anglo-Saxon” world. An internal evaluation of the programme in 1984[14] reiterated the importance of the issues, but found that the impact of PIACT had been fairly limited, although many specific contributions could be identified – creating national institutes, strengthening factory inspectorates, training of managers and policy makers, dissemination of information. A subsequent programme of Work Improvement in Small Enterprises within PIACT tried to overcome the trade-off between conditions of work and employment by treating work improvement as a productive factor. An innovative programme which included a number of successful local projects, it was nevertheless relatively poorly funded and dependent on the energy of a small number of staff members.
PIACT represented a significant shift in the ILO’s efforts on the quality of work towards developing countries. In the early years of the ILO, the extent to which the conventions and recommendations governing conditions of work could be applied to countries such as India, China or Japan were a subject of some controversy, it being generally assumed that such goals were out of reach. The early conventions included clauses which defined lower standards for these countries – Convention 1 on hours of work, which specified a general limit of 48 hours, offered a standard of 57 hours for Japan, 60 for British India and specifically excluded China, Persia and Siam.
The argument that labour standards were needed to prevent unfair competition was of course valid for these non-metropolitan territories too, but in the early years of the ILO these economies did not present much of a threat to industry in the metropolitan countries, while poor labour conditions helped to keep down commodity prices. External pressure to raise labour standards in low income countries was thus weak.
In the early phases of decolonization and development planning after the war, the issue of quality of work took another form. A dualistic model of economic development emerged, built around a process of transfer of labour from a traditional to a modern sector. The notion of the modern sector broadly reflected the predominant production model in industrialized countries at the time – regular wage employment with decent conditions of work, subject to a framework of regulation and organization. Development was thus seen as a process of labour transfer from poor to good quality employment, and at the same time from low productivity to high.
The contribution of the ILO to this process lay partly in the legislative framework for modern employment.[15] Labour codes built up from the corpus of international labour standards proliferated in newly independent countries, and the ILO had a large hand in their drafting. But the growth of good quality employment in the modern sector was dependent on the rate and structure of overall economic growth, which in turn was conditioned by the growth of capital stock and the availability of the skills needed for advanced industrial production, rather than on specific interventions to improve employment quality.