Negotiating a World Trade and Employment Charter: The United States, the ILO and the Collapse of the ITO Ideal

Abstract

Speaking at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana, Cuba, late in 1947, the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Duncan Christie Tait, a specialist on employment and migration, highlighted the potential for “mutual undertakings” between the ILO and the proposed International Trade Organization (ITO). Tait, as an observer, had joined delegates from 56 nations and representatives from other United Nations agencies in the Cuban capital for the founding of this new intergovernmental entity focused on commercial policy and trade. Indeed, ILO and ITO statements of purpose acknowledge significant commonalities in the economic realm, such as support for policies of full employment, rising standards of living and increased economic development, all linked concertedly to international trade. Tait, along with colleagues in the International Labour Office, was convinced his agency had a role to play alongside the ITO in facilitating world economic cooperation in these regards. Commercial activity, they assumed at the time, would increasingly extend beyond the trade routes of the yet industrialized North Atlantic, out across the Pacific Rim, from the Americas to the “Asiatics,” and on to the “Near and Middle East.”1 In all of these regions, international trade could help ameliorate poverty and low standards of living and mitigate the chances of mass unemployment through the maximization of production and incomes.