From Universal to Regional: The First Two American Meetings of the ILO and the Definition of a Latin American Labor Law Agenda, 1936–1939

In 1936 and 1939 the International Labor Organization (ILO) held two different conferences in the Americas. These conferences were unusual in both time and place: they were organized outside the sequence of the ILO's annual meetings, and they were held in Santiago, Chile and in Havana, Cuba rather than at the ILO’s headquarters in Geneva (where the annual meetings had taken place since 1919.) The meetings stand among other projects to regulate the world of work on a less “universal” scale than that advocated by the ILO. On several occasions, mainly in Pan-American meetings held in the 1930s, the possibility of an Inter-American Labor Organization was raised as an alternative to the ILO.

This paper underscores three central issues. First is that the treatment of labor was considered as far more central to the realm of international relations for the countries of the the Americas than it is today. Second is to recognize how American delegations contributed to defining a series of labor issues that they considered specific to the continent. Among the topics proposed by Geneva, the American delegates prioritized or added the following: indigenous work; child and female labor conditions; the truck system; popular food; agricultural labor; and the establishment of a system of labor statistics. Finally, the paper discusses these conferences as part of a process that forged a body of officials and intellectuals of labor law in Latin America. The meetings helped these officials to define a community of interests and to agree on the positions and actions that they should take in common during the decades that followed.