Beginning in the mid-1930s, governments seized upon the idea of “social security” as a response to the crisis of joblessness and its accompanying social ills. The trend was especially significant in the Western Hemisphere. The movement mobilized in responssse to the 1935 US Social Security Act, a federal social insurance program set in place as a part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In time, inter-American discussions on the subject became so widespread that participants proposed social security be included as an inalienable right and incorporated into the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. President Roosevelt himself considered social security, in effect, a “sound means toward greater economic security.” Yet US policy strategists within the Department of State suggested that increased international trade become an essential component of economic recovery, continued peace, and future prosperity.Footnote ¹ The International Labor Organization (ILO), in conjunction with the United States and other governments, sought to bolster workers' welfare through enhanced job opportunities, social insurance to replace the incomes of those no longer able to work, and social assistance for those in need. ILO experts offered prudent legal insights relating to national laws, linking these to international standards to achieve economic and social security on a regional scale.

This essay explores this linkage by looking closely at the efforts of the ILO to promote social welfare programs throughout the Western Hemisphere as its endeavors in Europe were temporarily precluded by the advent of the Second World War. Aspirations held by members of a transnational community, including experts from the United States, Latin America, and Canada, converged within the ILO to promote a set of common, socially conscious development goals. These goals were furthered by international cross-fertilization, but they remained national in their implementation. Despite mutual aims, diverse actors disagreed on how to proceed. Important differences emerged regarding how best to relieve insecurity, what concrete reforms were possible within each national framework, and even how, in the end, constructive international cooperation might prove.

The ILO itself underwent a series of important shifts between the years 1936 and 1948 as it transitioned from its affiliation with the League of Nations to its inclusion within the new United Nations structure. In doing so, its administrators expanded their scope both conceptually and geographically. Beginning in 1936, the ILO took steps to nurture a coalition of supporters in the Americas and beyond who met and, through a series of debates, proposed a set of social rights based on labor standards. During a stress-filled period that encompassed severe economic depression, the rise of Nazism in Europe, and the Second World War, the ILO refocused its energies in three important ways. First, with significant moral and financial support from the United States, the ILO backed national-level welfare and public-investment measures meant to combat the global economic crisis. The ILO's connections with nations of the Western Hemisphere overall grew to be so important that director John Winant, fearing its demise with war, chose to relocate the ILO headquarters physically from Geneva to the Americas. In a second new initiative, while temporarily headquartered in Montreal, the ILO helped to formulate plans for inter-Allied postwar social policy. In so doing, it moved from prioritizing standards relating to conditions of work alone to include broad-based social security standards. Finally, despite the shift away from a US policy of social welfare diplomacy toward a more cautious engagement with international economic development, the ILO emerged firmly committed to addressing the challenges facing less developed countries.

The period described also proved to be a watershed in the history of inter-American trade with striking increases in regional commercial exchange extending into the postwar period. The United States looked south to expand trade with Latin America as European sources of supply and demand for goods shrank. US trade experts espoused hopeful expectations that increased regional commerce would indeed relieve the economic slump. Looking closely at the inter-American activities of the ILO in this period reveals how aggressively and creatively its leaders and their supporters moved to promote the connection between regional trade liberalization, social security, and labor rights—including the rights of women workers. All were essential as visions of commerce, shared economic development, and universal protection against social risks converged. Support for continent-wide social security alongside this escalating market interconnectivity fired a new, moral, rights-based discourse. Its language promised economic justice for workers of all nations. Social rights, defined here as rights to basic social services regardless of status, and economic rights, defined as rights to a decent standard of living, found a home within a liberal, capitalist notion of liberty.

Given these important shifts, what new perspectives might scholars gain by looking at the ILO's past to better understand the difficulties involved in crafting regional, and even global, guarantees for decent labor standards, economic security, and adequate social welfare? This article argues that key actors in the ILO were well aware of the implicit challenges in balancing national autonomy with international objectives. Many who wrote of their efforts to realize these objectives explained that no one prescription could solve widespread common problems. The best they hoped for was the coordination of complementary responses. Social rights in the end were to offer consequence only on the national level, defended—although not always enforced—through legal formulas. Thus, a tension remained between universal standards and their realization through country-specific labor legislation. Declarations, considered guides for all nations, outlined specific ethical, human standards.Footnote ²

The history of the ILO has much to offer labor historians interested in the evolution of social welfare policies. The conclusion of the Second World War signaled the end of an era of past difficulties, involving the failures of the League of Nations, a drastic international economic collapse, and a wave of nationalism that led to war. The horror of that conflict in turn stimulated massive engagement around the issues of international humanitarian relief, technical aid, and social development through the United Nations.Footnote ³ In the postwar years, industrialized countries looked to an era of prosperity through increased productivity at home and liberalized trade abroad. Yet people throughout the world also sought higher standards of living.

A communist trade union leader serving as Cuban workers' delegate at an ILO wartime conference elaborated this point. Workers and soldiers alike, he claimed, struggling “to free humanity from slavery and oppression by the Nazis . . . will not tolerate again, when the war is over, the bitter sacrifice of their lives in vain for a world of tomorrow which is the same as that of yesterday.”Footnote ⁴ Conflicts between nations continued over how best to initiate economic growth while maintaining social welfare. As was the case during the New Deal era, the goal remained harmonizing social policies, employment standards, and the exigencies of international commerce.Footnote ⁵

A New Deal for the Americas

Before the United States joined the ILO in 1934, many politicians, business managers, and labor leaders within the country looked upon its work with a great deal of suspicion. The ILO's tripartite structure, offering representation to unions, employer organizations, and governments, plus its stated aim of encouraging legislation for minimum labor standards differed markedly from the free enterprise philosophy prominent in the country. The crisis atmosphere of depression, however, added new legitimacy to the ILO's focus on workers' welfare. Employer skepticism remained, but labor union leaders, heretofore suspicious of any form of state-mandated regulation, began to change their views. Members of government also revised their outlook, from considering the ILO nothing less than a plot meant to carve away at the prosperity of the country, toward understanding its value in solving the problems of international industrial competition.

