"Confronting Labor on the International Stage: the International Organization of Industrial Employers and the International Chamber of Commerce, 1920-1946"

After World War One, two international business associations were founded whose key members were multinational companies (MNEs). The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) was created at the International Trade Conference in Atlantic City October 1919 and has been based in Paris since 1920. The International Organization of Industrial Employers (IOIE) was founded at the First International Labor Conference in Washington just weeks after the Atlantic City conference ended. Based in Brussels from 1920 onwards, the IOIE coordinated employers’ delegates in the tripartite structure of the International Labor Organization (ILO), while the ICC represented business towards the League of Nations. During the interwar period, those two international business associations represented businesses towards international organizations in questions of trade (the ICC) and labor (the IOIE), often in direct confrontation with international trade unions.
Based on diverse company archives, private papers, national public records and archives of international organizations, this paper investigates how MNEs based in the USA and Europe used the ICC and the IOIE to assert their primacy over employees in the determination of international rules regulating trade and labor. I partially focus on the way the ICC and the IOIE created a working relationship with the League of Nations and the ILO in the 1920s and 1930s and the concrete ways business was able (or not able) to influence the policies promoted by these international organizations. In a second step, I develop three case studies of the concrete influence of MNEs in key policy domains: the failure of a binding international regulation of the duration of working hours, the promotion of rules against the discrimination of foreign companies, and the fight against double taxation. The paper reflects on the successes and the failures of the influence of MNEs.