Abstract
This edited collection is a global history of workers’ organisations since 1919, the year when the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Comintern and the International Federation of Trade Unions were formed. This historical moment represents a caesura in labour history as it epitomises the beginning of what the editors and the contributors in this book call the internationalisation of the labour question. The case studies in this centenary volume analyse the relationship between global workers’ organisations and the new ideological confrontation between liberal capitalism, socialism and communism since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Workers’ organisations, trade unions in particular, grew in importance and managed to organise internationally, forming alliances cemented by ideology and sustained by international institutional bodies or centrals. In the nascent capitalist versus communist struggle, trade unions thrived. Is it mere coincidence that today’s decline of unionism coincides with the end of ideological antagonism? This book emphasises important global labour issues such as gender as well as international workers’ histories from Latin America, Asia and Africa.
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Notes
- 1.
The ESSHC is a biennial conference organised by the International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam. The title of the panel was 1919 and the Long Century of Free Wage Labour: The Internationalisation of Labour Questions and Global Labour History. Many of the contributors to this book presented their research and ideas in the form of a paper at the ESSHC in Belfast.
- 2.
As it was studied and explained by Piketty and others, who however did not look at labour specifically but as an aggregate of ‘income’ as opposed to ‘profit’, which of course it makes but it is limiting; see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 3.
Ray Kiely, “The Race to the Bottom and International Labor Solidarity,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 26, no. 1 (2003): 67–88; Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden, “Informalizing the Economy: The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level,” Development and Change 45, no. 5 (2014): 920–940; Andrew Herod, “The Practice of International Labor Solidarity and the Geography of the Global Economy,” Economic Geography 71, no. 4 (1997): 341–363; and Werner Olle and Wolfgang Schoeller, “World Market Competition and Restrictions upon International Trade Union Policies,” in International Labour and the Third World, eds. Rosalind E. Boyd, Robin Cohen, and Peter C.W. Gutkind (Aldershot: Avebury, 1987): 26–147.
- 4.
An attempt in this direction was made more than fifteen years ago by Marcel van der Linden, Transnational Labour History: Explorations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017; first published in 2003). The essays in this book, however, while underlying the need to go ‘beyond national borders’, centre on the European and Russian experiences, with some references to the global dimension.
- 5.
See Reiner Tosstorff, “The International Trade-Union Movement and the Founding of the International Labour Organization,” International Review of Social History 50, no. 3 (2005): 399–433.
- 6.
See Peter Fairbrother, Christian Lévesque, and Marc-Antonin Hennebert, “Understanding Transnational Trade Unionism,” in Transnational Trade Unionism: Building Union Power, eds. Peter Fairbrother, Christian Lévesque, and Marc-Antonin Hennebert (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013): 1–21.
- 7.
See further Fabio Bertini, Gilliatt e la piovra. Il sindacalismo internazionale dalle origini a oggi, 1776–2006 (Rome: Aracne Editrice, 2011).
- 8.
See George Morgan and Pariece Nelligan, The Creativity Hoax: Precarious Work and the Gig Economy (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2018).
- 9.
Fairbrother, Lévesque and Hennebert, “Understanding Transnational Trade Unionism”: 9.
- 10.
For research on the different ideological inclinations of international unionism, and for European case studies of reformist unionism, see Richard Hyman, Understanding European Trade Unionism: Between Market, Class and Society (London: Sage, 2001); Ralph Darlington, Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism, 2nd edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013); and the various contributions in Lex Heerma van Voss, Patrick Pasture, and Jan de Maeyer (eds.), Between Cross and Class: Comparative Histories of Christian Labour in Europe, 1840–2000 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).
- 11.
See further van der Linden, Transnational Labour History.
- 12.
See [ILO] Charte international du travail: clauses des traités de paix de 1919 et 1920 relatives au travail (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1930).
- 13.
Edward Phelan and Harold Butler, both future general directors, drafted part XIII, ‘Labour’, of the Treaty of Versailles (signed on 28 June 1919 between the Allies and Germany). Part XIII is divided into two sections: the first, ‘Organisation of Labour’, is considered as the constitutional declaration of the ILO; the second part is known as the Charte Internationale du Travail and provides a series of general, reformist principles for all labour organisations. See https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partxiii.asp.
- 14.
Carwell, in 1956, called this idea ‘hemispheric trade-unionism’, see Joseph Carwell, International Role of American Labor (PhD thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1956): 101–112. See further Elizabeth McKillen, Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013): 91–122.
- 15.