In addition to the Depression, with at least a third of the US able workers out of jobs, Hitler's rise to power in Europe caused serious concerns about world peace and freedom of choice. Soon after becoming chancellor, Hitler quit the League of Nations and with it the ILO. Within Germany, the National Socialists founded new workers' organizations, replacing German trade union leaders with fascist state functionaries. As the strength of independent German unions collapsed, labor organizations around the world turned to the ILO to support trade unionism on an international scale.Footnote ⁶ Greater ILO participation provided one venue for mutual support of workers' collective welfare.

The situation became grave in 1936 with Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland, and sentiments in Geneva reflected feelings of powerlessness to stem the quickly advancing tide of aggression in Europe.Footnote ⁷ As international relations became more contentious, some ILO members became frustrated by its ponderous procedures. The ILO had been established after the First World War to examine conditions of employment, discuss problems in an international forum, and offer solutions. But it had no recourse against countries that chose to ignore its work. Adding to the voluntary nature of accepting ILO mandates, its deliberation proved painfully slow. Individual resolutions initiated by national delegates might or might not result in a call to investigation. Final comment, by international convention or recommendation, often took years. In the interim, the ILO attempted to stay focused on pressing labor and employment issues of the day.

But if the ILO could not avert political tensions in Europe, it did manage to work out details of approaching problems associated with joblessness. By 1936 it had offered several conventions, to be introduced into national legislatures for their individual ratification into law, on unemployment provisions and social insurance. These conventions, attractive to desperate politicians, in fact remained closely tied to the aims of active—or powerful—members. As state initiatives meant to bolster employment mounted, ILO analysis informed their action.Footnote ⁸ ILO studies offered member-states a theoretical justification for government action. In his General Theory, John Maynard Keynes praised ILO research for its “consistent appreciation of [the] truth,” that national investment programs could stimulate optimal employment levels. He also congratulated ILO foresight in recognizing the value of international initiatives.Footnote ⁹ More than in Europe, nations of the Western Hemisphere turned to the ILO for both advice and inspiration. By the mid-1930s, such members were responsible for seventy percent of new ratifications, having successfully incorporated specific ILO standards into their own systems of laws.Footnote ¹⁰

ILO prescriptions addressed national-level dilemmas, and delegates used the institution as a forum to introduce and then petition for desirable labor and employment policies. During the Depression, officials in the International Labor Office partnered with various reformers, such as New Deal planners, as they attempted to influence domestic laws. Reinforcement for action on an international scale legitimized their own plans for crafting economically sound and socially expedient insurance plans to protect national workers. Coordination with other countries quelled apprehension about competitiveness. Visionaries thoroughly imagined a New Deal at home and abroad.

Several of Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet members saw the need for global action to deal with the economic crisis. First and foremost, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins supported US engagement with the ILO, representing for her an international dedication to New Deal-like social and labor reform. She also considered it an option, if possible, to accomplish by international treaty what might not be practical through national legislation. Capturing this sentiment, liberal journalists equated the ILO between 1933 and 1935 to a sort of global National Recovery Administration (NRA), with its codes of fair competition.Footnote ¹¹ In fact, attack on the short-lived NRA, which included labor provisions, further mobilized Perkins for ILO action. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was also spurred to support the ILO, believing it capable of revitalizing trade relations during a time of grave political difficulty. For Hull, the attraction of the ILO, and the League itself, rested in their support for liberalized trade.Footnote ¹² Approval of both the State and Labor departments was essential for positive US-ILO relations.

Official US delegates attended the International Labor Conference in Geneva for the first time in 1935, the same year the US Social Security Act became law. Their presence in ILO proceedings coincided with mounting dedication to the so-called Good Neighbor policy in Latin America. The change in US inter-American diplomacy reflected the need for both allies and trading partners in the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt justified greater attention to regionalism on the basis of a common desire for economic renewal. He well understood the connection between supporting the needy, aiding the unemployed, and containing destabilizing radicalism at home, and he applied the same insight to the hemisphere. In Buenos Aires in 1936, he pledged to support, for the Americas, higher standards of living “for all our people.”Footnote ¹³ Throughout Roosevelt's presidency, US foreign relations experts rhetorically outlined a new economic order for the New World based on common approaches to security in the region. This order was to be cooperative instead of competitive and aimed at creating closer ties between the United States, Latin America, and Canada.Footnote ¹⁴

Nevertheless, while US bureaucrats explained that pan-American security required economic and political cooperation to protect against “social risks” in the region, business executives looked to Latin America as an outlet for US commodities. Attempts to regain stability therefore took different forms. During trade negotiations with Latin American nations between 1934 and 1936, US industrialists with important government connections managed to retain many protectionist duties against competing Latin American products even as they secured lower tariffs abroad. This bargain allowed a flood of US surplus products into Latin America via reciprocal trade agreements.Footnote ¹⁵ But several countries in the region also hoped that enhanced domestic production might provide a way out of their own economic difficulties. Mexico, Brazil, and Chile were especially active in promoting industrialization.Footnote ¹⁶ Social security served as a convenient approach to overcome the problems associated with modernization as workers' relocations and dependency on wage work eroded traditional means of social protection. As US aggregate exports to Latin America increased in the late 1930s, so too did US imports from Latin American countries.Footnote ¹⁷ State Department officials maintained support for “the greatest possible volume of mutually profitable international trade.”Footnote ¹⁸

US social welfare activists working with the ILO proposed numerous ways to bolster the “continental economy” through new sets of social security policies. These included more robust social services and the international coordination of public works.Footnote ¹⁹ For the former, state-mandated social insurance programs endeavored to guard individuals against employment risks and, additionally, sustain purchasing power. More robust consumption would stimulate production, balance national expenditures, and thus achieve economic stability. The US approach came in part through the 1935 Social Security Act, initially including old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid to certain dependent populations. For expert Arthur Altmeyer, who worked extensively with the US program and later with international proposals, passing social security legislation was only the first step. He and others affiliated with the ILO envisioned evolving systems that would in time build toward more universal social welfare.Footnote ²⁰

