Undermining Our Sovereignty: The International Labour Organisation

Tim Owen
Opinion

The New World Order. World Government. Conspiracy theories? Paranoia? The truth is, world government has been quietly creeping up on us for a long time.  In fact many important building blocks have been in place for decades - almost a century in some cases.

The most obvious was the League of Nations, which was constituted after the First World War and then morphed into the United Nations after the Second World War. Un-elected, the elite technocrats and bureaucrats at the League, would know best what we needed and how our lives should be organised, would make and enforce the rules. The UN now fancies itself as the de facto World Government.  Issuing mandates and sending in troops across the globe.  Interfering in every aspect of human existence.  Ostensibly a platform for peace and a conduit for social progress, it provides the perfect milieu and mechanism for all those who would enslave or control mankind.  From the central bankers and crony capitalists who want to enrich themselves through leveraging the power of government rather than through productivity and adding value.  To the freedom hating social controllers of every stripe who can’t abide the idea of true human liberty.  Perhaps even more concerning though, is the raft of international bodies which have come in the wake of Versailles and the League of Nations initiative. There are a myriad of organisations covering every aspect of human endeavour. Let’s look at one of these.

A lesser known, but equally pernicious institution which spun off from the Treaty of Versailles was the International Labour Organisation (ILO).  As with all these world government/back door Marxism enterprises, it presents itself as the protector of all things good and pure and the promoter of all things wise and benevolent. Its Conventions are about ending child labour, forced labour and discrimination, among other things. Motherhood and apple pie, right? Who, other than the most evil user and abuser, could possibly object? Well, allow me to take a stab at it…

Here are three arguments to show why an organisation like the ILO is unnecessary; that its interventions and activities can actually slow progress towards its purported goals in the long run; and that it's really a vehicle for promoting world socialism.

Firstly, it’s not regulation which has ended child labour and other less desirable working practices in developed countries. Increases in productivity through invention and innovation have allowed this to happen.  For example, think of rural families in Britain and Europe pre-industrial revolution. They didn’t have their children help them on the farm because they were cruel or unloving parents or exploitative employers. They did it through necessity. They were not able to produce enough products to support their families without using their children's labour. Then, along come various pieces of machinery and innovative farming methods and now what took the labour of six or ten people can be done by one or two. No-one summarises this argument better than Tom Woods of the Mises Institute.

Secondly, regulations inevitably have the effect of burdening smaller businesses disproportionately to larger ones.  A couple of recent examples in New Zealand would be the Anti-Money Laundering Legislation and the Health and Safety at Work Act.  The compliance costs of these Acts for smaller players has made it impossible for a lot of smaller businesses to complete.  The net effect is that the ladder is pulled up for a lot of less well off folk who may otherwise have bettered themselves through business vehicles but instead now have to satisfy themselves with working for wages for a larger entity.  As we saw in the first argument, it is productivity and the accumulation of wealth which facilitates improvements in the human condition.  Regulations which have the effect of keeping people poorer, therefore, in the long run lead to less improvements in working conditions not more overall, even if they appear to have succeeded in addressing certain specific circumstances.

Thirdly, the ILO is a perfect example of the high-handedness of such world bodies and shows how they assume de-facto world government status. Whilst countries go through a ratification process of the various Conventions and some countries may not have ratified all of the Conventions (for example, New Zealand has only ratified 6 of the 8 Fundamental Conventions of the ILO), the ‘very fact of membership’ means that they have agreed to pursue all of the Conventions.  So, in the New Zealand example, we have not ratified the Minimum Age Convention, which sets minimum age standards for work.  Nevertheless, having ‘freely’ joined this body we are obliged to endorse this Convention and to work towards compliance with it, despite the fact that our government has not actually ratified it.  Welcome to the New World Order, citizens.

 

About the author

Tim Owen