The 1920s labor code defined workers’ rights without including the right not to work

Evidence

In keeping with the administration’s self-perceived role as tutor to the “childlike” races of West Africa, however, the new code had another function: to ensure that “the legitimate rights, well-being and security of the laborers,” as well as those of the employers, were protected. As Carde explained to the Council of the Government General in 1924, he had been surprised when he arrived in Dakar to find that, despite the large concessionary companies in the Western Sudan and Ivory Coast in need of abundant wage labor, no regulation existed regarding working conditions. This sudden interest in workers’ rights can, like the new instructions regarding cash-crop production, be attributed to Dakar’s heightened awareness that it could not afford to waste its precious human resources through ill-treatment. An analysis of the new code’s provisions nevertheless reveals the administration’s definition of those rights. Freedom not to work was certainly not one of them. “The goal of this projet de reglementation de travail,” a member of the governor general’s council indicated, “was to bring certain particularly backward populations of West Africa to civilization through work, and especially to make them understand that the law of labor is the basis of all progress.” 73 The provisions of the code fell into two groups: those that satisfied the settlers’ primary demands, and those that protected the workers. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 837

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows that ‘civilization through work’ meant compulsory labor, not workers’ freedom — a key concept for understanding forced-labor ideology.
• XREF: This paternalist framing of labor echoes how today’s development discourse still ties progress to certain kinds of approved work discipline, and connects to earlier chapters on the mission civilisatrice.