Updates

This week I was able to attend the conference Networks of Labour: International Officers and Social Networks in the History of the International Labour Organization convened by labour historians in Rome.  This was a generative experience and has given me a deeper insight into the history of the organization. In many ways, the issues that concern me about domestic work and the ILO as a site in which knowledge about this category of labour is generated, as well as the social relations that constitute it, are not new.

For example, ideological contestation has always been present in the kinds of programs that were sponsored (i.e. funded) to foster development in the UN system, in which ‘development’ itself is under dispute. For the IPE scholar it is one thing to say that the Chicago School eventually won over Dependistas, but it’s quite another to understand how this has played out in everyday life. Adeline Baskiewiz-Maison’s presentation on the ILO’s first director Albert Thomas, underscores the human, embodied compromise between the ILO as a large institution and the Socialist International. What may begin as competition or outright contestation can eventually develop into collaboration or at least the uptake of new concepts and ideas. Baskiewiz-Maison mentions how socialists came to mobilise the analytical categories of the ILO in their political activities.  In contemporary times, I think of the continued engagement of civil society organizations who have maintained presence and engagement in the annual Global Form on Migration and Development since its inception. In this case, it is a matter of literally being in the same place at the same time, on the same programme if possible, if groups cannot literally be in the same room.

Debates in the ILO as a massive epistemic community were not simply intellectual but had immediate ‘real world’ impacts. And the source of contestation need not even be competing schools of thought – but governments or the public. Oscar Gaspari presented a paper on Mussolini’s government questioning and mocking the work of Italy’s union of statisticians, particularly over the cost-of-living index.  In contemporary times these moments of disruption of scientific work – of disputes over the facticity of knowledge claims (e.g. is Covid real) is even easier with social media.

The ILO is a bureaucracy, yes. But it is also a technocracy. And technical know-how *is* science in action. Before institutions regularize rules and processes, before questions of legitimacy and mandate, there are questions of domains and boundaries. I think of the pilot programs on fair recruitment launched by the ILO in recent years. There are case studies and specific migration corridors selected, as in any social scientific inquiry.  ‘Technical assistance’ is not simply the transfer of know-how, but is also a transfer of values. The solution provided means defining the problem. This process of definition is contextual and specific.  For example, if the solution is the provision of ‘social security’, it would need to deal with kinship systems that may be very different from modern societies’ nuclear family. Or even the fundamental question of who gets to be the ILO’s main subject of concern – what is a worker? Who gets to be a worker? Who or what is the non-worker (e.g. a slave)? Norberto Ferreras’ presentation on Brazil’s slave economy was really insightful.  I realized citizenship is not simply about cultural belonging or political rights.  It is also a technology of labour relations, labour value and the economy. The question of whether (im)migrants are slaves is still incredibly relevant today.

There is the question of the ILO’s ‘permeability’, and whether its tripartite architecture is sufficient to the times. The ILO was of course born of the need of Europe’s industrial core. It was modelled after Europe’s social democracies. One can see the limits of this architecture in the ILO’s activities in countries in which trade unions are banned. The worker as an ontological category, a set of social relations, a historical figure, was a male European working in industry. As ILO official Gianni Rosas mentioned in his opening speech, the vast majority of the world’s workers today are in the informal sector and are not in Europe. And here then is the question of whether the ILO is sufficiently representative and democratic, the topic of Daniel Mauls’ keynote on the ILO technocrats deployed in colonial Africa. What is expertise and who gets to be an expert? Why were there distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘native’ experts? In her presentation on Alice Hamilton, Judith Rainhorn demonstrated how ‘expertise’ is thoroughly gendered.

Lastly, the ILO has always sought to legitimize itself as it seeks to expand its mandate. And it does so through processes of inclusion and engagement – processes which are curiously expansionary and discriminating (who gets access) at the same time. The issue of permeability and accessibility, it seems to me, are fully linked to questions of representation and democracy. This is something to ponder as I continue with work on #KnowingDom.