Amalia Ribi Forclaz: The International Labour Organization and Housing Conditions in Agriculture, 1920–1940

Amalia Ribi Forclaz: A Light, a Bed, and possibly a Pillow. The International Labour Organization and Housing Conditions in Agriculture, 1920–1940

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In the early 1920s, the issue of adequate sleeping quarters and beddings for farm workers became the focus of the newly-created International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland. This presentation examines how the ILO addressed the problematic conditions in which farmworkers all over Europe were housed. It focuses on the way the ILO sought to define the needs of the farmworker and thereby assimilated as much as language from industrial settings as possible, identifying the ‘agricultural worker’ as a hybrid whose situation both differed from and resembled that of factory workers. The ILO’s investigations into the housing and so-called ‘living-in conditions’ of hired farm labour offers a glimpse into the complexity of labour relations in the agricultural sector and the difficulty of viewing paid farm work as just another form of wage paid labour.

 

Amalia Ribi Forclaz is Associate Professor in International History and Politics at The Graduate Institute Geneva.

 

Die Reihe Rural History Forum veranstaltet das IGLR mit freundlicher Unterstützung von und