On the investment side, the ILO also attempted to coordinate international public works to offer more people jobs, provide gains for various businesses, and improve national infrastructures. One approach to this idea, introduced at the 1933 World Economic Conference in London, proposed intergovernmental agreements to lower gold reserves, allowing central banks funds to finance national public works.Footnote ²¹ Another ILO vision sought to create an intermediary fund between creditor countries and those lacking capital, thus providing grant loans for projects. Programs focused primarily on roads, water transport, or the international transfer of electricity. The ILO seriously mulled over these proposals for international development, yet political events in Europe in 1939 served to limit cooperation among nations there. Even in the Americas, initiatives rarely got up and running.Footnote ²² Several of the programs' advocates hoped to return to the idea during postwar reconstruction—comparable in some ways to the future World Bank, except that the ILO form specifically linked foreign aid, public works, and labor standards.Footnote ²³

Although many nationalists in Latin America remained leery of US hegemony in the region as well as the overtly European focus of the ILO, hemispheric social security initiatives also had their Latin American supporters. These included Ricardo J. Alfaro, a former president of Panama. Despite a history of US imperialism in his country, including blatantly unfair labor practices in the Canal Zone, Alfaro, now serving as envoy in Washington, was motivated by the prospects of greater regional cooperation. A leading Panamanian intellectual of the time, he wrote often about the benefits of joint regional action in support of peace, justice, and prosperity. The 1936 Hull-Alfaro Treaty, in fact, included the promise—one never kept—of equal employment opportunities for Panamanians in their own country. Although rightfully skeptical of many US Good Neighbor pledges, Alfaro supported regional public works projects in the hope they would benefit his nation. One such project, an inter-American highway begun in 1935, aimed to provide a venue of transportation from south Texas to Panama City. “Economic highways” between north and south, however, needed to become “two way boulevards” for the Good Neighbor policy to become more than an empty phrase.Footnote ²⁴

ILO supporters within the United States backed programs for economic and social development throughout the Americas, yet most all had come from activists' networks engaged at the more local level. The Depression did not so much inspire support for coordinating laws, but offered the opportunity to do so on the federal and later the international stage. A core group included social welfare experts like Edwin Witte, Frances Perkins, Arthur Altmeyer, and John Winant, who served on the President's Committee on Economic Security (CES), tasked with designing the country's first federal insurance program.Footnote ²⁵ Activists also came from the ranks of labor feminists.Footnote ²⁶ New York labor economists Frieda Miller and others from the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) fully engaged with the ILO. The WTUL had initiated the first meeting of the International Congress of Working Women (ICWW) to lobby the ILO beginning in 1919, hoping to further improve industrial conditions for working women around the world. Miller, who was to become a major player in the ILO from the 1930s through the 1960s, traveled to Europe as early as 1923 to attend an ICWW conference.Footnote ²⁷ Back in the United States, alongside Industrial Commissioner Frances Perkins, Miller pushed for state-level minimum wage and unemployment insurance programs. These women, along with many others, worked to enact state laws regulating sweatshop and factory conditions. As they did, they cooperated with social reformers from other US states.

The Republican governor of New Hampshire, John Winant, focused closely on employment issues in the textile industry and therefore found common ground with Perkins and Miller. An advocate of progressive reform initiatives, Winant rose to prominence mediating a massive 1934 textile strike, as nearly a million workers throughout the nation walked off the job protesting low wages and poor working conditions.Footnote ²⁸ Winant was no radical, but a corporate liberal who readily cooperated with business interests. His New Hampshire plan aimed to “share the burden” of unemployment by cutting workers' hours, yet with a slight offset in higher wages.Footnote ²⁹ Meanwhile, he sought to improve social conditions for US workers amid fierce international competition.

Winant saw the need to alleviate the worst consequences of cutthroat competition within the country, but he also worried about a veritable textile war well underway by the time the Great Depression hit. Shifts in global centers of production, evolving over decades, had meant a decrease in the relative importance of American and British manufacturing and a rise in new manufacturing in Asia and Latin America.Footnote ³⁰ Hoping to keep more people employed at home, Winant turned to the ILO in an attempt to mitigate competition, specifically from Latin America. His interest in international labor standards and support for unemployment insurance were so resolute that in 1935 he moved to Geneva to work with the Social Insurance Section of the International Labor Office.

In early 1936, FDR lured Winant to Washington to chair the first US Social Security Board. This move created an important link between the ILO and the Social Security Administration that would last for decades. Also including CES research expert and future ILO activist Arthur Altmeyer, the board set out to manage the burgeoning Social Security system and guide its evolution. Adrien Tixier, a French ILO social insurance consultant to whom Winant had turned to for help, offered early proposals in reference to the program.Footnote ³¹ Yet Winant's time on the board proved brief. He resigned a year later, following a public confrontation with Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon, who had called the US Social Security program a “cruel hoax” in an October 1936 speech. Winant returned to Geneva and with significant pressure from the Roosevelt administration rose to be ILO director. Even then, Perkins and others debated whether it was better to have Winant at the ILO, working on the “foreign policies of the New Deal,” or at home rallying liberal business support for its domestic policies.Footnote ³²

President Roosevelt made it clear that the United States looked to the ILO as an institutional point of contact for statist social reform. He believed support from the Western Hemisphere would indeed save the agency from the fascist assault against democracy sweeping over Europe and, many feared, the Americas.Footnote ³³ He was not, however, the only state leader concerned with the ILO's usefulness on the path toward enhanced social well-being and economic development. Expanding measures of labor standards became a pan-American trend. Chilean president Arturo Alessandri, who initiated the request for the first-ever regional ILO conference in the Americas, also drew the parallel between social security and future growth through the ILO.Footnote ³⁴ As with many countries in Latin America, Chile already had a significant social welfare system in place, including extensive health, housing, and workers' compensation programs. Nevertheless, severe unemployment, an increasingly militant labor movement, and domestic political turbulence pushed Alessandri, a progressive if highly paternalistic Liberal, to turn to the ILO. Following on the heels of the 1931 Chilean Labor Code—part of a military-supported policy to encourage state-led industrialization—Alessandri passed a series of laws aimed at stabilizing social security.Footnote ³⁵ To do so, he took inspiration from Geneva.Footnote ³⁶ Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil, all active ILO members during this era, did the same.

