The Centenary of the ILO 100 years after having overcome a number of crises / Takayuki Ando

While we all celebrate the Centenary of our mother organization ILO from the bottom of our heart, we must not forget the fact that the long roads which our organization has travelled in the past 100 years were not necessarily always flat and easy.  The ILO has experienced,  not only  the  very hard years  during  the  Second World War;  forcing the Office to implement  90 per cent  staff  cut (from 400 to 40) and  take refuge in Montreal, but also many other serious difficulties during its long history.

Due to the limit set to the space available for each contribution, I can only briefly touch on these. One  of the  most  serious  and  long  lasting difficulties  the  ILO  bad  to face  was  the confrontation between the “universarism” and the “tripartitism”, both basic principles on which our organization needs to function. The sharp difference of opinions on this issue  and the hard antagonism mainly between the employers group (and some governments, particularly the USA) on the one side , and the then Eastern countries on the  other, very much  disturbed the  smooth  functioning of the lLO, particularly the normal working of annual conferences and other  tripartite meetings, for many years, in fact since the mid-1930s when  the USSR  joined the ILO, until early 1990s when the East and West confrontation was finally dissolved.

Some of the other serious difficulties the ILO had to face, as far as I have personally experienced, were  the  introductions of certain political  issues  into  the  ILO  stages, causing  serious  confusion at annual  Conferences, first in 1963~64  due to the confrontation among  Member States regarding the problem of racial  discrimination “Apartheid”  in South Africa. I still recall vividly the big noise and shouting for and against the matter in the Conference hall of the Palais des Nations. Then a little later, in early 1970s, the hard accusation against the ILO by the USA regarding the so-called “politicalization of the ILO”, in connection with the conflicts among Member States regarding the issue of Palestine~Israel relationship, etc., which led to the USA’s suspension of its payment of annual contribution and finally to its withdrawal from the ILO for several years (1977~80).

This required the Office to take various hard measures for the economization of its activities, including staff cuts. In these difficult years the great efforts made first by Mr. Jenks, and after his tragic death, by Mr. Blanchard to maintain the unshakable position of the ILO must not be forgotten.

The ILO can function effectively only with a harmonious and orderly situation in the world.    Let us recall afresh the words inscribed on the foundation stone of the old Office building (in Latin), stating “If you want peace, cultivate social justice”, and also the words in the  Preamble to the ILO Constitution, namely, “Universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice”.

Takayuki  Ando,

ILO official from 1956-86

Remembering the Conference and the Editorial and Translation Division / Roberto P. Payró

Gone are the days when the Editorial and Translation Division (later Branch) was an important service, not only responsible for editing and publishing books and periodicals, but also conference records and official documents, translations, printing and dissemination by sales and otherwise. When I joined the ILO in 1950 the Division was headed by J.E.A. Johnstone as chief of Division, a Canadian Professor of Greek, rumoured to have Iroquois blood. He had joined the ILO in 1927 and worked during the war at the ILO Working Centre in Montreal. He was a personality, much respected by all for the strength of his commitment to the ILO and the firmness of his defence of editorial standards and of the interests of his Division. He carried a tradition of excellence in the publishing world, which had it roots far back to the early years of the Organization^[1].

The hardest task was assigned to us year after year as another session of the International Labour Conference took place. Basing myself on my recollection of the years before I was transferred to the ILO Liaison Office with the United Nations in 1957, this is what I can tell you about how we worked for three weeks every June.

Speeches made at the plenary sittings of the Conference were taken down by verbatim reporters[2] (for Spanish we had such outstanding workers as Enrique Martîn, Sorel and Manuel Carrillo (before he was assigned interpreter duties), and transcribed by themselves, or such excellent stenographers or copy typists as de Hoyos, Ricardo Dîaz Corpiôn, Isabel and Rosa Miragaya, and later, Emilio Forcada and Virgilio Garrote. Only rarely would an interpreter take the trouble to re-dictate a speech that had not turned out well in the language of interpretation. In most cases I remember, it was always Dick Roome who turned up at the Typing Pool’s quarters high up in the Palais to dictate anew something he thought he had not done properly on his first try (Dick was an excellent translator and a first-rate colleague, and this may partly explain why he was willing to help those of us who were on Conference Record Service duty.) Rather reluctantly, Mr. Johnstone would let members of his staff serve as interpreters. As a result, we were lucky to have on the Spanish side such good colleagues as Juanita Riley, Ana Marîa Etchegorry and Manuel Carrillo, and the English side had Roome, Michael Bell, Kitty Leibovitch, Jim Connolly, Patrick Denby and Hugh Jones.

