ILO and employment: from a European to a global approach (1944-1976)

The article describes the progressive change of approach by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in managing employment problems during the “Trente Glorieuses”. Created with mainly normative aims, to be pursued through the approval of international labour conventions, after WWII the organization increasingly began investing its energies in technical assistance actions. These were more attuned to the preferences of the new hegemonic power, the United States, and perfectly in line with Washington’s approach to the problems of western European reconstruction. Indeed, the drive towards productivity and class cooperation which characterized the Marshall Plan, also stimulated the activities of the ILO, which helped western European countries and organizations such as the OEEC and the European Communities in promoting labour mobility, a key ingredient in view of the productivist targets. As a growing number of newly independent countries adhered to the ILO, this approach began to reveal its limits. The convention on employment approved by the organization in 1964 already showed a new attitude on the matter, stressing the need to consider the different level of structural and economic development of every country in order to adopt an adequate strategy. But the real break with the productivist approach arrived in 1969 with the launch of the World Employment Programme, which considered less efficient but more “employment-productive” strategies in order to promote full employment in the Third World countries. This was the basis of the “basic needs” approach, which was adopted by the 1976 World Employment Conference as the official line of the ILO, and in the Seventies was generally considered an essential complement of the widespread demand for a New International Economic Order.