 So welcome everyone. For those of you who don't know, there are some here who don't and many do. My name is Camille Cameron and I've got the privilege to be the dean here. And of course I'd like to begin as we do by acknowledging that we're all gathered here today on traditional magma territory. We've got many excellent lecture series here at the Schulich School of Law and one of those, and in fact the one of longest standing is the Reed Lecture. The Reed Lecture was established to honor the memory of Horace E. Reed who was the dean of the law school from 1950 to 1964. It was established as a joint project of the Reed family and the law school. And I'm pleased that we've got members of the Reed family here today, Dr. Robert Reed, Dr. Judy Reed, Guernsey and Ms. Michelle Raymond. Horace Reed's life is one of a rich academic life and a life committed to public service. He enlisted during the First World War. He served as chair of the Regulations Revision Committee with the Royal Canadian Navy. He was a long time member of the Nova Scotia Labor Relations Board. He was a long time member of the Conference of Governing Bodies at the Legal Profession. He was honorary president of the Nova Scotia Barrister Society and he was a Canadian delegate to the Conference on Private International Law at the Hague in 1968. He was other things too. I've only read you a selection in the interests of time. He's remembered for this remarkable life of public service, but he's also remembered fondly and with respect for his scholarly achievements and his contributions as a teacher and as dean of this law school. In an editorial in the Halifax Herald in 1975, his life was described in the following way. Horace Emerson Reed, former dean of Dalhousie Law School and a legal scholar and law teacher, taught law with all of the authority of a profound and mature scholar of international renown. But he also brought to his teaching the benevolence and humanity which were among his most admirable qualities, certainly quite a compliment. In recognition of his remarkable achievements, he was appointed officer of the Order of Canada in 1973. He also has honorary degrees from Acadia, Queens, Dalhousie and Windsor University. He began his teaching career in Minnesota but saw the light and came to Dalhousie. We're glad that he did and we're pleased to be able to honor him with this lecture series and to share it with members of his family. This year we're delighted to have Dr. Adele Blackett with us to deliver the 41st it is annual Horace Reed Memorial Lecture. Dr. Blackett is professor of law and the Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labor Law and Development at the Faculty of Law McGill University where she teaches and researches in the areas of labor and employment, trade regulation, law and development, critical race theory and slavery and the law. She holds a BA in history from Queens University, civil law and common law degrees from McGill and both an LLM and a PhD from, SJD I should say from Columbia University, a doctorate. Widely published in English, French and Spanish in the field of transnational labor law. In 2015 Dr. Blackett co-edited a research handbook on transnational labor law. Her book manuscript entitled Everyday Transgressions, Domestic Workers Transnational Challenge to International Labor Law was published in the spring of 2019 by Cornell Press. Professor Blackett is the recipient of prestigious research fellowships including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's Laura Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights Research and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship. And the focus of that Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship is transnational futures of international labor law. In November 2018 Adele Blackett was appointed to the Human Rights Expert Panel of the Government of Canada's Renewed Court Challenges Program. She was appointed also to CETA, the Canadian European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement roster of experts in trade and labor. In December 2018 and she was elected as an associate member of the International Academy of Comparative Law in July 2019. It's my pleasure to introduce her today and I told her just a moment ago, I'm jealous of her title. I'm always looking for really creative titles. I can never quite come up with them. But the title is On the Presence of the Past in the Future of International Labor Law. Good evening and thank you very much Dean Cameron for the invitation and for the kind introduction. Dean Cameron, members of the READ family, distinguished guests, colleagues and friends. It's a tremendous honor to be here, to be welcomed at Dalhousie University and on to traditional NCAA territory. And to address you tonight in the context of the Horace C. READ Memorial Lecture. It's a particular honor to be able to do so during the centenary of the International Labor Organization. And before I speak specifically to the centenary, please allow me to share three ways in which Dalhousie is an inspiration to me on international labor law. First, while I never had the pleasure to meet Dean READ, who was also former chair of the Nova Scotia Labor Relations Board, I did meet the person who helped to establish the READ Lectures. Another former Dean of Dalhousie Law School, Ronald St. Jean MacDonald. In 1992, while I was an undergraduate law student on exchange from McGill to Université Hoverschumann in Strasbourg, studying international and European social law, he was the only non-European judge of the European Court of Human Rights. And he took the time to invite me to dinner every time he came into town, so you can appreciate that