Abstract
The International Labour Organization (ILO) played a key role in the US approach to global socio-economic affairs in the years immediately following the Second World War. The US federal government significantly bolstered activities in conjunction with the ILO, part of the United Nations after 1947, fully aware of the agency’s significance in relation to post-war economic and social welfare. In its Declaration of Philadelphia, the ILO in fact elaborated upon President Roosevelt’s powerful January 1944 call for an ‘economic bill of rights’ insisting that all people deserve economic security and job opportunities.1 Roosevelt’s New Deal and the ILO both supported state regulation of labour standards and broad social protections through the idea of ‘social security’. After the war, two former New Deal activists, Frieda Miller and Arthur Altmeyer, took advantage of ILO support to push for greater, not less, state action in the support of workers’ welfare in the United States and abroad. But they attempted to make the New Deal global at a time when the direction of US labour and social policies took on an increasingly confrontational tone given a political environment in the country which was quickly turning away from the welfare state.
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Notes
F. D. Roosevelt, ‘Message to Congress on the State of the Union, January 11, 1944’, The Public Papers & Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel Rosenman (ed.), Vol. 13 (New York: Harper, 1950), pp. 40–42;
ILO, The Declaration of Philadelphia (Montreal: International Labour Office, 1944), p. 3.
For the development of the term ‘labour feminists’, see D. S. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 4–8.
See A. Altmeyer, ‘Ten Years of Social Security’, in W. Haber and W. J. Cohen (eds), Readings in Social Security (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1948), pp. 79–88.
M. Weir, A. S. Orloff and T. Skocpol, The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 213.
For Senate hearing testimonials against the ILO and ‘socialized medicine’, for example, see J. S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 398.
C. Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 39–51.
S. Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 198–205.
A. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 136, 206.
On Miller’s work with the New York Sanitary control board, see E. Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 248.
E. Boris and M. Honey, ‘Gender, Race, and Labor Department Policies’, Monthly Labor Review (vol. 111, no. 2, 1988), p. 30.
T. Skard, ‘Getting Our History Right: How Were the Equal Rights of Women and Men Included in the Charter of the United Nations?’, Forum for Development Studies (vol. 35, no. 1, 2008), p. 44.
P. Määttä: Equal Pay, Just a Principle of the ILO? (Norderstedt: Demand GmbH, 2008), pp. 55, 91. The WFTU placed the issue of equal pay on the ECOSOC agenda early in 1948, Z 14/2/3 (J.1), ILO Archives.
United States Congress, Hearings by the United States House, Committee on Appropriations (Washington, DC: GPO, 1952), p. 251.
ILO, Decent Work for Domestic Workers: Fourth Item on the Agenda (Geneva, 2009), p. 16. At the ILO’s 100th conference in June of 2011 delegates finally passed Convention No. 189, the Domestic Workers Convertion. It aimed to improve working conditions for tens of millions of domestic workers worldwide, disproportionally women from the Global South.
A. Altmeyer, ‘The Wisconsin Idea and Social Security’, Wisconsin Magazine of History (vol. 42, no. 1, 1958), pp. 19–25.
Commons’ vision of promoting economic wellbeing rested in the notion of mitigating conflict between special interest groups through government regulation. The Wisconsin version of social insurance contrasted with more redistributive social policies such as the Townsend Plan, which advocated a flat-rate pension for all over the age of 60 funded out of general tax reserves. For more extensive analysis, see T. Skocpol, Social Policy in The United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 147, 212.
A. Altmeyer, ‘The Progress of Social Security in the Americas in 1944’, International Labor Review (vol. 51, no. 6, 1945), pp. 699–719; ‘Social Security Consultation on Income Maintenance and Medical Care, Montreal, 9–12 July, 1943’, 40:G25, MG 27, Papers of Ian Mackenzie, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
K. McQuaid, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 86.
E. Reynaud, ‘Social Security for All: Global Trends and Challenges’, Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal (vol. 27, no. 2, 2006), pp. 123, 143.
Perkins was highly involved in the US–ILO relations, especially on social security. For details, see G. Martin, Madam Secretary, Frances Perkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 429–440; also, box 5, Perkins Files, Women’s Rights Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
For a definitive debate during a House Ways and Means Committee meeting, see US Congress, House Committee on Ways and Means, Analysis of the Social Security System: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 1953, pp. 982–1007;
See also A. Altmeyer, The Formative Years of Social Security (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), pp. 221–235.
A. Altmeyer and R. Ferrero, Estudio económico de la legislación social Peruana y sugerencias para su mejoramiento (Lima, Peru, 1957); for various international programs, box 9, RG 47, NA.
A. Altmeyer, ‘Training for International Responsibilities’, in A. Altmeyer, A. Myrdal and D. Rusk, America’s Role in International Social Welfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 57–59.
D. P. Moynihan, The United States and the International Labor Organization (PhD dissertation, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1960);
W. Galenson, The International Labor Organization: An American View (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).
See, for example, N. Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
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Jensen, J. (2013). US New Deal Social Policy Experts and the ILO, 1948–1954. In: Kott, S., Droux, J. (eds) Globalizing Social Rights. International Labour Organization (ILO) Century Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291967_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291967_11
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