The typescripts of all speeches were sent down to the Conference Record Service. Sometimes we were glad to see at first sight that the text had been improved by our colleagues in the Typing Pool who knew how much we suffered from the bad quality of interpretation (and more particularly from the fact that the style and the content of most transcripts needed to be adapted for publication; interpretation did not lend itself to immediate reproduction as a text written with care, unless the interpreter happened to be one of the few really talented ones, such as Kitty Natzio, Albert Kouindjy, George Dunand, Roger Glémet, Mrs. Kerr or, later, Camille Amacker, or was willing to spend time deciding how he or she would translate a prepared speech made available before their turn in the interpreters’ booth had started).

There, the mass of typescripts for a whole sitting would be distributed in any order among the editors, revisers and translators on duty. (Until the 1970s, the staff of the Conference Record Service worked from 9 a.m. until the end of business.) As a rule, there were only three people in each language team and the chief of the Service rarely called for reinforcements, because he wanted regular non-Conference work to continue normally at the ILO building by the lake. The composition of these teams varied. One year, the Spanish team would be composed of Martinez Mont, Sifre and Altimiras, and Elena Ochoa and Juanita Riley would serve with Martinez Mont the following year. Subsequently, Pepe Osuna led the team and Araquistáin, Payró or Xavier Caballero seconded him. The French and English teams were·more stable: Pierre Boulas was almost always the head, seconded by Bernard Spy, André Lang, Guy Cotté, Raymond Bas or François Moret, and the English team was composed of Nora Moffat, Molly Healey and Pat Norsky (née Boyd), and Robert Caldwell from time to time.

Rarely did we leave the Palais before midnight; when Conference Committee reports started to come in, we might be working until 3, 4 or 5 in the morning. I remember one occasion in the early 1950’s when Osuna, Araquistáin and I worked non-stop for what seemed to be 48 very full hours because the Spanish edition of the Provisional Record had fallen behind by a whole day.)

One person from each language team was assigned by Mr. Johnstone to keep a careful record of what went on in plenary. This record was called the “skeleton” and was used to note not only the order in which business was transacted and the names and accreditation of each speaker (including those who had raised points of order), but also, to the extent possible, the names of the interpreters. The latter information was useful: it let us know what we could expect about the quality of a transcript, thus giving us some insight regarding the time it might take to put a speech into shape.

Most speeches were copiously revised, since we took pride in the fact that anyone reading the Provisional Record or making use of the Record of Proceedings would find that the concordance of texts in English, French and Spanish was quite good and even excellent. Prepared speeches were relatively easy, even when they were read terribly fast because the delegate was trying to finish before the time limit of 15 minutes expired. But every now and then, practically everyone improvised and then we were faced with something much worse than the tower of Babel.

There were a few excellent speakers, like Léon Jouhaux, Pierre Waline, Sir Guildhaume Myrddin­Evans, Alfred Roberts or Arutiunian, but the others belonged to another class altogether. (For a couple of years I specialized in improving and shortening the transcript of speeches made by Mr. Tripathi, a workers’ delegate from India, and the Cuban workers’ delegate, who spoke at great length and great speed as well as with double the amount of passion and repetitive emphasis that most delegates would show.)

Then the main editorial team would check batches of typewritten copy, introduce typographical markings and stylistic or substantive corrections, ensure that the record of each sitting was complete, that the list of speakers was correct, and that all procedural questions had been dealt with in accordance with the Standing Orders of the Conference and long-standing practice. There were times during the Cold War years when everything came to a standstill when a delegate objected to remarks made by a speaker and it became necessary – according to new rules laid down by the Conference – for the President and his advisers to inspect the incriminated passages of a speech or several speeches and determine whether they would be expunged from the record or allowed to be printed. (Sometimes, the passages we were told to delete one day had to be reinstated the next day as part of a corrigendum.)

