The ILO framed social justice as a defense against unrest threatening empire and peace.

Evidence

The pacifying vision of social order expressed in the UDHR did owe much to the ILO’s founding premise that labour conditions involving ‘injustice, hardship and privation to large numbers of people’ would lead to ‘unrest’ and imperil the ‘peace and harmony of the world’. The foundation of the ILO, and its commitment to social justice, were a recognition of the threat that demands for equality and economic rights posed to social peace and to the ‘political integrity of existing empires and states’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 188

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Whyte’s broader argument about rights discourse serving pacification, and echoes Marxist readings of welfare as capitalist stabilization (cf. Against Postmodernism). — connects to: The ILO propagated a European-administered moral order that normalised colonial wage labour — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 241

Broader Connections

• The ILO propagated a European-administered moral order that normalised colonial wage labour #expands (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 241