as a student living in residence on a meager budget, I've never forgotten that kind of generosity. So much of what I learned of international and regional human rights law and its relationship to labor law, and probably also to nod to Karen Knopp's lovely tribute to him, his utopianism, and about what it means to be a good mentor, came from those times together. And he was, by the way, scandalized when I was offered an unpaid internship at the ILO in Geneva. I'm happy to report that the wonderful unit at the ILO soon found a way to pay me to write a research paper that is frankly very much part of the genesis of the work that I've since done on domestic work. And the ILO revised its policy soon thereafter and now stands out among UN agencies for paying its interns. But I have held on to Professor MacDonald's sense of outrage because it reminded me of how easily our sense of what is normal can shift and what new exclusions can unwittingly be permitted if we don't work to safeguard past gains while we foster broadened forms of inclusion. The second is Professor Emeritus Moira MacDonald, who I met just this past academic year when she gave an engaging guest lecture on my live webcast and video archived course at McGill for the Centenary of the ILO, the Transnational Futures of International Labor Law. And Professor MacDonald's work as an academic on the ILO's Maritime Labor Convention of 2006 paved a path for the ILO, amongst other things, to bring academics on board to support the preparation and adoption of ILO standards. And that stellar engagement made it possible, not only for me to get involved on domestic workers, but also for our colleague Catherine LaPell from the University of Ottawa to get involved in the most recent and successful standard that was adopted this year on violence and harassment at work. There was incidentally some surprise at the ILO when I pointed out how similar the fields of maritime labor law and domestic work are. Early global fields, both with the root in early forms of transatlantic trade, requiring labor standards for people who tended to spend most of their time away from home. One million mostly male seafarers, resolutely in the productive economy, indispensable to global commerce. Sixty-seven million mostly female household workers, mostly in the reproductive economy, whose work is, of course, indispensable to social reproduction and enables all other work. The differences in regulatory approach at the ILO could hardly have been more starker, but the standard setting went some way to bridging the divide in service to decent work. There's a third way in which my focus on international labor law is linked. Let me know if I'm doing this right. Is that okay? Okay. It's linked to Dalhousie University and it directly related to the themes that I wish to explore with you tonight. When we are imagining our disciplinary futures, how do we remember the past? How do we talk about the past in ways that neither reduce it or over-determinate? How do we resist presentism precisely to enable hard and overdue conversations to proceed respectfully and meaningfully because they matter so much to any attempt to think through where our field bears the weight of the past in the present? The link is the visionary Lord Dalhousie report that was recently released by your university. In referencing it, I want to salute the fact that Dalhousie University took the courageous and important decision squarely to face its history of slavery by establishing a strong committee and commissioning a report chaired by historian and former James R. Johnson Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Dr. Fua Cooper and your dean, Dean Cameron, was a member of the Distinguished Committee of Experts. What's particularly path-breaking about that report and what situates it as part of a trajectory that many institutions, including my own, will do well to follow is its conceptualization of slavery as a global institution. In other words, it speaks not only about the number of slaves in any particular place at any particular moment, although that is important, nor does it only chronicle the specific legislation in place or not to ascertain the existence of slavery or not in a particular territory. Rather, it speaks to the inevitable impact of an institution that was central, global, and legal for centuries. We are commemorating the Quadra Centennial this year. This necessarily includes being attentive to how the proceeds of the system of transatlantic slavery and the slave trade enabled institutions that we treasure to be built. It includes looking at the legacies of the institution of slavery on a people defined by their racialized status, whose very survival needs are rendered invisible except for their ability to serve as cheap, disposable, and servile labor. It makes the pivotal link all too often overlooked in my own field between labor, land, and dispossession. The report traces a path through important programs at Dalhousie, including the vital Indigenous Black and Mi'gma program and the courage of the Honourable Corinne Sparks, who is a Dalhousie law graduate and the first African Nova Scotian to receive appointment to the judiciary and the first African Canadian female to serve on the bench throughout the RDS case before the Supreme Court of Canada. The contributions of the Lord Dalhousie report set a high standard for universities and communities across Canada. And there is another particularly humanizing way to think and talk about slavery as a global institution and its legacies, and that is through literature and for much of the history chronicled in the Lord Dalhousie report, there is a resonance in the themes of another work that I