Reading ‘Class’ in International Law: The ILO’s Technical Assistance Mission to Egypt and the Interwar Colonial Labour Policy
By Mai Taha, Harvard Law School, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Legal History, Legal Theory, and Public International Law.
Please note that this event will be held in English only.
Where is ‘class’ in international law? How did ‘class’ become a subject of concern for international law and its institutions, specifically during the formative interwar years? In this paper, I study one aspect by which class became a distinct category in international law through the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) technical assistance missions. I focus here on the ILO’s technical assistance mission sent to Egypt in 1931. I read this specific episode as one that not only illuminates how ‘class’ in the semi-periphery became salient in international law, but also reveals the ILO’s entangled relationship with empire and capital as mediated by different international legal technologies. This was most vivid in the networks of relationships established between the ILO, the Egyptian Labour Office, the colonial presence and the Egyptian Federation of Industries (EFI). The ILO’s archive in Geneva tells the story of a top-down transformation of labour policy, but absent from the ILO’s archive is the story of labour militancy sparked at the beginning of the interwar period in Egypt, which saw a massive resurgence in labour activism, including the organization of trade unions, strikes and direct political action. Through the protagonists, I read the archive against itself and against the social history of the labour movement during this period when workplace demands often intersected and collided with the demands to end British colonialism.
I argue that the claimed success of the intervention hinged upon shaping a new politics of expertise through law that divided a fluid and hybrid sphere of social activity into rigid and separate domains: the technical and the political. The ILO’s mission categorized employer-labour relations in Egypt as an area of technical expertise. This process of streamlining employer-labour relations entailed both disciplining and oversight. It entailed law and rights. In fact, the ILO’s intervention laid down the foundations for a new liberal legal system that recognized basic workers’ rights as central tenants in the laws and regulations that govern any modern and independent state. I argue that the seeming disjuncture between the material benefits of this colonial and liberal legality, and the structural depoliticization of work is merely a chimera. There is no disjuncture. The depoliticization of work organically developed with a new liberal legal system that would function efficiently in a semi-colonial context. In a sense, the ILO was standing up to its initial postwar promise of social reform through law, while maintaining oversight on class and labour politics. The new labour regime rejected political trade unions, and instead worked toward entrenching a legalized and a non-political trade union movement that would function strictly along industrial lines.
Where: University of Sherbrooke Law Faculty, room A9-162.