Latin American political leaders nevertheless approached social security in diverse ways during the Depression, and the struggle between radicalism, reform, and repression became an important aspect of the inter-American dialogue. In Cuba, a dynamic coalition of workers and women activists came together during the 1930s around issues of civic rights and social justice. Fighting for a voice in politics, they carried their requests to international meetings.Footnote ³⁷ Engagement with the ILO served as a testament to a flourishing, and contentious, debate around social and labor policies.Footnote ³⁸ It came in spite of the military repression against radical activism streamlined by the US-supported Colonel Fulgencio Batista. After the defeat of a brief but violent revolution in the mid-1930s, Cuba, under so-called pax batistiana, ratified several ILO conventions on hours of work in industry, minimum wages, and workers' compensation.Footnote ³⁹

Mexico initiated its first federal labor law in 1931, the same year the country joined the ILO. Reflecting the social and economic needs of his country, President Lázaro Cárdenas's approach to politics in the 1930s involved an amalgam of nationalism, social radicalism, and New Deal-style reform.Footnote ⁴⁰ Between 1934 and 1940, Cárdenas took the initial steps in formulating a policy of social security within his country. In the end, however, he failed to pass social security legislation. Later, under the more conservative Manuel Ávila Camacho, Labor Secretary Ignacio García Téllez returned to the task of setting in place a social security system. To do so, Téllez, who became director of the Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social, sought out extensive ILO technical assistance.Footnote ⁴¹

Social security reforms often came through more authoritarian mandates, as was the case in Brazil under Getúlio Vargas. Even in this case, social welfare technicians played an important role through the Instituto de Direito Social (IDS). Between 1933 and 1936 the country ratified eight ILO conventions, later consolidated in the text of the Congresso Brasileiro de Direito Social. Regulating working conditions appeared vital for both political stability and future urban-industrial development. Vargas promoted his post-1937 Estado Novo code of labor rights as good for working Brazilians, though it combined with strict regulations on unions.Footnote ⁴² He claimed his program would lead the country to “economic emancipation” through industrialization.Footnote ⁴³ FDR, cultivating the favor of Vargas in the interest of positive regional relations—particularly given Brazil's strategic importance—referred to him often as a “co-author” of the New Deal.Footnote ⁴⁴

Given the escalating tenor of a “new American international community,” Canadian politicians also embraced, if hesitatingly, a shared vision of continental social security.Footnote ⁴⁵ Prime Minister R. B. Bennett introduced his own “New Deal” in Canada, using ILO labor codes as a model. The government ratified four ILO conventions within the 1935 Hours of Work Act and the Minimum Wages Act. Still, a cornerstone of Bennett's program, the Employment and Social Insurance Act, ran into constitutional troubles. Bennett, inspired in part by recent policies in the United States, had promised federal action against unemployment during his election campaign. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the law aiming to do so as an infringement on provincial authority. The Canadian federal government was only able to create a system of national unemployment insurance in 1940 after an amendment to its British North America Act, which allowed for implementation of the policy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Final social security proposals were later drafted with the help of ILO social insurance experts.Footnote ⁴⁷

In light of mounting activity in the Americas, British ILO director Harold Butler considered the Chilean proposal for an American regional conference a grand idea. He thought such an event would prove mutually beneficial, offering the ILO greater exposure in South America while stimulating “worldwide interest regarding the social problems in the region.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Chile's foreign minister, Miguel Cruchaga Tocornal, heartily welcomed Butler, ILO staff members, and national delegates to Santiago in early 1936. In his opening remarks, he stressed Chile's collaboration with the ILO and boasted of his country's ratification of thirty-three ILO conventions to date.Footnote ⁴⁹

Social welfare expert Oswald Stein, of Czechoslovakia, accompanied Butler to South America that year. Over the next several years, he and others with backgrounds in European continental social insurance greatly influenced the trajectory of ILO recommendations in the Americas.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Santiago, José Enrique Sandoval of the Cuban Ministry of Labor led conference discussion on social welfare following Stein's reports. Different national experiences, Sandoval explained, could certainly inform leaders of the region on how best to provide security for their own citizens.Footnote ⁵¹

Wages, however, served well as a main basis of economic security for workers. Frieda Miller, a US expert on minimum wage law sent to Santiago at the request of Frances Perkins, was the only woman serving as an official delegate. Before the assembly, she called for international cooperation on regulating maximum hours and for the protection of wages in the textile industry. Only a planned and rationalized worldwide industry would help working families on a broad scale, she claimed.Footnote ⁵² Miller's requests to consider minimum wages for women in all national settings met with mixed reception. Despite ambivalent attitudes from some delegates, however, defense against low wages and the backing of equal pay for equal work—meant to provide greater support through “wage security”—consistently garnered greater attention in the ILO from this point on.Footnote ⁵³

The first ILO regional conference in 1936 opened a dialogue on expanding programs to better address the problems facing laborers in Latin America. In Santiago, representatives called for attention to nutritional services and greater protections for some vulnerable laborers. However, the meetings also exposed sharp conflicts over thorny issues such as legal limits on minimum age for industrial work. Several South American participants voiced great resistance to Miller's suggestion to raise the ILO mandate for industrial employment from a fourteen to a sixteen-year age limit, claiming this would take away significant human resources in burgeoning labor-scarce industries. An ensuing discussion revealed disagreements over whether commercial rivalries could indeed prove harmful to populations and family welfare. Although Chile, Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina had all ratified an ILO convention calling for the international regulation of child labor, great resistance still remained. The confrontations Miller faced, however, led her to recognize an opportunity. Writing back to Washington, she noted the value of reaching out specifically to the women of Latin America. “If we can do anything about keeping in touch with women's groups [through the ILO],” she suggested, “the elimination of child labor might very properly find a place in our efforts.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In the coming years, the US Department of Labor's Women's and Children's Bureaus greatly expanded their international focus.Footnote ⁵⁵