suspect many of you have read already. Essie Adygheian's 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize winning novel Washington Black. I am mindful of spoiler alerts, but I note that this novel is soon to be adapted into a limited 20th Century Fox TV series, so if you have not, do read it before then. Adygheian is often described as an historical novelist, and she does work from huge historical conflagrations to find those people who are usually only seen in the shadows. One of those people is her protagonist, Washington Black, or Wash for Short, who we follow as a young slave boy at Faith Plantation in Barbados, through to Canadian Arctic and on to Europe and even Morocco. However, a significant portion of the book, its entire third of four parts, takes place in this place, Nova Scotia. Wash is self-taught, he's a prodigy, he's also a wanted man for most of the novel, followed by a bounty hunter, John Willard, charged to find him and either kill him or bring him back to a life of slavery in Faith Plantation. Washington is someone for whom freedom can hardly be taken for granted, so someone for whom slavery and freedom cannot be glibly dichotomized. As Adygheian has insisted, freedom does not start simply because the shackles have been taken off. Here's the first short passage I want to read to you, set in Nova Scotia and spoken by Washington Black. The sailors talked of many islands of free ports, but it was life among the loyalists in Nova Scotia that I most desired. I traveled south, then east, crossing the dark waters, journeying over land by cart and carriage, and I arrived finally at Shelbourne with high expectations, but I found that the free golden existence once described to me had been used up, crushed, drained to the skin by all who'd come before. Shelbourne was wet and dreadful, its mud streets reamed with the tattered and the grey face to displaced roamers from last centuries, American War. There was little land, fewer supplies, and the black skinned were given the worst of it, when they were given any at all. I worked for time in a small-scale fishery, but by the years on the plantation and my memory of Joel and Willard's agents on the docks, had twisted something in me. I was everywhere uneasy in my skin. I tried to avoid all conflict. Each morning I would gather my satchel of lead and paint and sell collapsible chair with an easel attached that I myself had fashioned and I would walk the quiet dirt road behind my rooming house toward the dark inlet. These early ventures had become my one pure pleasure. The sense of freedom was intense. At the easel I was a man in full, his hours, his own, his preoccupations, his own. The field of labor law that I work in is one that for many is associated with the conditions of freedom. What it takes in terms of healthy, safe, work, decent working conditions, a pay on which one may live comfortably, if not well, and the freedom to associate to obtain those conditions, and of course equality. My field is also a field that is largely considered to be beleaguered. Although it is our colleague from this university, emeritus professor Bruce Archibald, who reminded me years ago that viewed from the inside, for those who are included in labor law's paradigm, it's a system of standards and procedures that have worked remarkably well. That insight has stood up repeatedly for me in my experience, including in some rather unlikely places, like Haiti, where the formal economy is barely one-tenth of the workforce, but those within can actually count on the institutions of labor law. But as we know, informality is what is normatively controlling in most of the world. So labor law holds a particular, if often aspirational vision of the world of work. It's incarnated in the International Labor Organization's conception via article 13 of the Peace Treaty of 1919 and its 1919 Constitution and the 1944 Constitutional Annex, the Declaration of Philadelphia. That labor is not a commodity, that freedom of expression and of association are essential to sustained progress, that poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere, that all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue both their material well-bearing and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity of economic security and equal opportunity, all reflecting one guiding principle that social justice is essential to universal and lasting peace. The vision is a noble one, even utopian. And I have spent much of my scholarly career seeking to foster deeper understanding of and commitment to these principles. But I must ask, how is it possible that over time that same vision has become deeply exclusionary, one surrounded by islands of unfreedom? I've wanted to spend some time thinking about some of the decisions of the past, which established the boundaries in labor law and in the process, the exclusions. Labor law scholars spend considerable time working through keep writings from the 1940s and they include within them Otto Kahn Freud, Hugo Sinheimer and increasingly Carl Polenny, alongside theorists of transnational law, Philip Jessup and the ILO's former director general and leading public international law scholar, C. Wilfred Jenks. The pivotal work from 1944 by Eric Williams, who later in life became the prime minister of the newly independent Trinidad and Tobago on capitalism and slavery, has occupied a less central place. That is an understatement, of course. Williams insisted that his work was, quote, not a study of the institution of slavery, but of the contribution of slavery to the development of British capitalism, end of quote. His watershed work established that the institution of slavery was at the heart