The International Labour Organization’s Next Century: Economic Democracy, and the Undemocratic Third

A century ago, the International Labour Organization’s founding document, the ill-fated Versailles Treaty 1919, recalled that ‘peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice’. This idea of social justice, and its emergence at the centre of international law, was audacious because it demanded change. It said that justicewas creative, that it did not simply correct or distribute what was already there. It said that humanity could achieve higher goals, that people were not born for one job, and that the role of a just society was to ensure everyone could develop their personality to the fullest. This tradition of thought followed the conviction that we can expand our ‘capacity’, that we must strive for ‘human improvement’ and for ‘elevating the universal lot’, and we must attain ‘the utmost possible development of faculty in the individual human being’. As one of Versailles’ dejected negotiators would later write, ‘the real