US New Deal Social Policy Experts and the ILO, 1948–1954

Abstract

The International Labour Organization (ILO) played a key role in the US approach to global socio-economic affairs in the years immediately following the Second World War. The US federal government significantly bolstered activities in conjunction with the ILO, part of the United Nations after 1947, fully aware of the agency’s significance in relation to post-war economic and social welfare. In its Declaration of Philadelphia, the ILO in fact elaborated upon President Roosevelt’s powerful January 1944 call for an ‘economic bill of rights’ insisting that all people deserve economic security and job opportunities.1 Roosevelt’s New Deal and the ILO both supported state regulation of labour standards and broad social protections through the idea of ‘social security’. After the war, two former New Deal activists, Frieda Miller and Arthur Altmeyer, took advantage of ILO support to push for greater, not less, state action in the support of workers’ welfare in the United States and abroad. But they attempted to make the New Deal global at a time when the direction of US labour and social policies took on an increasingly confrontational tone given a political environment in the country which was quickly turning away from the welfare state.