Despite the ILO's intention to support workers' rights, significant problems arose in regard to compliance with legal employment standards in the region. Notwithstanding official enthusiasm within his country, Chilean labor unionist Luís Solís Solís bitterly denounced the deplorable conditions facing wage laborers there. Before the ILO's international representatives, he accused Chilean officials of failing to enforce the conventions recently ratified with great fanfare. Charging state leaders with resisting trade unionism, he called for greater ILO activity in South America. “We look to the [ILO] to help us in obtaining our freedom,” Solís proclaimed.Footnote ⁵⁶ Alessandri later showed his more ruthless side, confirming the accusations set forth by Solís, by arresting the socialist union leader weeks after the outburst. Back in Geneva, the ILO scrambled to arrange an inquiry into the case, but Chilean representatives countered the request as a violation of national sovereignty.Footnote ⁵⁷ Aguirre Cerda, a pro-labor, Popular Front leader, soon replaced Alessandri and continued to foster close relations with the ILO.Footnote ⁵⁸

Regardless of mounting Nazi military activities in Europe, work continued in Geneva and positive progress in the Americas encouraged changes in the composition of the ILO bureaucracy itself. By 1938 representatives from Brazil, Chile, and Mexico had taken seats on the ILO's executive Governing Body. Chilean social policy expert Alejandro Flores Zorrilla went to work with the Social Insurance Section as liaison for Latin America. The ILO appointed as many as fifty technical experts from the Americas to research committees and twenty additional officers to the ILO staff.Footnote ⁵⁹ Along with them, Columbia University economics professor Carter Goodrich relocated to Geneva to serve as official US labor commissioner to the ILO. As US liaison, Goodrich would report back to Washington on ILO activities.Footnote ⁶⁰

Neither US engagement with the ILO nor apparent New Deal legislative success at home, however, ensured that social welfare policies remained free from criticism. Not one country ratified a US-initiated international convention mandating a forty-hour week in textile production. Bad timing, combined with ongoing resistance to international regulation of working hours, plagued a series of conventions on hours of work set forth between 1935 and 1937.Footnote ⁶¹ Meanwhile, opposition mounted in the United States to more redistributive social security policies. During the 1939 Social Security Act amendment proceedings, an attempt to include national health insurance legislation failed, despite Roosevelt's bid for greater “health security.”Footnote ⁶² Historians consider funding revisions that year a major turning point in the history of the US program. Benefits expanded for eligible workers, but events signaled retrenched commitment to government support of economic security for all. Nonetheless, regional cooperation overall remained strong, and international social welfare diplomacy continued.Footnote ⁶³

The shocking news of Hitler's invasion of Poland added urgency to inter-American continental defense. With the first declarations of war in Europe and Canada, regional envoys met and proclaimed the Declaration of Panama, stipulating a 300-mile military “Hemispheric Safety Belt” around the nonbelligerent nations of the Americas. The area included British colonial possessions in the Caribbean. Again, Panama's Ricardo Alfaro encouraged inter-American diplomats—even in this period of crisis—to cooperate around issues of workers' rights and family welfare.Footnote ⁶⁴ Given US commercial interests in Panama regarding trade, Alfaro's backing remained strategically important. Negotiations ensued for the establishment of US-manned military bases to protect the canal from potential attack. In addition to stepping up armed forces, though, the ILO, in conjunction with its American members, offered proposals for an Inter-American Social Insurance Code, meant to construct a social security zone in the region. It followed a 1938 “Declaration in Defense of Human Rights,” aimed to protect the “humanitarian sentiments” of individuals beyond the direct reach of war.Footnote ⁶⁵ Panamanian president Arnulfo Arias, a staunch nationalist and Western-educated doctor, soon set in place the Caja de Seguro, or social security fund, as part of his own social reforms.Footnote ⁶⁶

Opening a second American ILO Conference in Havana late in 1939 amid the distressing news of war, Cuban minister of state Miguel Ángel de la Campa noted the vast distinctions on either side of the Atlantic:

Attention turned again to regional social welfare and the role of governments in supporting optimal employment. Several delegates, including those from the United States, called upon the ILO to investigate inter-American market competition and propose ways to expedite financial cooperation between nations in the region.Footnote ⁶⁸

The conference also revealed tensions over how best to provide social security for laborers throughout the region. Highly critical of economic imperialism, Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano urged attendees to heed the plight of the very poor, often rural, workers. An intellectual and unabashed Marxist political activist, he remained a vocal supporter of broad social welfare legislation in Mexico and throughout Latin America.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Havana, he asked the ILO to consider approaches to improve the “general economic structure” of inter-American relations.Footnote ⁷⁰ His plan called for review of all foreign investment in less developed countries by a tripartite ILO committee that would assess the benefit of financial ventures—for the host nation. Such a committee, he claimed, could aid in the conservation of the natural resources, ensure the due payment of taxes, and further the inclusion of collective bargaining stipulations in commercial agreements.Footnote ⁷¹ Hoping to use the ILO to gain his own allies, Lombardo Toledano increasingly spoke of hopefulness concerning future social and economic reform. He did so even in terms of rectifying the worst conflicts of US-Latin American relations.Footnote ⁷²

Lombardo's wife, Rosa Maria Otero de Lombardo Toledano, focused her attention on women in the informal sector, a group of workers formerly left out of the ILO's social insurance schemes, as she encouraged the ILO to act on preserving standards of hours, wages, and working conditions for industrial homework.Footnote ⁷³ Still, other Latin American women argued that attempts to regulate conditions of employment would never succeed “unless women be recognized as individuals fully capable of responsibilities of citizenship,” including the right to vote and join labor unions. Civic equality for women remained a vital issue for rights activists in Latin America, since only a handful of its countries had enacted women's suffrage. Mexico was one of the countries that had not. Women in the Americas had indeed traveled to Geneva to press international debate on their legal standing. In 1935 they had presented an international treaty for equal rights, defined as “human rights,” before the League of Nations.Footnote ⁷⁴ The call for investigating women's status worldwide thus began not with the creation of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 1946, but in the league ten years prior. The ILO was called upon to conduct studies relating to women's economic opportunities within various nations.