The next step was for the chief of the Conference Record Service to authorise the despatch to the printers of batches of typescript. In Mr. Johnstone’s time, he personally reviewed every batch of copy in the three languages before agreeing to their transmission to printers anxious to receive them as hours went by past midnight until 2, 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning.

Conference Committee reports required even more care. We had been trained to think in terms of a full cycle, so we knew that most of the time we were not handling reports of ephemeral value. The technical reports submitted to the Conference and the reports on the discussions on them were all part of a sequence that would not end necessarily with the adoption of an international instrument; we knew only too well that the precedents established with one set of reports for single or double discussion would be relevant and useful when a cognate subject was placed on the agenda of the Conference at a later stage. Editors meticulously verified the correctness in form and accuracy of the master language and of the translations of the reports and the draft instruments, conclusions, resolutions or annexes attached, and up to the last minute incorporated new matter and further changes communicated by each secretariat after the relevant Committee had concluded its deliberations. (Kundig once told me that, knowing that Johnstone did not a want a single page of the annexes and the report of the Application Committee to be sent to the printers before the Committee had completed its work late on the last Friday before the Conference closed, he had threatened to pick up copies of those texts he found lying about in the Delegates’ Lounge and start the typesetting some days earlier. The full report, together with the annexes, had to be distributed the following Monday, so one can understand printing plant Kundig’s reaction, all the more since the Application Committee report was by far the bulkiest. It was not before the 1970s that our practice changed and the printers were allowed to start typesetting as early as Monday or Tuesday, although this meant that corrections made at the page proof stage were heavy.)

The roneoed pages of the Committees’ reports would be covered with handwritten corrections. A lot of time would be devoted to cross-checking the contents in three languages before it could be decided to send the reports to the printers.

And what happened there? It was not only the printing staff that eagerly awaited the batches of copy we sent. Obviously, lino-typists and Monotype compositors would take several hours setting type and correcting mistakes, but it was our own ILO proofreaders and copyholders who were carefully reading proofs as they became available and marking essential corrections. They would again handle the same volume of proofreading after the printing staff had finished the page make-up and page proofs had been inked; it was often at this late stage that they had to incorporate last minute amendments sent in by the Conference Record Service. In all likelihood, these would concern the report of the Conference Committee on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations, and more particularly its annexes, since many delegates sent in amendments to the summaries of their interventions during the Committee’s deliberations, all the more so when the debate had turned against them and the countries represented by them were to be mentioned in a Special List.

The printing work, organising and controlling all external printing done for the lLO by old-style printers proud of their excellence at monotype and linotype printing and binding, but also for ensuring that ILO specifications and quality standards were carefully met through proofreading and other technical work done by our printing staff. The lLO was proud of the quality of its reports and publications. How could one be unaware of this fact when most publications and reports were handled by full-time editors before they were translated for publication in another language, and were closely scrutinised at various stages by the staff of the Printing Section?

At that time the boss of all printing work was Auguste Larvor, a convivial man outside his own shop but a stern boss when dealing with his own subordinates, who were ruled in the old-fashioned way which some may have called the master’s whip and not a glove. Larvor, like his two immediate successors – R.E. Charlton and Fred Richardson – was under constant scrutiny by J.E.A. Johnstone, the chief of Branch, who was respected by all for the strength of his commitment to the lLO and the firmness of his defence of the interests of his Branch. Mr. Johnstone inspected every bit of printed matter produced by the lLO and was determined to make commercial printers and lLO members of the Printing Section respect the golden rule that ILO periodicals appeared on time and Conference reports were never to be issued with more than 24 hours’ delay over the scheduled date of publication. Every June he did all he could to enforce the rule that the ILO Conference’s Provisional Record for the previous day’s sittings had to be available by the time delegates started moving into the plenary hall or the various committee rooms at the Palais des Nations, with an occasional delay, never tolerated beyond an hour or two, when a Conference Committee Report on a technical item for first or second discussion, on Resolutions or on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations, was placed for discussion and adoption on the plenary’s agenda often only six or seven hours after the printers had received the end of the relevant manuscript. The same schedule would be enforced whenever it had been announced in the Daily Bulletin that a draft Convention or Recommendation would be put to the vote at an unmovable time.