For example, in the early 1920s the ILO conducted an inquiry into what caused unemployment and what produced the economic crisis. The conducting of the inquiry, which started in 1920, was debated and of course governments and employers could not but be wary of the outcome of such an investigation. See ILO, Unemployment Enquiry: Remedies for Unemployment (Geneva: Kundig, 1922); for a discussion on the dangers of dealing with unemployment and its causes in the interwar period, see Stephanie Ward, Unemployment and the State in Britain: The Means Test and Protest in 1930s South Wales and North-East England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 33–62; on the Anglo-American Unionist logics, especially the American Federation of Labour and the TUC, see Geert van Goethem, The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) as well as Carwell, International Role of American Labor.
- 16.
Oreste Bazzicchi, Cent’anni di Confindustria (1910–2010). Un secolo di sviluppo italiano (Limena: Libreriauniversitaria Edizioni, 2009): 35–36.
- 17.
See Edo Fimmen, The International Federation of Trade Unions: Its Development and Aims (Amsterdam: International Federation of Trade Unions, 1922), IISH, IFTU series, 1901–1945, International Institute of Social History, Archives (IISG) Int 2063/4.
- 18.
See “Declaration du group patronal,” Débats, 26 October 1922.
- 19.
See Tosstorff, “The International Trade-Union Movement”: 401; on the Christian unionist interpretation of the Rerum Novarum, see Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 19–20.
- 20.
See further Patrick Pasture, Histoire du syndicalisme chrétien international. La difficile recherché d’une troisième voie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999).
- 21.
The document or public statement with which the Mezhsovprof attacked the Amsterdam International as a ‘reactionary’ movement is contained in an issue of the publication, in French, of the IFTU, Mouvement syndical international. Revue de la Féderation syndicale internationale¸ Amsterdam-Berlin-Paris, 1 January 1921 (Mouvement syndical international, IISG ZO 16030).
- 22.
See further Rainer Tosstorff, The Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) 1920–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
- 23.
See Roy Ginsberg, Demystifying the European Union: The Enduring Logic of Regional Integration, 2nd edition (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010): 64–67.
- 24.
For a compendium of conceptualisations and on the possible definition of ‘worker’ in global labour history, see Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labor History (Leiden: Brill, 2008): Ch. 2, “Who Are the Workers?” and Ch. 3, “Why ‘Free’ Wage labor?”.
- 25.
See Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 26.
Within the vast literature on the subject, for Europe, see Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick and Richard Hyman, Trade Unions in Western Europe: Hard Times, Hard Choices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); for the United States, see Robert Baldwin, The Decline of US Labor Unions and the Role of Trade (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2003); for Africa, see Eddie Webster, Akua Britwum, and Sharit Bhowmik, Crossing the Divide: Precarious Work and the Future of Labour (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2017); for Latin America, see Maria Victoria Murillo, Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions and Market Reforms in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); for Asia, see John Benson and Ying Zhu (eds.), Trade Unions in Asia: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); and Sarosh Kuruvilla, Subesh Das, and Hyunji Kwon, Trade Union Growth and Decline in Asia, DigitalCommons@ILR, Cornell University ILR School, 2002, http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/articles.
- 27.
This view excludes all kinds of labour categories, informal or without a contract, such as temporary and self-employed workers, workers employed in more than one activity and more than one type of labour relations, such as domestic workers as well as unfree labour. The problem of definition remains quite unsolved, see Karin Hofmeester, “Labour Relations: Introductory Remarks,” in Handbook the Global History of Work, eds. Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018): 317–328.
- 28.
Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, Prolegomena for a Global Labour History (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1999), http://www.iisg.nl/publications/prolegom.pdf.
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Breman, Jan, and Marcel van der Linden, “Informalizing the Economy: The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level,” Development and Change 45, no. 5 (2014): 920–940.
Carwell, Joseph, International Role of American Labor (PhD thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1956).
Darlington, Ralph, Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism, 2nd edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013).
Fairbrother, Peter, Christian Lévesque, and Marc-Antonin Hennebert, “Understanding Transnational Trade Unionism,” in Transnational Trade Unionism: Building Union Power, eds. Peter Fairbrother, Christian Lévesque, and Marc-Antonin Hennebert (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013): 1–21.
Ginsberg, Roy, Demystifying the European Union: The Enduring Logic of Regional Integration, 2nd edition (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
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Herod, Andrew, “The Practice of International Labor Solidarity and the Geography of the Global Economy,” Economic Geography 71, no. 4 (1997): 341–363.
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Webster, Eddie, Akua Britwum, and Sharit Bhowmik, Crossing the Divide: Precarious Work and the Future of Labour (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2017).
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Bellucci, S., Weiss, H. (2020). 1919 and the Century of Labour Internationalisation. In: Bellucci, S., Weiss, H. (eds) The Internationalisation of the Labour Question. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28235-6_1
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