In Havana, Winant, now as ILO director, drew attention to the connection between citizenship rights and economic opportunity. He also encouraged ILO members throughout the region to endorse “fair and equitable” trade.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Havana conference itself stood as a defining moment in calls for “economic democracy” on an international scale. Participants enumerated details on social insurance, minimum wages, and specific protections for agricultural, indigenous, and women workers. The latter included renewed ILO statements on maternity provisions and the pledge to support equal pay for equal work. The end result, described as the 1939 Declaration of Havana, set out broad goals for workers' rights in the region.Footnote ⁷⁶ It stood as one in a series of ILO, and later UN, “solemn declarations” in support of rising standards of living and social security. ILO members looked back to the statements issued in Cuba that year for inspiration in their 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia and later the UN Declaration of Human Rights.Footnote ⁷⁷ In 1939, with Poland under siege, Cuba's José Enrique de Sandoval complimented Winant and the ILO for nurturing “the bonds that unite the New World to Geneva.”Footnote ⁷⁸

By 1940, though, escalating war in Europe served to alter US priorities. Anglo-American commitments, plus the war itself, began to overshadow US relations with Latin America through the ILO. Yet Winant took measures to ensure the agency would remain within the purview of Western Hemisphere leaders. Fearing the ILO would languish in war-ravaged Europe, he moved its headquarters across the Atlantic, to the campus of McGill University in Montreal, during the summer of 1940. He did so to ensure the ILO remained “a spearhead of social and economic freedom.”Footnote ⁷⁹ An Emergency Committee took over significant day-to-day control, led by the now Governing Body chairman, US economist Carter Goodrich. With the ILO in Canada, relatively close to Washington, Goodrich intensified contact with the White House on his activities.Footnote ⁸⁰

Meanwhile, war strategists of all types descended upon Montreal, including British diplomats nurturing close relations with North America. They further justified inclusion in the inter-American system based on British Commonwealth possessions in the Western Hemisphere. In Montreal, advanced plans for manpower and materials procurement took shape. Beyond military tactical concerns, the ILO continued to focus on workers' welfare. In Canada, however, the ILO was constantly plagued by financial difficulties, as even supporters were forced to decrease or even stop payments during the war. Realizing the need to keep the ILO alive, Winant traveled throughout South and Central America to secure ongoing financial commitments.Footnote ⁸¹ Within this somber atmosphere the ILO focused exclusively on plans for peace as the drafting of conventions ceased completely.

Social welfare advocates throughout the region continued to find inspiration in the ongoing expressions of President Roosevelt. In what became known as the Four Freedoms speech, he spoke of the need for an immediate improvement in the US “social economy” through job pensions, unemployment insurance, and greater access to medical care. “Just as our national policy in internal affairs has been based upon a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all our fellow men within our gates,” the President noted, “so our national policy in foreign affairs has been based on a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all nations, large and small.” As had been stated in the Declaration of Havana, Roosevelt offered legitimacy to the notion of social rights for all. The president promised that countries engaged in the fight to support democracy against totalitarian tyranny could achieve, alongside the United States itself, “freedom from want.”Footnote ⁸²

Indicative of the importance of the Anglo-American ties at that conjuncture, Winant left the ILO in 1941 to serve as US ambassador in London, but his work there remained closely in tune with the ILO. FDR recognized the vital importance of positive labor relations with Britain, and Winant had become internationally known as an expert in that field. Hostile to Nazi control of Europe, he replaced Joseph Kennedy, a notorious German appeaser. Throughout the long and difficult war, Winant would serve as a staunch defender of a New Deal-style social agenda before British laborites.Footnote ⁸³ “We have the courage to defeat poverty as we are defeating fascism,” he exclaimed to a group of miners in England once the United States had joined the fighting, “and we must translate it into action with the same urgency and unity of purpose that we have won from our comradeship in this war.”Footnote ⁸⁴ New Deal legislative experts, including Frieda Miller and Benjamin Cohen, accompanied Winant to London as special assistants.Footnote ⁸⁵ Even Carter Goodrich served as a member of the US consular service to Great Britain during Winant's tenure. The team served as a link between trans-Atlantic social policy experts during the war as the ILO gained even greater prestige. Thus it was Winant, a fellow social reformer, that FDR held in confidence regarding Anglo-American affairs. Nevertheless, Secretary of State Hull, a former Tennessee congressman ideologically opposed to trade barriers, was the man called upon to streamline Washington's plans for economic reconstruction.Footnote ⁸⁶

Articulating the commitment to a future of peace and prosperity, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter later that year. It pledged “that all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from want . . . with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security.” Winant later claimed it was he who encouraged the president to include words in support of the ILO's mission for higher labor standards and social security.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet Winant's ILO replacement, Edward Phelan, was quick to outline an even more expansive postwar “social mandate,” meant to broaden the social and economic compass of the ILO. Phelan, an Irishman associated with the ILO since 1919, called for the coordination of an ILO-led international social policy. Its focus, he claimed, was to eliminate unemployment, provide equality of occupational opportunity, improve social insurance programs, and institute wage policies to secure for workers “a just share of the fruits of progress.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The ILO, meanwhile, organized technical assistance programs in the Americas in the defense of workers' rights.

