ABSTRACT
Figure 19.1 The Atlantic Charter (1941) and the Declaration by United Nations (1942) 274
The ILO continues its work from Montreal
The activities of international organizations did not come to a halt when the relations between states deteriorated and war broke out, but they did decrease. The ILO decided to leave Switzerland. The American John Winant, who in 1939 had succeeded Harold Butler as director-general, regarded the situation in Switzerland as too isolated and threatening. In June 1940 the ILO was unable to hold its annual International Labour Conference for the first time in its existence, after the German occupation of Belgium and the Netherlands in May. Due to the new circumstances it saw itself obliged to cut the number of its employees drastically. To begin with, the ILO considered taking up residence in Vichy, France, as the French foreign office had put some buildings there at the ILO’s disposal, but this plan failed when Marshal Philippe Pétain used the buildings as his headquarters for the part of France he was to govern after his armistice with Germany. The US proved not to be an option for the ILO because the American government did not want it to become a haven for international organizations, as it told Winant. Thanks
to Winant’s personal relationships the ILO managed to move to a university campus in Montreal. Through the kind offices of the Canadian governmental representative on the ILO’s Governing Body, the Canadian government allowed the International Labour Office to take up residence in Montreal for the duration of the war. The city’s bilingualism and the availability of economic and law libraries were regarded as advantages. In early August the first group of ILO staff members and their families left Geneva for Montreal. Their journey took more than a month. The university chapel and facilities put at the ILO’s disposal were rather a disappointment, but its Canadian residence allowed the ILO to continue its essential services and to stay in contact with most of its member states. Many of them continued to send in their reports on the implementation of ILO conventions. The transfer to Canada, which had declared war on Germany in September 1939, implied that the ILO gave up its original neutral position and sided with the Allies. The ILO also made itself independent from the League of Nations. From its new location it began to see the world from a different perspective, one of the consequences being that it intensified its contacts with the Latin American states.