of economic development and prosperity, that is the industrial revolution. An insight that flowed through some of the leading contemporary writing about slavery as a global institution to appear in the last decade. Moreover, there's no question that the plantation itself was industrial and a site out of which much contemporary learning occurred. Emeritus professor of economics, Kerry Polenny Levitt affirms that the technical advantages of the division of labor were pioneered on the plantations of the West Indies. Plantation slavery was a forerunner of capitalist industry, yet another insight that has been developed through historical analyses, including the history of Taylorism. For labor law, these insights are hardly neutral. What they offer is at once the prospect of telling the story of labor law with a longer and more interconnected trajectory, while holding on to the necessary dimension of any labor law narrative which is rooted in resistance or emancipation, a notion around which much of my scholarship on labor law has focused. The objective has been transparent to reimagine and contribute to the reconstruction of an inclusive labor law built from the margins. My goal this evening is to tie an emancipatory approach to labor law specifically into understandings of international labor law. And I posit that the international labor organization needs to go back and deliberately unsettle some of the margins that it tacitly reproduced in its first century. If its future, its second century, is to live up to its constitutional commitments. So now, let me say a little bit more about the ILO. You have heard from one of my mentors in international labor law already. The ILO's former legal advisor Anne Trebelcock, who visited last month in the context of the Innis Christi labor law lecture and intensive course, and who reminded her Shulik Law School audience that the ILO was invited by the government of Canada to take its wartime refuge here from 1940 to 1948 at my university, McGill University. During that time, the League of Nations Institution that survived to become the first specialized agency of the United Nations in 1948, elaborated the Declaration of Philadelphia on the aims and purposes of the ILO from which I have just read, and it developed the organization's position and terms of cooperative engagement with other international institutions on international economic law. It also honed the ILO's approach to decolonization. The US lawyer, David Morse, who was the ILO's director general for most of the heyday of the social experiment that was the welfare state from 1948 to 1970, accepted a Nobel police prize for the ILO's 50th birthday, affirming in 1969 that in a world that had shown itself more disposed to address matters by force than by talk, the ILO had provided the nations of the world with a meeting ground, an instrument for cooperation, and for dialogue among different interests. In other words, it is well known that the ILO has adopted hundreds of international labor standards with a view to teaching the world as Albert Thomas, the first director general of the ILO said, to speak something of the language of social policy. But as Morse insists, ILO tripartism was an early form of transnational cooperation beyond states. He recalled that the ILO was born as a product of different 19th and early 20th century currents in Europe at once humanitarian, reformist, and socialist. The ILO's structure reflects this, and in particular Morse acknowledged that workers' demands for effective international action have often been in contrast with the views of governments, which have seen in the ILO an instrument for strengthening the stability of sovereign nation states. And while the ILO has of course lived and operated in a world of sovereign states, it has nevertheless gradually extended the scope and possibilities of transnational action. For Morse, this growing transnationalism was part of how the ILO patiently, undramatically, but not unsuccessfully worked to build what Morse called an infrastructure of peace. Morse's reflection on the Nobel Lecture suggests a cautious sensibility at the height of the expansion of a vision that combined Adam Smith's inspired approach to liberalization through trade abroad alongside a Keynesian inspired approach to redistribution domestically. But it would barely take another decade before countries of the Global North would begin to wonder whether that social welfare state that the ILO helped to foster in some parts of the Global North was the historical aberration. So Morse was writing at the end of the 1960s. He received the prize on behalf of the ILO five years after the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and barely a year after he was assassinated. Morse did not mention Dr. King, but it should not be surprising that Morse acknowledged the need for the ILO to pay attention to those within industrialized societies who live at the margins. Those who were forgotten or dispossessed and he mentioned specifically those who were low paid racialized and religious minorities and migrant workers. He argued that it was necessary and feasible to redress racial discrimination and indeed the ILO had recently adopted a standard on racial discrimination, its elimination, as along with other forms of discrimination. And he also argued that it was feasible to eliminate poverty in the Global North and that eliminating poverty in the Global North would become the basis for deepened international solidarity with the Global South. Finally, the ILO was sanguine about its own limits and contribution to this vision. Consider what David Morse had to say during that same lecture to explain the ILO's approach to