President Roosevelt highlighted the efforts of the ILO, inviting delegates attending its October 1941 conference in New York to meet for a final session at the White House. In an address broadcast on national radio, he praised the ILO, calling it a “parliament for man's justice.” Drawing the connection between labor rights and the principles of international collaboration, FDR directly related US social policy aims to the ILO's support of social security. He promised that, through the ILO, the United States and other countries would work to build a stable international system based on social justice for people everywhere. The president lauded the ILO for its role in advancing social insurance systems, international public works, and “the channels of world trade.” Once peace came, FDR contended, these factors would ensure “there must be a more abundant life for the masses of the people of all countries.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Nonetheless, after the US entered the war a mere month later, Washington bureaucrats essentially ignored the economic plight of workers in the continental south, although Lend Lease credit funds did flow to Latin American countries for military and industrialization projects.Footnote ⁹⁰ Social insurance experts did, however, remain active throughout the region, and Latin American countries continued to turn to the ILO for guidance with social welfare. Oswald Stein and others offered actuarial support to Mexican social security administrators upon their requests. Miguel García Cruz, chief of the Mexican Social Insurance Department, noted that industrial growth in his country would be “synchronized with the gestation and birth of social security.”Footnote ⁹¹ Earlier ILO proposals from Santiago and Havana inspired the Mexican Social Insurance Bill, he noted, and the competent services of ILO specialists contributed to its arrangements. Stein also pushed on with other labor missions, crisscrossing South America by plane in 1942. His meetings in Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile importantly earned the ILO extra revenue as he worked to extend region-wide welfare services.Footnote ⁹²

Social security, advancing within the circle of inter-American nations—notably including Britain—developed and evolved within unique country-specific contexts. Still, a transnational group of trained professionals made possible the interface between the national and international stages.Footnote ⁹³ Personal interactions mattered a great deal. Stein conducted a series of lectures at the US Social Security Board's offices. He and others also kept in contact with William Beveridge in Britain as he was finalizing proposals for a postwar national welfare system included in his report, Social Insurance and Allied Services.Footnote ⁹⁴ The text projected a social security plan meant to “free the British people from want” through the integration of social insurance, government assistance, and supplementary voluntary insurance.Footnote ⁹⁵ Arthur Altmeyer, now leading a special US Committee on Labor Standards and Social Security, kept President Roosevelt informed on Beveridge's work.Footnote ⁹⁶ That spring FDR released his own National Resource Planning Board (NRPB) report, Security, Work, and Relief Policies, outlining even more extensive measures for the United States.Footnote ⁹⁷ In the end, however, it was Beveridge who captured international attention by offering clear, direct aims for the potential postwar welfare state.Footnote ⁹⁸ The NRPB report proved for critics to be too vast and too vague, a “grab bag” of leftover New Deal proposals.Footnote ⁹⁹

Seeking to expand these national formulas into the international realm, the ILO summoned an impressive cast of social security experts to Montreal in the summer of 1943 to help draft an “International Charter of Social Security.” Beveridge, on tour in North America promoting his program, was there, as was the Canadian minister of pensions and national health, Ian Mackenzie. Leonard Marsh, the author of the Canadian social security report who was working at McGill University, attended as well. Stein and others led the discussion, outlining the ILO's work on international social welfare coordination in Latin America. Much effort had been channeled through the Inter-American Committee to Promote Social Security. As a testament to Americas-wide interest in a regional social charter, representatives from Chile, Cuba, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador also participated in this 1943 “Montreal Consultation.” Calling social security a “dynamic concept,” ILO hosts and attendees formulated a blueprint for the agency's postwar goals.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King offered his support for the project, noting the “heavy responsibility” facing the ILO for the improvement of labor standards during the transformation from war to peace.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The plan emerged within the 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia, touted by the US press as a “charter based on the Four Freedoms.” Even Mexico's skeptical Lombardo Toledano expressed his anticipation. “We face a future full of promise,” he proclaimed during the conference proceedings, including “expectations about the splendid fruits of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, which has opened a new era in the history of inter-American relations.” US actions, Lombardo contended, had made it possible to aspire to guarantees, the world over, “for the right to work, the right to justice . . . and the right to peace.”Footnote ¹⁰² The declaration outlined robust economic proposals for fair trade and the social advancement of developing nations. Its social security stipulations combined significant details from Beveridge's propositions, but also from Security, Work, and Relief and Latin American programs calling for general well-being and development.Footnote ¹⁰³ The ILO asked member states to support income security through full employment, public health care, and a wide array of social welfare programs,

Future International Labor Conferences would, it claimed, “scrutinize all international and financial policies in light of these fundamental objectives.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Statements thus suggested that the ILO become a supervisory body for global economics.

Difficulties between US delegates and others in the ILO became increasingly common as criticism mounted in Washington regarding the ILO's role in postwar international affairs. In fact, the position of the State Department had been changing dramatically, and 1944 can be considered an important hinge point in the crafting of US foreign policy. Thanks to outlines drafted by Hull and his counselors, looking toward the creation of other “more appropriate” organizations to safeguard global financial stability and stimulate development, bureaucrats began to draw a distinction between international economic and social agendas. Inter-Allied planners would soon meet in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to propose a new set of institutions they felt could better promote financial coordination and foreign trade. An International Trade Organization (ITO) was slated to take precedence over the ILO in matters of commercial exchange. Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, a member of FDR's “Brain Trust” assigned to head the department's sub-committee on Economic Reconstruction, in fact issued instructions for the US delegation in Philadelphia along these lines: The ILO would continue to deal with questions of wages and conditions of work, technical training, industrial health and safety, and social security. It would not, based on emerging US policy, become involved in “other economic areas,” such as regulating international investment, commercial policy, trade, or the production or distribution of foodstuffs. The outlines Berle unveiled directly conflicted with several of the ILO's 1944 aims and, importantly, left out ILO supervision of agricultural labor from the US point of view. Indeed, these statements now proposed a limitation on the power of the ILO in terms of economic concerns.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Accordingly, Carter Goodrich registered a complaint against use of the term “state duty” in international agreements to ensure rights of employment, conceding to the tenor of emerging US position. In reaction, an Australian government delegate, highly disparaging of the US position, offered a challenge. Given that a full employment policy was safe on its way to becoming adopted in Australia, Canada, and Britain, he chided Goodrich: “Not here and not now for the U.S., but it must well be in the future.” It would be a tremendous blow, he contended, if it were “that the nation primarily responsible for the Atlantic Charter and Freedom from Want . . . proved unwilling to undergo obligations without which these declarations could not be brought into effect.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Latin American countries appealed to the international community during the proceedings for continued financial and technical assistance to modernize their economies and industrial sectors.