What did the ILO entrust to external printers in those days? Everything having to do with the International Labour Conference, including the List of Delegates and the authentic texts of any Convention and Recommendation adopted (which had to be ready overnight before the Conference closed, so that the President of the Conference could affix his or her signature on them). The  Official Bulletin, the Minutes of the Governing Body, the monthly International Labour Review, the Legislative Series, the bi-monthly Occupational Safety and Health, the  fortnightly issues of Industry and Labour, the Year Book of Labour Statistics, the Budget (which was then an annual affair) all Studies and Manuals, the Reports of the Director-General to regional conferences (and the records of proceedings of such conferences) and all special publications, were also printed by contractors.

There was no letterpress printing in the case of reports for what we now call Sectorial Meetings. In other words, the reports submitted to Industrial Committees and similar bodies were entrusted to the Roneo Section (the “roneo” machines were much slower than the offset machines installed in the late 1970s), and only the reports and texts emanating from such meetings were subsequently printed in the Official Bulletin. The same applied to freedom of association cases, available in roneoed form at the start and printed much later on in a special series of the Official Bulletin.

In the 1950s, the Printing Section had a chief (Larvor) and a deputy chief (Charlton), and never less than four proofreaders and one copyholder for each of the main languages (English, French and Spanish). They read and corrected twice and sometimes more than twice the galley proofs and the page proofs of everything the lLO had entrusted to outside printers. Those were the days when English editors knew that no error would be missed if Charlton had done the proofreading, but also knew how well Richardson, Veitch, Thompson and Norris could perform if allowed enough time to do their job; those were the days when French editors would infallibly applaud the work done by Deshusses or Dittert although they might argue with corrections introduced by somebody like Bachelet or Neuenschwander, and when Spanish editors were only too glad to have their texts inspected by such wonderful proofreaders as Félix Lorenzo, Salvador Oriza, Enrique Benavent and, later, Luis Echevarria.

We owed a lot to them. They would not let misprints or factual errors go unnoticed, they would detect passages where words were missing, they would question figures that did not add up, they would teach us the ABC about printing and about proofreading and, at least in my own case, made me improve my drafting by heavily annotating the typescripts I sent to them for copy preparation. Moreover, they made us take an interest in making ILO books look better and in knowing a bit more about the printing trades and encouraged us to visit printers to see how the work was done. And they worked with editors and revisers as if they were all part of the same team. Although it reported to a different chief, the Stenographer and Typing Pool was always there as another essential element in the processing chain. Whether under the direction of Mrs. Cacopardo, Mrs. Lawrenson, Rosita Daly or Isabel Miragaya, the Typing Pool was always willing to lend a hand. It’s staff would take dictation from all translators and copy-type heavily corrected  typescripts or handwritten texts from officials like me who preferred to scribble instead of wasting the time of verbatim reporters who could have taken down a whole speech in the time that took me to decide what turns of phrase and what words I would use in a translation.

Although it reported to a different chief, the Stenographer and Typing Pool was always there as another essential element in the processing chain. Whether under the direction of Mrs. Cacopardo, Mrs. Lawrenson, Rosita Daly or Isabel Miragaya, the Typing Pool was always willing to lend a hand. Its staff would take dictation from all translators and copy-type heavily corrected  typescripts or handwritten texts from officials like me. Indeed, for as long as I can remember some proofreaders were always made available to handle copy-preparation, copy-editing or sub-editing tasks, when editors were not free.