development assistance as peace building and I quote here. What concerns the ILO in particular is the fact that the economic progress which has been achieved has benefited only a small sector of the population. To some extent the ILO itself may have contributed to this situation. By assisting in the development of institutions similar to those existing in the industrialized societies of Europe and North America such as social security systems, trade unions and collective bargaining, it may have helped to strengthen the position of the privileged sector of the society of civil servants, managers, skilled workers. I'm not suggesting that the ILO should now abandon its fundamental principles, but I am suggesting that it should make every effort to redress the alarming imbalances that have arisen in the societies of developing countries. So Morse's speech written precisely when the ILO was stepping up its role in providing development assistance is disarmingly prescient. And in this moment, 50 years later of rethinking the boundaries of the field for the future of international labor law, focusing on it seems appropriate and much of my past work has focused precisely on the inability to dichotomize the global north and the global south in thinking through labor regulation. Tonight I focus on what Morse did not do, which was to revisit the familiar founding narrative that is in fact challenged by Williams's thesis evoked earlier alongside related work on racial capitalism that is subsequently grown in relation to it. And which posits that the transatlantic slave trade was not an historical aberration. From this literature, we learn that with the formal end of slavery, various forms of forced labor persisted or were organized and included the displacement of blacks from the most productive lands. And we have not as labor lawyers spent enough time understanding labor law in relation to settler colonialism, which is intertwined with slavery. The literature on racial capitalism forces us to move beyond the familiar exploitation centered concepts of capitalism that fail to explain in Nancy Fraser's term the persisting entanglement with racial oppression. For Cedric Robinson, racialization is a phenomenon that can be traced back through Europe and it is a phenomenon that has persisted and is part of the fabric of western civilization. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has insisted that racial discourses constitute one of the greatest most persistent classificatory systems for the representation and organizations of practices around the fact of difference. Globalization is fostered precisely because it can advance on such contradictory terrain. Moreover, historians of capital and labor increasingly underscore one of Polanyi's central points, that economic liberalism and unfree labor emerged not as polar opposites, rather the economic liberalism has historically and systematically depended on multiple overlapping forms of free enforced labor. So what did the ILO understand of the foundation of international labor law? Did it merely consider slavery to be irrelevant to its mandate, which takes its origins in the Industrial Revolution? As the newly formed League of Nations rushed off to construct what became the 1926 Slavery Convention, taking largely at their word League of Nations member states from formerly slave holding countries who insisted that slavery no longer existed because they had laws that said slavery no longer existed. By the way, the Under Secretary of State for External Affairs of Canada reported that, quote, slavery does not exist in this country and has long ceased to be a subject of any practical interest, end of quote. But looking with particular acuity at the behest of the British colonial administrators turned commissioner into the conditions, for example, in Ethiopia, repeatedly referred to as Abyssinia, although that name was changed centuries earlier. The push for a convention on slavery appears to have caught the ILO by surprise and the ILO's first director general, Albert Thomas, wrote to the first secretary general of the League of Nations, Sir Eric Drummond, to gently express the view that the subject was indeed within the ILO's mandate. When an initial League of Nations consultative committee on slavery's report was formally deemed to have an insufficient textual basis on which to move forward with a new convention, two options remained open for the international community. The first was to situate a commission within the pre-existing mandates commission of the League of Nations. The other was to confide the matter to the ILO. And for Albert Thomas, as he recounted to Professor Edouard Beniz, who was a delegate to the League and before he became president of Czechoslovakia, as well as the Swedish Prime Minister, Jalmar Branting, who brought his country into the League, the choice was clear. The ILO had the constitutional competence to address slavery. It's the term slavery designated nothing other than conditions of work over which the ILO had jurisdiction according to the preamble of Part 13 of the treaty. Conditions of work needed to be understood broadly, he argued, also that the ILO could most assuredly under the peace treaty foresee application of decisions of the ILO to possessions and protectorates with appropriate modifications. But beyond the jurisdictional question, Thomas argued that the ILO, through its secretariat, possessed the technical skills to make this work possible. And to confide the ILO, this matter previously considered by the League of Nations would demonstrate clearly that the two organizations formed part of an integrated ensemble, which would yield public approbation. But the matter