Events unfolding over the following years suggested that workers in Latin America would in all essence lose the peace in reference to balancing domestic economic growth and social objectives. Diplomats from Washington refused to commit to aid for countries to the south and rejected proposals for development planning. Debates set the United States in opposition to Latin American social activists arguing against “economic vassalage to the more industrialized countries.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The 1945 Economic Charter of the Americas supported free trade and unrestrained foreign capital investment throughout the region. Mexican, Cuban, and Panamanian officials, not ready to let earlier promises slip away, insisted on a resolution to ensure “the principles of international law for the safeguarding of the essential rights of man.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Panama specifically urged legal experts to draft statements on postwar expectations regarding social and economic rights, which they hoped would be included in founding documents of the United Nations.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Even with the April 1945 death of FDR, who had only recently called for a “second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all,” ILO supporters such as Altmeyer and Winant were determined to push for its active role in the postwar world.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Winant sent word from London, attempting to impress upon US officials that the ILO, with its long experience in international relations and unique tripartite structure, must not be put in a subordinate position. Rather, he envisioned the ILO as a leading UN institution, ensuring that industrial matters be considered in global economic and social relations.Footnote ¹¹¹ Altmeyer continued to play an active role in the ILO and, alongside others such as director of the Mexican Institute of Social Security Ignacio García Téllez, worked toward further coordination of inter-American standards.Footnote ¹¹²

After the war, several Latin American legal groups, still clinging to hopes of shared prosperity, presented drafts for an “international bill of rights,” calling for continued commitment to social objectives. Struggles against the hardships of depression and then war, the lingering burden of imperialism in the region, and internal fights against various forms of dictatorships and authoritarianism had sharpened their demands. Versions came from Cuba, Chile, and Panama, with the latter introduced by Ricardo Alfaro himself. These documents eventually became the first that Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafter John P. Humphrey of McGill University referred to in terms of social security.Footnote ¹¹³

By the 1948 founding of the Organization of the American States (OAS) in Bogotá, Colombia, the United States proved unwilling to commit to hemispheric social welfare coordination. A Mr. Jamison from the State Department recalled discussions there, where the United States, as “a strict minority of one,” skirted a commitment to region-wide full employment policies as advocated by the ILO.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Reflecting a fracture in the ever-fragile inter-American system, Canada refused to join the OAS, arguing instead that it could encourage positive regional relations best by remaining free from their conflicts.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Despite these disagreements, Latin American countries proposed a Bogotá Declaration affirming the “essential liberties” of a system of workers' protections, including the right to work, fair remuneration, and social security.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Up to this point, the International Labor Office had pushed further with statements on economic development, proposing their own “Industrial Relations Charter for the Americas” for the protection of unions and workers' collective rights.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Edward Phelan did not refrain from commenting on issues of foreign investments, industrial development, and cost of living details as they related to labor and social conditions.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In fact, he and others still in the ILO's Montreal Office sought protocols through which poor countries could improve their economic strength in the hope of implementing lasting labor policy reforms. Yet Phelan was near retirement, and the tables turned in 1948 with the election of David Morse as ILO director. The transition put the United States back in control as the ILO returned to Geneva. Morse continued to lead the agency in the direction of technical assistance—using extensive experience in Latin America as precedent. Nonetheless, US views on development took a significant turn in the postwar years, moving away from the visions of social improvement of the 1930s. Facing a very different international context, US leaders focused attention not on the forward march of fascism, but economic and political competition from the Soviet Union. As they did, social scientific “modernization theory” aimed specifically at development in a postcolonial world, supplanting a social democratic perspective among many US liberal reformers. These new sociological strategies, concerned with transitions taking place within emerging countries, did recognize the need for the social welfare state. But the model called for improved living standards as a matter of individual rights, rather than providing a system-wide analysis of opportunities and workers' rights per se.Footnote ¹¹⁹

To the disappointment of social democratic groups throughout the Americas, by 1948 US postwar foreign policy had fully diverted from New Deal-era social welfare diplomacy conducted in part through the ILO. Whereas social rights demanded the use of state resources, US domestic reconsideration of the government's role in the economy meant that such rights proved problematic. US strategists began in earnest to revise the country's position on social rights, now determined “unenforceable” since these were “economically impossible of realization.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Hemispheric solidarity did in fact remain a key goal in Washington, but policies privileged trade liberalization over shared development, ultimately leading to US market domination throughout the hemisphere.

The trend to support transnational social security did for a time encourage prominent officials in the Western Hemisphere to take advantage of the resources offered by the ILO. In the US this position developed within the context of the New Deal, later coupled with the need for both allies and popular political support during war. All the while, though, there existed significant variation in goals between advocates of market growth through “free trade” and those focusing their attention on both trade and economic opportunities for workers through more robust social welfare measures. The willingness of certain Latin American leaders to utilize the ILO for the realization of social security on the national level also signaled a new phase in their internationalism and, importantly, their industrial growth. At the end of the war, nations throughout the region looked forward to the prospects of “full economic and political nationhood.”Footnote ¹²¹ To a great extent, this proved true for rapidly developing countries such as Brazil and Mexico and for those with a particularly strong historical legacy of US imperialism, such as Cuba and Panama. Activists across the Americas attempted to integrate calls for social equality, workers' rights, and social security within a discourse on human rights.

Although ILO efforts did not ultimately achieve guarantees of social and economic rights or the expansion of labor standards evenly throughout the region, inter-American exchanges did serve to help frame social security goals within receptive countries. To do so, specialists working with the International Labor Office offered basic outlines for the creation or the further evolution of welfare programs. Income, health, and other social benefits administered through various social protection schemes remained vitally important to both individuals and national economies. Interestingly, the ILO's influence on social security in the region came prior to its international convention. When it was finally established in 1952, very few countries in the Western Hemisphere ratified the Minimum Standards of Social Security Convention. It is important, therefore, to point out that the ILO's relevance may indeed reach further than its formal ratification mechanism suggests. Pushed forward by the dual crisis of depression and war, social security emerged as an alternative to widespread income loss within many ILO member states, connected securely with the desire for future economic development. The associations between social welfare, trade, and labor standards of the era deserve attention, particularly in light of the challenges facing both nations and workers in the wake of a new financial crisis with its detrimental effects on employment worldwide.