Can you imagine how it was that our Printing Section’s staff worked during those three weeks? I will give you only one example from direct observation. The Spanish edition of the Provisional Record was printed by Kundig’s at their relatively small premises near the Old Town. The compositors, some Swiss, some Irish, the odd Turk, some German, for the most part, did not know a word of Spanish. It would have been bad enough having to typeset a whole line or word by word from a good typescript in Spanish, but they had to guess what the handwritten corrections said and how they were spelled, because changes had been made by different hands and very often they had to deal with illegible handwriting between lines, on the margins or on bits of paper attached to the copy. Our proofreaders were busy with their own work but had to answer the typesetters’ queries and help them unravel what ILO staff members working in a great hurry had written by hand. The same happened at the Tribune de Genève, where the English and French editions of the Provisional Record were printed.

This was the heaviest work period year after year. We, the editors, revisers and translators and the small secretariat composed of Lucile Harrison, Juliette Palacios and Claire Chan, shared with the staff of the Printing Section the lot during the month of June, perhaps working longer hours because proofreaders and copyholders worked two long shifts. It was a hard school, but a highly rewarding experience that has left me many vivid memories.

Roberto P. Payró, former chief of the

Editorial and translation Branch, died in 2017

 [1] Later I myself was to become chief of the Editorial and Translation Branch from 1970 until my retirement in 1984.

[2] The English and French verbatim reporters included such well-qualified colleagues as Mrs. Gilmour, Miss Tynan, Mlle Boulaz, Mrs. Lapalme and Mr. Rogès.

Active Parntership – a constructive ILO approach / Björn Grünwald

Democracy has a tendency to become its own enemy. Oh, it looks very good on the drawing board, but remains a dubious proposition to manage in real life. Difficult enough when applied locally, attempting it nationally brings out many imperfections and imbalances. And internationally – well, welcome to the UN!

The ILO was conceived as a reaction and also an alternative to the violence that increasingly spilled over from military use into civilian society during the Great War. So much so that this became a first priority when discussions commenced after the Armistice, to provide instruments to handle conflicts, as an alternative to violence. An alternative to the Russian Revolution, as it were.

Only that the ILO was not invited to apply its principles in that part of the world, even though the Soviet Union eventually did become a member, finding the ILO a useful venue for its general political ambitions. So, eventually, ILO became one major theater of the Cold War.

Only after 70 years, with the collapse of communism, was there an opportunity for a constructive alternative. ILO reacted very rapidly, and already in early 1992 proposed an Active Partnership approach, offering advice and assistance to the countries which embarked on the very complicated process of transition from failed planned economies and totalitarian regimes, to democracy and market economy.

To handle this, a Multidisciplinary Team was organized and seven senior experts recruited to act as emissaries to, to begin with, sixteen of these nations. The very first projects – for Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine – were launched already during 1992, as the Team was being brought together. It was decided to locate the Team to Budapest, where it opened for business in January 1993. This was a major feat, getting something up and running within a two-year regular budget period – easy maybe in a company but indeed not in a slow-moving international organization of the UN family. Unfortunately, this meant that there could not be any major funds allocated for our first year, just enough to cover office costs, salaries and some travel expenses, but even this was indeed a great achievement.

Yet, we were in business and set our sights for the following biennium.  Except that the very success of this initiative made the ILO member nations take notice, and demand their own MDT’s. Which meant that we had to share what funds could be set aside with nine other such Teams worldwide, which left us almost as poor as before. And on top of this, in 1994 the US Congress could not agree on their federal budget, which also prevented them from paying their 25% share of all UN operations, which in turn effectively blocked any hope for expanding the operations of our MDT. Stalemate.

So, seven experts attempting to cover sixteen Central and Eastern European nations in transition, plus backstopping support to a further eight in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with almost no funds available for major projects?  After three years of such homeopathic efforts, if even that, we were totally exhausted, and almost ready to give up. Then it was time for an ILO regional Conference for Europe, late 1995, which was held in Warsaw.

Our Team, the Central and Eastern European Multidisciplinary Team or CEET, was invited. We went, convinced that we would be massively criticized for poor delivery both by the 26 countries we were assigned to support, and by the 24 other European countries.  To our utter surprise and dismay, we were instead unanimously praised by all three constituents of all our 26 nations, and generally applauded by the remaining 24!

