The International Labour Organization: Structure

In one line

The Organisation consists of a General Conference of four delegates per member, two governmental and one each for employers and workers, a Governing Body of fifty-six, and an International Labour Office, and every delegate votes individually, which makes it the only intergovernmental body in which private interests hold votes.

Origin and preamble

Established in 1919 as Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles, which makes it older than the United Nations and the only specialised agency that predates it.

The preamble opens with the reason: universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice.

It then states the problem: conditions of labour exist involving such injustice, hardship and privation to large numbers of people as to produce unrest so great that the peace and harmony of the world are imperilled.

And it lists the remedies, which read as a catalogue of labour rights written in 1919: regulation of hours including a maximum working day and week, regulation of the labour supply, prevention of unemployment, an adequate living wage, protection against sickness, disease and injury arising out of employment, protection of children, young persons and women, provision for old age and injury, protection of workers employed in countries other than their own, recognition of the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value, recognition of the principle of freedom of association, and vocational and technical education.

Equal pay for work of equal value and freedom of association are in a treaty preamble of 1919, twenty-nine years before the Universal Declaration and forty-seven before the Covenants.

The preamble also states the economic argument: 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. That is the case against a race to the bottom, made in 1919.

The Declaration of Philadelphia

Adopted at Philadelphia on 10 May 1944 and annexed to the Constitution in 1946, so it is part of the Constitution and not a separate declaration.

Its principles are quotable: labour is not a commodity; freedom of expression and of association are essential to sustained progress; poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere; and all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity.

That last principle is a human rights statement of 1944, and it is the reason this organisation belongs in a human rights paper rather than only in a labour law one.