Abstract
As the very artery of international commerce, merchant shipping offers an ideal setting for examining the changing rules applied by both individual states and, ultimately, an organized world community, to workers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 With the rise of powerful nation-states joined by a global marketplace in the nineteenth century, recruitment and regulation of a seafaring labour force emerged as a high priority and a vexing problem for Western powers such as Great Britain and the United States. For the early twentieth century, to which I direct my attention in this chapter, a combination of the de-skilling impact of steam and diesel power, the hypercompetition among shipping powers and a worldwide reach for cheap labour threatened wage and living standards established by a previous generation of collective bargaining and political accommodation. No occupational sector thus looked with greater hope to the establishment of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1919 as a mechanism for restoring a semblance of order and humane treatment in the labour market. Given the diversity of the international seafaring labour force, however, regulation — whether global and national in inspiration — inevitably reflected the racial and ethnic, as well as imperial, designs of the regulators themselves. When ethnic as well as deep political and economic differences prevented global regulations from taking hold, national actors, by the mid-1930s, took matters into their own hands. Despite its many failures, however, by 1950 the ILO and especially the ILO maritime division beckoned as one of the few broadly international bodies to survive the wreckage of economic depression, another world war, and large-scale collapse of democracy with both its machinery and aspirations intact.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
E. W. Sager, Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 245–49. Sager notes that 1876 was the last year that total tonnage from sailing vessels exceeded that of steamships in UK-registered vessels, but that as late as 1910, a majority of US and Scandinavian tonnage was still powered by sail.
J. Kramer, “Conrad’s Crews Revisited,” in B. Klein, ed., Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002), 157.
A. Gelb and B. Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 157.
E. O’Neill, Early Plays (New York: Penguin, 2001) quotation from “The Moon of the Caribbees” [1917], 6.
E. O’Neill, “The Hairy Ape,” in Three Great Plays (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005), 104, 129.
A. Read, The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism (New York: Norton, 2008), vii.
J. T. Shotwell, ed., The Origins of the International Labor Organization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), Vol. I (E. J. Phelan, “The Commission on International Labour Legislation”), 191–95; H. B. Butler, “The Washington Conference,” 305–30.
E. C. Lorenz, Defining Global Justice: The History of US International Labor Standards Policy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 75–103; To woo US policy-makers, ILO advocates appealed directly to the similarities between the originating spirit of the international organization and the emergency measures of the Depression era New Deal — particularly, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 — to construct a new “partnership between industry, labor, and government.” J. T. Shotwell, ed., The Origins of the International Labor Organization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), I, 357–67, quotation 359.
The Constitution of the ILO formed Part XIII, or the Labor Section, of the Treaty of Versailles. http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/text/versaillestreaty/ver387.html; re: the ILO as an anti-Communist buffer, see C. J. Ratzlaff, “The International Labor Organization of the League of Nations: Its Significance to the United States,” American Economic Review, 22 (September, 1932), 455.
E. J. Phelan, “British Preparations,” in Shotwell, Origins, I, 105–26.
International Labour Organization, The Rules of the Game: A Brief Introduction to International Labour Standards (Geneva: ILO, 2005), 12–16.
Tribute by F. Blancard in Albert Thomas, 1878–1978 (Geneva: ILO, 1978), 5; E. J. Phelan, Yes and Albert Thomas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949 [1936]), 58.
B. Reinalda, “Success and Failure: The ITF’s Sectional Activities in the Context of the ILO,” in Reinalda, ed., The International Transport Workers Federation, 1914–1945: The Edo Fimmen Era (Amsterdam: Stichtingbeheer IISG, 1997), 138–40; By 2005, the ILO had adopted 185 Conventions and 195 Recommendations, more than 60 of which pertained to seafaring. The Rules of the Game, 17, 64.
R. Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900–1960,” in International Review of Social History, 51 (2006), Supplement, 112.
A. Marsh and V. Ryan, The Seamen (Oxford: Malthouse Press, 1989), 108–10; F. J. A. Broeze, “The Muscles of Empire: Indian Seamen and the Raj,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18 (1981), 52–55. Two less controversial Conventions banning child labour under 14 and restricting shipside recruitment bosses and brokers were approved in Genoa. Otherwise, prior to 1936, the only maritime measures to reach the two-thirds threshold required the signing of articles of agreement for all seagoing vessels (1926) and the repatriation of foreign seamen to their home country (1926); http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/cgi-lex/conv(ed)pl? (accessed 5 March 2009).
Reawakening fears of worldwide revolution and social breakdown, the stock market crash and economic depression of the 1930s paradoxically lifted the global profile of the ILO as a potential agent in dealing with the employment crisis. D. P. Moynihan, “The United States and the International Labor Organization, 1889–1934” PhD diss. (Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1960), 469.
W. G. Rice and W. E. Chalmers, “Improvement of Labor Conditions on Ships by International Action,” MLR 42 (May 1936), 1181–1203, quotation 1191.
New Deal advocates certainly had reason to fear for the future of national labour and welfare legislation. Not until March 1937 did the Supreme Court (in the famous “stitch in time saves nine” case) reverse itself and uphold a state minimum wage law. Within weeks, it likewise upheld the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act, thus both averting a constitutional crisis and rendering unnecessary such radically alternative paths as the ILO to domestic social legislation. R. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), 286; Lorenz, 108.
W. E. Chalmers, “International Labor Organization: Results of International Labor Conference, June 1936,” MLR (1936), 323.
C. Goodrich, “International Labor Relations: Maritime Labor Treaties of 1936,” MLR, 44 (1937), 349, 354. A British collective bargaining agreement the previous summer adopting the rudiments of the three-watch system reportedly paved the way for the needed supermajority of delegate votes.
G. Balachandran, “Conflicts in the International Maritime Labour Market: British and Indian Seamen, Employers, and the State, 1890–1939,” Indian Economic & Social History Review, 39 (2002), 96–99.
A. Marsh and V. Ryan, The Seamen (Oxford: Malthouse Press, 1989), 154–55.
J. Hyslop, “Steamship Empire: Asian, African and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine, c. 1880–1945,” Journal of Asian and African Studies,44 (1), 63–64; G. Balachandran, “Producing Coolies, (Un)making Workers: A (Post-)Colonial Parable for the Contemporary Present,” Paper presented to “Workers, the Nation-State and Beyond: The Newberry Conference on Labor Across the Americas,” Chicago, 18–20 September 2008.
Telephone interview with Abdulgani Serang (grandson of A. K. Serang and currently General Secretary of the National Union of Seafarers of India, NUSI), 3 March 2009; “The ILO and Seafarers,” ITF Journal, 29 (Autumn, 1969), 59.
See, for example, F. J. A. Broeze, “The Muscles of Empire: Indian Seamen and the Raj,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18 (1981), 43–67; J. Seekings, “The ILO and Welfare Reform in South Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, 1925–50,” in J. van Daele et al., eds., ILO Histories. Essays on the International Labour Organization and Its Impact on the World During the Twentieth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 145–72.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 International Labour Organization
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fink, L. (2016). A Sea of Difference: The ILO and the Search for Common Standards, 1919–45. In: Jensen, J.M., Lichtenstein, N. (eds) The ILO from Geneva to the Pacific Rim. International Labour Organization (ILO) Century Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137570901_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137570901_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57592-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57090-1
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)