How was this possible? Well, we were seen as the only major international agency that was seriously attempting to meet our constituents in their countries, working together and prepared to listen to them and their arguments, rather than just going there to tell them what to do. In the evaluation of the Active Partnership Policy that the ILO Governing Body undertook after five years, this was convincingly expressed by the vice Prime Minister of Ukraine who stated that each ILO dollar to them was worth more than ten World Bank dollars precisely because the CEET really paid attention to their priorities, and listened to them.

So, happy end? Well, not quite – even though much was indeed achieved during these first few years of the ILO pioneering dialogue with half a continent that had experienced the very fabric of their societies come apart at the seams.

Many mistakes were made, by the ILO and other actors, but much was indeed also achieved in the first few years when everything was possible, because there was then no established rule of what to do, and how to do it.

Or in the words of the first Polish minister of industry ‘it’s just a matter of re-creating the beautiful aquarium from what’s left of the fish soup the communists made of it when they took over!’

Grace Sampson: 50 years’ service / H.F. Rossetti

Grace joined the staff of the London Branch Office on New Year’s Day of 1926. She had reached the age of 16 years exactly four weeks earlier. She retired on the last day of 1975 and on that day, she completed fift y years’ unbroken service with the lLO, all at the London Branch Office. If at Headquarters, or any other out-stationed Office, there is, or ever has been, any servant of the Organisation with a record of long service equal to this, I should be very much surprised. I shall .also be surprised if her record is ever again equaled.

In 1926 Albert Thomas was still Director, which means that Grace Sampson served in the London Office under every one of the DGs. When David Morse was Director-General, he arranged for her to be invited to Geneva on official mission during the session of the Conference in June 1967. This was in recognition of her long and devoted service. And yet she continued to work for another eight years.

Mrs. Sampson had left London on mission on two previous occasions. In 1945 she was in Copenhagen from 15 November to 1 December as a member of the Secretariat at the Meeting of the Maritime Preparatory Technical Conference. The following year she was in Brussels from 14 November to 3 December serving successively as a member of the Office staff at the first session of the Textiles Committee and, immediately afterwards, at the first session of the Building, Civil Engineering and Public Works Committee. She thus had a very early opportunity to acquire first­hand knowledge of the new postwar development of ILO activities, in the shape of Industrial Committees.

The great bulk of Mrs. Sampson’s work was, of course, done in the London Branch Office. This does not mean that she stayed in the same place. The office to which the 16-year-old girl reported on 1 January 1926 (New Year’s Day was not then an office holiday) was at 26 Buckingham Gate, near Buckingham Palace. Later “homes” of the London Branch Office in which she served were in Victoria Street, Parliament Street, Piccadilly, and then, for her final year of service, New Bond Street. In addition to these offices, and literally more like a “home” than the others, was the Director’s country home at Rudgwick in Sussex, where the staff established itself for several years during the Second World War after the Victoria Street office was bombed. The daughter of the local doctor was, Grace tells me, recruited to help out with the typing when necessary. I first saw Mrs. Sampson when visiting Mr. Burge, who was then Director, for a weekend during this period of wartime exile.

Mr. Burge was the second and much the longest-serving of the Directors of the Branch Office (1924-1945). Mrs. Sampson worked for him for almost 20 years after joining the staff in 1926. Later she served under Mr. Robbins, Mr. Pickford, Mr. G. A. Johnson (on his short migration from Headquarters to London), Sir Guildhaume Myrddin-Evans, and Mr. Slater.

I took over from Mr. Slater on All Fools’ Day of 1970. Grace Sampson had by then completed her forty-fourth year of service and it would not be surprising if she looked on me with a slightly weary eye – the seventh Director she had worked for! (Even Grace had not arrived at the London Office in time to work for the very first Director, way back in 1920, J.E. Herbert.)

But if her eye was slightly weary, I got no suggestion of its being so. She was, and always remained, full of energy and enthusiasm. She had, by the time of my arrival, graduated from the girl-clerk of 1926 to the librarian, but she was a librarian with a difference. Her capacious memory and long experience made catalogues and card-indexes and such devices for helping the ill-informed quite unnecessary. She was of invaluable help to all inquirers after truth who visited the London Office, or who wrote, or who telephoned, provided it was ILO truth that they were after.