was already in the League of Nations hands, and it chose cooperation on its own terms. And in its fourth assembly held in 1923, it decided to form a committee of experts within the Permanent Maddates Commission to again study the matter of slavery with a view to elaborating a convention. Those experts would have expertise in colonial administration. The ILO was invited to communicate and name one person who would represent it on the committee. And Alberto Mass' response was gracious, but clearly a lament. The ILO's jurisdictional space would come later in the relay between the framework left for forced labor and ultimately in the division of powers that saw the ILO take responsibility that the topic referred to as native labor. In other words, the ILO wanted to be charged with the mandate to investigate and set standards on slavery, seeing this as being in deep continuity with its understanding of labor law. Its constituents, and in particular dimensions of the labor movement and sub-civil society organizations, also reached out to the ILO to take up this work in a manner that would be seen as more responsive than the approach of the League, in other words, through tripartism. But would situating this work within the ILO have been likely to be more attentive to the ways in which unfreedom, the legacies of slavery, were lived? The genesis and ultimate conduct of the investigations and standard setting on native labor suggest maybe not. The first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, who's then studied in Germany under Max Weber, and whose rightful place as a father of U.S. sociology was largely overlooked, W.E.B. Dubois, interacted with both the League of Nations and the ILO. He called on Albert Thomas to address the issue of indigenous labor, including black labor, and perhaps even more memorably. Albert Thomas opined in an apparent reflection on W.E.B. Dubois's own well-known affirmation that the question of the 20th century is the question of the color line. That, and I quote, he considers that there will be no true protection of labor if we do not concern ourselves with the conditions of black labor. You will forgive me for wondering what the course of history at and throughout the ILO would have been had Professor Dubois's gently penned offer to the ILO to consider his candidacy to head that forced labor unit. Might have made it past the ILO official who presented himself as Dubois's friend and into Albert Thomas' hand. So here's another short passage from Washington Black. Oh, what this meant to me, seeing my idea come into the world. Even the cloud cutter had not moved me as much. It had never been mine, despite all my work on it. It had always been Titch's invention. But here, finally, was a thing of my own making, the invention of a boy born for obliteration for toil and for death, what vindication to think I might leave this mark. Even if I am alone, even if I alone would know it, for I was not naive. My name, I understood, would never be known in the history of the place. It would be guff, not a slight disfigured black man who would forever be celebrated as the father of Ocean House. When I allowed myself to truly think of it, a tightness rose behind my eyes. Guff was not a bad man. He did not like to take credit for my discoveries and principle. But I understood. I did not dwell on it in those slow, hazy days. The work that followed, and in particular the work on forced labor and native labor at the ILO, remained resolutely in the hands of colonial administrators, despite the prospects offered by ILO tripartism. Albert Thomas continued to sign letters of appointment that indicated that members of the forced labor committee served in their individual capacity as experts, but each major colonial power insisted on having its representative. There was some advocacy for women to be represented on each of these committees, and despite herculean efforts and startling but not unexpected stereotyping, the requests were mostly ultimately successful once the suggestion of a woman who was, quote, part native, and quote, herself, was abandoned. Historian Daniel Mall notes also that Albert Thomas was sharply reprimanded when he expressed consternation about native labor conditions after visiting Dutch rubber plantations in Indonesia. He adds that even in the post-war period, colonial powers enjoyed a kid-glove treatment at the ILO for far too long, far longer than they did within the UN. Finally, Dante's Belgard, a high-ranking diplomat from Independent Haiti, participated in the initial consultative committee on slavery before the League of Nations toward a distinct vision of slavery in the meetings that questioned what it meant by free labor conditions. While some of the key colonial administrators on the committee were subsequently appointed to the committee that drafted the convention and the ILO's forced labor committee, Belgard was not. The label of slavery through the redefinition tended no longer to attach to those who had spent centuries engaged in the slave trade, and that were mandate holders, but rather in Ethiopia, as I mentioned earlier, conveniently paving the way, frankly, for Italian invasion to be justified in part as a response, as a way to eliminate slavery. Both the 1926 convention and the subsequent forced labor convention of the ILO from 1930 were seen to provide the latitude that colonial powers needed to compel natives to work. Definitions of slavery have tended to turn on possessing the powers of ownership, as required in Article 1 of the Slavery Convention, largely leaving states that have formally legislated against slavery alone. The public private dichotomy has prevailed in the framework adopted to