The story
The International Labour Organization was founded in April 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles, with its seat in Geneva. Its first conference, in Washington in October and November 1919, adopted six conventions: an eight-hour day and 48-hour week in industry, unemployment, maternity protection, night work for women and for young people, and a minimum working age of fourteen. Its structure is tripartite: governments, employers and workers vote together.
Its founders held that labor conditions and peace were linked. Pressure from unions, whose legal status and eight-hour campaigns dated from the later nineteenth century, and fear of revolution after 1917 pushed the Allies to put a labor charter in the peace treaty, drafted by a commission chaired by the American union leader Samuel Gompers. The preamble says lasting peace can be based only on social justice, and the French socialist Albert Thomas became first director. The ILO outlived the League of Nations, became the first UN specialized agency in 1946, and has adopted nearly 190 conventions, including bans on forced labor (1930). It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969.
Why it mattered
- It set global conventions on the eight-hour day, child labor, forced labor and freedom of association.
- The tripartite model, giving workers and employers a formal voice beside governments, influenced later institutions.
- It was one of the few League-era institutions that survived, as the first specialized agency of the UN in 1946.
- Its standards helped shape national labor laws in newly independent countries after 1945.
Sources
- History of the ILO International Labour Organization
- International Labour Organization (ILO) Britannica
- Nobel Peace Prize 1969 NobelPrize.org
Community notes
Loading notes…