She occasionally gazed briefly into the middle distance where memories have their being, or glanced quickly over the shelves, before saying: “I think this report on Food Consumption and Dietary Surveys in the Americas presented by the ILO to the Eleventh Pan American Sanitary Conference held in Rio de Janeiro in 1942 might help you in your inquiries.”

Of course, there were times when neither the middle distance, nor the shelves, yielded answers to the strange requests for information put by visitors, and we had to have recourse to HQ.

Her departure on 31 December 1975, after 50 years of devoted work was a sad day for the London Office and the ILO as a whole. We shall not know ourselves without Grace to refer conundrums to and to help us in all the innumerable ways that have come so naturally to her kindly disposition.

Whether the Organisation will ever have a longer-serving official seems, as I said at the start, doubtful: it could not have one who will take more interest in its work or serve it more devotedly and well.

(First published in ILO World, January 1976)

100 years (nearly): ILO’s efforts to protect performers’ rights Coping with technological change – in a nutshell / Sally Christine Cornwell

A little known chapter in ILO’s history has been its continuing effort to protect the rights of performing artists (those associated with music, acting, audio-visual works etc). Until the technology for capturing or “fixing” performances in films or on records (phonograms) was perfected, performances were live and remuneration was mostly regulated between the performers and those who hired them.

With the development and increased use and distribution of recordings and films in the 1920s, performers became increasingly concerned about being paid for the repeated copying and use of their works. Moreover they felt entitled to protect the integrity of their works – a moral right.  Whereas authors had international laws protecting copyright dating from the late 1880s, no similar protection existed for performers. From the 1920s the ILO recognized that performers were workers who should be remunerated not only for their original performance but for any subsequent commercial use made of it, since such use “employs” the performer’s labour.

After 30 years of consultations among governments and different rights’ holders, the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations (the Rome Convention) was adopted in 1961. The ILO, UNESCO and WIPO have shared the administration of the convention. Ratification has been slow, but over 90 Member States have now ratified it.

The Rome Convention marked a major step forward by recognizing that performers had some rights of consent to the use of their works and could claim remuneration in some instances. At the same time, the Convention provided options to avoid or restrict the remuneration rights. The trade unions representing performers were never entirely satisfied with the terms of the Convention, but obtaining greater international protection was seen as an improbable goal.

Since 1961 technological developments and even more sophisticated means of communication (cable, videos, video discs, satellites, digital technologies) have simply multiplied the means by which performers’ works can be copied (even changed) reproduced, re-used, and re-diffused.

Over 20 years ago WIPO updated and renewed its international copyright and phonograms treaties, but efforts to provide similar international protection for performers in audiovisual works have not been successful.

In 2012, however, a WIPO Conference adopted the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances. This treaty essentially covers the intellectual property rights of performers in audiovisual performances (moral rights and rights and rights to authorize reproduction, distribution, rental and diffusion to the public) of performances that have been “fixed” in audiovisual fixations. There are, however, options to restrict rights: replacing authorization with remuneration and/or transferring rights against royalties or remuneration. The Beijing Treaty, with about 17 ratifications, will come into force when 30 States have ratified.

With these developments, what is the role of the ILO?  It has not been closely involved in the Beijing Treaty.  The most recent Rome Convention Intergovernmental Committee was held in 2009. Any future meeting is dependent on “new” developments, presumably the entry into force of the Beijing Treaty.  What is the future of the Rome Convention once the Beijing Treaty comes into force?  Some workers’ organisations have expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the new treaty and would like clarifications of the possible implications.

After 100 years of defending performers’ rights, will the ILO continue to do so?

Clearly the ILO’s continued concern for the employment and working conditions of performers, most of whom are in atypical forms of employment, will remain. The ILO’s Global Forum on Employment Relationships in Media and Cultural Sectors in 2014 provides a roadmap. The ILO meeting was followed by a trade union handbook in 2016, “Reaching Out to Atypical Workers in the Arts, Media and Entertainment Sectors”, prepared by European members of the International Arts and Entertainment Alliance. These are all critical aspects of performers’ working lives.