review prison labors under convention number 29 of the ILO, and when the US ratified the League of Nations Slavery Convention without actually ever joining the League of Nations, it included a reservation designed to enable it to extract convict labor, a system linked to the interpretation of the 13th Amendment that authors ranging from Douglas Blackman, Michel Alexander, and filmmaker Abba DuVernay have referred to as slavery by another name. Although it became a member of the ILO in 1934, the US never ratified the ILO's 1934 Slavery Convention. So this is the past that surrounded the ILO's first decades, a path that has been underexplored. I've taken a deep dive into it because in part and parcel, it is part and parcel of a reflection on why the proliferation of contemporary forms of human exploitation and suffering, so violent and intense that they evoke the ready characterizations of modern slavery, are expanding. Our state-focused 70-year-old human rights arsenal in a century's carefully developed international labor standards seem ill-equipped, or at least insufficient, to curtail them. There has been a decided recent turn through international action on trafficking to evoke a different, some might say, Wilbur Forcian vision of controlling, curtailing the slave trade at high seas, a potential transnationalized labor vision, a positive labor vision built around such familiar ideas as robust labor inspection, proactive enforcement of labor rights rather than leaving everything to plant-based mechanisms, empowered representatives of workers to support workers facing conditions that proliferate, in particular, in migrant communities and others susceptible to labor exploitation, cooperation between labor administrations all across borders to ensure that cases can be completed. These approaches, labor law approaches, have been decentered. Yet this, if anything, is meant to be the legacy of teaching the world to speak somewhat the same language on social policy. The tension of this approach can be seen in the ILO's 2014 protocol to convention number 29, which includes specific references to trafficking, emphasizes the importance of penal approaches, but also, importantly, reaffirms the need to pay attention to root causes of forced labor. Read through the literature that I've referenced tonight, the contemporary penchant to treat modern slavery as criminal activity undertaken by illiberal subjects who must be stopped by virtuous state actors, not only operates an act of historical amnesia. As migration scholar Bridget Anderson astutely observes, modern slavery and trafficking discourse depoliticizes, that is, it focuses on the individualized victim, placing her beyond politics. The modern slavery frame can come to mean something so dichotomized from freedom that it is unmoored from any understanding of the perpetual unfinished character. I argue that an emancipatory approach to labor law calls out less for focusing on the exceptionality of illegality and more on the structural challenge that is attentive both to exploitation and to historical forms of dispossession. In other words, the anxiety over modern slavery in Europe specifically in the global north more generally is inseparable from a globalization that fails to face the conditions under which people continue to move across territory and how asymmetrical migration law and global governance can make people illegal. Domestic work is a good example of this and it operates along another of the perennial margins that for some time remained in labor law nationally and internationally, the intersectionality of the care economy. This is a good place to read another passage from Washington Black. From when Wash was still enslaved on faith plantation and the passage captures a dimension of servitude that I theorize in my own book on domestic work, historical forms of invisibility that are of course gendered but are also deeply racialized and that emerge out of the relationship of master and servant and master and slave. Titch could not begin his experiment without one last element, he said. Workers, Washington, he explained to me, we cannot carry the apparatus on our own, can we? And so we found ourselves in the entrance hall of quietly sweating, the air smelled of tea leaves as if the house rugs had recently been cleaned. Titch had grown impatient. I watched him pace the scuffed parquet, the wood creaking faintly under his steps. He would then return to me and pause to lay a soft tentative hand on my shoulder. His eyes kept drifting to the far corridor. Time seemed to slow to stand around us. I do not know how long we waited. At last a figure flirted distantly across a corridor. Titch called out to it. His voice seemed to drift off into the shadows. There came a pause. Then Gaius materialized from some unseen place, his uniform crisp as an English envelope. Seeing him I thought he must possess more bones than the average man so full of knots and angles was he. I imagined I could hear the light crack of his joints as he approached. His fine hard face stared up at Titch, betraying nothing. The work of social reproduction is at once subsumed in a lived history of servitude, but also fundamentally market enabling. And the need to set standards for the 67 million domestic workers worldwide had come up repeatedly at the ILO as early as 1936 and then in 1965 when the ILO said it was urgent to do something to bring standards that would be compatible with self-respect and human dignity. But that margin at the ILO remained until ultimately it was the domestic workers themselves who in 2008 faced with a governing body that had tripartite members that did not include them. The members were more likely to be