Labour Needs a Fresh Leader
The Hindu
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3405299.ece
May 11, 2012

by Vijay Prashad

On May 28, a select group of delegates will enter a
room in the International Labour Organization (ILO) in
Geneva to elect the body's next Director-General. Nine
candidates are in line for the post. The ILO's
byzantine process revolves around a tripartite
structure, with the employers (the International
Organisation of Employers), the workers (largely the
International Trade Union Confederation, ITUC) and the
governments sharing the task of selecting the next
Director.

The governments hold 28 of the votes, and the workers
and employers share 14 votes each. One of the
candidates, the former leader of the ITUC and a long-
time ILO insider, Guy Ryder, has been backed by the
ITUC and is well-positioned to take control of the
organisation. But with the world economy in crisis and
the ILO unable to break out of a three-decade-long
stasis, it is clear that Ryder's leadership is not what
the ILO needs. Mired in ideological confusion and in
institutional paralysis, the ILO requires a break from
the past. Absent new thinking about the transformation
of work and the decline of unionism, the ILO will
continue down the path of irrelevance.

Born in 1919 out of a century of social democratic and
Catholic working-class organisations, as well as out of
fear of the Soviet revolution, the ILO promised to
secure the place of workers in modern society. Rather
than the class-conflict model of the Marxists, the ILO
chose the route of employer-worker collaboration to set
labour standards and to improve working conditions. For
its first 50 years, the ILO forged about two hundred
legally binding conventions to shape and regulate
national markets. The modular worker was a man with a
full-time union job. In 1969, at its zenith, the ILO
won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Prize came just when two important processes began
to undermine the ILO. First, the social process we know
as "globalisation" broke the back of national markets
and rendered extinct the full-time union job.
Catastrophic declines in union membership across the
Global North came at the same time as industrial
production moved to the South, where union membership
was not low to begin with. The new worker was no longer
exclusively male, with women workers in "footloose
factories" increasingly the face of today's labourer.
Second, the Global North moved aggressively to defund
any United Nations agency that challenged the ideology
of neoliberalism, or privatisation of public
enterprises and freeing up employers against workers.
In the 1970s, the United States government withdrew
from the ILO and suspended its annual contribution (the
U.S. used to pay for a quarter of the ILO's budget).

A constrained ILO floundered. It was not able to come
to terms with the stark changes in the world economy,
and pressure from the U.S. pushed its secretariat to
make concessions to neo-liberal policymaking. The ILO
had to fund its programs from private foundations,
whose own agendas now leaked into this inter-
governmental body. As Guy Standing, a former senior ILO
official, put it, "the effect was a weary focus on
survival."

Rather than go headlong into an investigation of the
new kinds of work, the ILO has produced a set of bland
concepts that do not address reality: "decent work"
being the most shop-worn of the lot. One of the
problems for the ILO that Guy Standing identified is
that the governing body, which will chose the next
leader, is constituted by yesterday's economy. "Unless
its governance structure is made more representative of
today's world of work and social policy," Standing
said, "the ILO will drift into its dotage."
Unfortunately the leading candidate for the ILO post
was one of those who brought the current configuration
of the governing body into the management structure of
the ILO. This is precisely the kind of manoeuvre that
is fated to prevent any real change in the ILO.

Some of the candidacies are farcical. Tarciscio Mora of
the Colombian Confederation of Workers says that the
candidacy of Colombian Vice President Angelino Garzón
is a scandal while "trade unionists are still being
killed" in Colombia. Last year was the first time in
two decades that the ILO did not blacklist Colombia
(not long after Garzón's nomination, paramilitaries in
Putamayo killed Oil Worker leader Mauricio Arrendondo
and his wife Janeth Ordoñez Carlosama in front of their
children). The French candidate Gilles de Robien is a
nobleman from Brittany, a Count no less, which makes
him, as one ILO insider put it, a credible member of
the labor aristocracy! Sweden's Mona Sahlin comes to
the election after leading the Social Democratic Party
to its worst ever performance in the Swedish
parliamentary elections of 2010.

Apart from Ryder, two other candidates are from inside
the ILO, Benin's Charles Dan is the ILO's Regional
Director for Africa and Senegal's Assane Diop is an
Executive Director at the ILO's Social Protection
Sector. Two other candidates are politicians who have
worked intimately in the promotion of neoliberal ideas.
The Netherlands' Ad Melkert, a former government
official, was Executive Director at the World Bank
(where, as ethics chief, he is rumoured to have given
former Bank President Paul Wolfowitz a free pass with
his scandal). Niger's Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, a former
Prime Minister, was one of the architects of the New
Partnership for Africa's Development and of the African
Agenda. None of these men have a vision for the
revitalisation of the ILO.

The only Asian candidate is Malaysian economist Jomo
Kwame Sundaram, who is currently the Assistant
Secretary-General for Economic Development in the U.N.
Department of Economic and Social Affairs. While most
of the other candidates seem poised to treat the ILO as
a career post, and to allow it to slip into
irrelevance, K.S. Jomo's track record at the U.N.
promises an alternative path. When the financial crisis
struck, K.S. Jomo joined the process in the U.N. to
push its agencies to offer a "second opinion" on the
appropriate policy responses to the crisis. At the
heart of this was to rethink the neoliberal emphasis of
most policy. If nothing else, it is likely that K.S.
Jomo would bring this intellectual orientation to bear
on the ILO's work.

A new ILO report points out that the world has lost
some fifty million jobs as a result of the financial
crisis. Austerity regimes in Europe cannot bring
employment or lessen inequality. The election results
from France and Greece reveal the desire among the
people for an alternative path. The ILO is one inter-
governmental agency that should be capable of producing
the intellectual and policy leadership to tackle both
unemployment and inequality.

The world needs new thinking. A defence of the golden
age gone by might feed one's nostalgia but it does not
provide good ideas to move us out of the morass of the
present. Millions seek work and dignity. They do not
want platitudes. They want answers.

(Vijay Prashad is the author, most recently, of Arab
Spring, Libyan Winter, forthcoming and of Darker
Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World).

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