The ILO and the future of work: The politics of global labour policy

In the late 2010s, the future of work gathered attention from the most influential actors in global social governance. The International Labour Organization (ILO), since 2015 and in the context of its Future of Work Initiative, aimed to position itself in the discussion by putting this issue at the centre of their activities for its centenary (2019). The normative and conceptual approach developed by the ILO in this initiative was named the ‘human-centred agenda’, aimed to align technological change with decent work and social justice. Although preliminary scholarly works have seen these efforts as a humanistic and pro-worker ‘countermovement’, a deeper analysis of the ideas and interests involved in the Future of Work Initiative reveals a different, more complex picture. This article studies the creation of the human-centred agenda led by the ILO secretariat and the Global Commission on the Future of Work, and how it was further negotiated and modified by the social partners in the making of the Centenary Declaration in 2019. In particular, it shows how business at the ILO and right-wing populist governments, in tandem, reoriented the human-centred agenda towards a pro-employer perspective, thus framing social and labour policy as a tool for adapting the workforce to technological change. It concludes with some reflections about the consequences of these developments for the ILO’s position in global governance.