The question remains, however, as to whether the ILO has a role to play, and which one, in defending performers’ rights when their works are “fixed” and used and re-used in many forms.

In the past even the future was brighter / Peter Auer

The Global Commission on the future of work, set up in 2017 as a second step to the future of work initiative created by the DG, Guy Rider, in 2013, is in full working gear, organising technical events in order to issue a major report in 2019.

This effort makes me think that it is timely to remind of another major initiative on the same subject, back in the not so far past. In 2000 the French Ministry of Labour and the then Director General of the ILO, Juan Somavia, initiated a series of symposia on the same subject, coined in broader terms as the “future of work, employment and social protection”. I was then charged by the DG to coordinate these events in close collaboration with the French ministry of labour. Subsequently, the ILO invited  experts on the matter in the ILO, the French ministry, the social partners and the international research community and held 3 conferences in the years 2001, 2002 and 2005.

The first conference, organized in Annecy, France in 2001 discussed the need for the development of policies to provide security for workers in the face of growing uncertainties, which were caused by the forces of globalization, as well as technological and organisational change. Accordingly, the first conference discussed the large subject of the transformations of work and employment as a consequence of these changes and the impact of these transformations on work and society as well as the possible economic, political and social responses for increased worker security. (For details see the conference proceedings: Peter Auer and Christine Daniel “The future of work, employment and social protection: the search for new securities in a world of growing uncertainties” IILS, ILO 2002).

The second symposium meeting, organized in Lyon in 2002, focused on labour market dynamics and discussed trajectories of the employed and unemployed, life cycle approaches, the evolution of regulations and the need for well integrated policies. The concept of life long security, protected transitions on the labour market with varying periods of work, education and training, as well as the protection of risks at particular difficult periods in the life cycle of individuals was a core idea in this meeting. Balancing working and family life was seen as a particularly important part of modern, dynamic labour markets that increase female participation in the worklife. (see Peter Auer and Bernard Gazier ” The future of work, employment and social protection: the dynamics of change and the protection of workers” ILLS, ILO 2002).

The third meeting in 2005 was again organized in Annecy and found that globalization has indeed enhanced the overall well being of countries that have participated in globalization and have contributed to an overall reduction in poverty. However, in the public perception, globalization was increasingly seen as a job killer, affecting people’s life course negatively and a big driver of inequality. While it was found that most adversely affected are countries that do not, or only marginally participate in the economics of globalization, it was also acknowledged that that there are few policies effectively compensating the losers of globalization. The conference analysed these trends and patterns in the internationalisation of employment, looked at losers and winners and proposes new policies of compensation, based on labour rights and standards and on labour market and social policies  which build an effective employment adjustment and social protection system that leads to a fairer globalization. (See Peter Auer, Geneviève Besse and Dominique Méda “The internationalization of employment: a challenge for a fair globalization”, IILS, ILO 2005.)

In conclusion the series of conferences organized by France and the ILO posed many of the right questions and proposed a framework for labour standards and labour market policies that would allow to govern globalization at national and international level in order to make it fairer. However, the financial crisis starting in 2008, which needed ad-hoc interventions to cope with the negative impact on jobs, reduced the ability to build long term labour market and social policy frameworks that would accompany the shocks of globalization in a more sustainable way.  Quantitative easing worked well for private investors, but was accompanied by a reduction in public spending on social and labour market policies.

Also in the light of recent attempts by a major economic power to reduce globalization alltogether and install national preference, and the rise of nationalism in Europe and elsewhere one might ask if the paradigm “let globalization happen, but compensate the losers” is still accepted as a road map for developing standards and policies. What we see is that policies of compensation are superceded by protectionist measures, and one may ask whether the Annecy conference series was too overoptimistic on the governance of globalization by standards and policies. It is in this context that one may say that “in the past even the future was brighter” as this belief of being able to govern globalization in order to make it fairer is less prevalent today than in the early 2000s. This one of the important challenges that the Global Commission on the future of work will have to discuss.

* This is a variant of the saying in German “früher war auch die Zukunft besser” that is ascribed to the humorist Karl Valentin