ILO World Employment Conference, 1976

Abstract

In 1976, the impetus that had been generated at the 1974 World Food Conference was continued and given a new and broadened, and for some, unexpected focus at the ILO World Employment Conference or, to give it its full name, the ‘Tripartite World Conference on Employment, Income Distribution and Social Progress and the International Division of Labour’ (ILO, 1976).⁴² As befitted the mandate of ILO, the conference was concerned with the problems of employment in the world but it also saw those problems in the context of the concept of satisfying ‘basic needs’ (which included ensuring food security but also other essential requirements, see below) and the changing international economic order. The focus on ‘base needs’ arose out of the work being conducted simultaneously at the Bariloche and Dag Hammarskjold Foundations and the IL0.⁴³ The decision to hold the conference was in no small measure due to the pressure exercised by the debate in the UN General Assembly over a new international economic order. There was also a link to the results of the employment missions of ILO’s World Employment Programme, particularly that of the mission to Kenya in 1972, out of which came the concept of ‘distribution from growth’.⁴⁴