employers of domestic workers than domestic workers themselves, but they had done their homework and they as a well organized global movement urged the ILO to set standards that would challenge the asymmetrical, largely invisible law of the household workplace that is so well illustrated by that passage from Washington Black. The standard setting concluded in 2011. There were detailed new standards on decent work for domestic workers and the convention has now been ratified by 29 countries. I understand that Canada is considering it and very actively in the process of considering it and that this ratification helps to place countries like Canada in a transnational learning community. So the adoption of this instrument could have signaled closer ILO attention to the importance of not assuming that there is an absence of subordination as servitude in modern workplaces and to make such a sharp distinction between it and subordination as control, a central part of the work that the ILO is doing. This institution, the ILO, is a complex, multifaceted international institution and it still might, and the new standards on violence and harassment at work might be a sign for some optimism there. However, the ILO spent much of its 2019 annual International Labour Conference adopting a centenary declaration for the future of work. It's not a constitutional text and you will not turn to it for the kind of beautifully articulated noble aspirations found in the Declaration of Philadelphia that I quoted near the outset. I witnessed the last hours of the negotiation of this declaration and I can say I have witnessed finer moments for tripartism at the ILO but while the text is lengthy and somewhat watered down, the declaration does reference a number of important issues central to the future of work including just transitions, gender equality, strengthening social protection, social dialogue. The ILO is to take an increased role in multilateralism and the promotion of international cooperation. The centenary declaration calls for the ILO to scale up its work on labour migration in response to constituents needs, take a leadership role in decent work in labour migration and to eliminate forced labour. Yet remarkably in this moment of rising populism, explicit politicking that deploys racial difference as a way to emancipate hatred, the ILO's centenary declaration makes no mention of racial discrimination. One might imagine that the focus of the future work has been thought of as technology-centered and artificial intelligence may be colour-blind but even there a growing body of research contradicts that suggestion. Machines are programmed to be very much like us. So to make the future of work resonate for those who live the stark inequality that exists within and between states and it is re-racialised in the global context thinking transnationally offers an important corrective. There is a potential, I would argue, in a transnational approach to international labour law to unbundle the field from the narrow narrative that has rooted its emergence exclusively in the Industrial Revolution, has excluded care work and has deracinated the field from attention to that other fictive commodity land. I have sought tonight to offer a thicker history based on an archive that points to the need for engaging with slavery-enforced labour alongside free labour conditions, engagement with servitude alongside subordinated control at the centre of the employment relationship and engagement with the persistence of racialisation in a field that aspires to equality and true democracy and freedom. Each is a reminder of the persisting presence of the past in international labour law. I have challenged the ILO to take a closer, more careful look at the historical forms of invisibility in its own past boundary-making. As to the future, we saw through Director General Morse's 1969 Nobel lecture that the transnational at the ILO has been observed for some time, if not cultivated, but to acknowledge the impact of histories of transatlantic trade in labour between and beyond European territories across the Atlantic can be an antidote to a particular kind of methodological nationalism. It also makes the contemporary spatialisation of labour and in particular through migration and including for the provision of care similarly clear as evocations of the need to take the transnational seriously. Close attention needs to be paid to these issues that have tended to be relegated to labour law's margins to avoid misframing our justice claims as national when they can only really be understood and resolved transnationally, which I take to include the national but not to be limited to the national. To rethink labour transnationally is also to call attention to a distinctly important part of any narrative of enslavement, the enslave's insistence on their humanity by resisting commodification, often by moving across borders. This is fundamentally the story of international labour law and a portal to its transnational futures. I ended my winter 2019 course by recalling that we are in a moment when we have to profoundly unsettle some of the starting assumptions of the field of international labour law and challenge some of the asymmetries that may have given us a sense of solidarity in the past, but so deeply exclude people worldwide. We need to unsettle, some would say, decolonise before we can begin to imagine how a second centenary for social justice toward peace can become a reality. On that note, let me conclude this lecture with Edugian's protagonist closing words in Washington Black. Through the badly nailed boards of the door, a hissing threaded in like voices. Exhausted, I rose unthinkingly to my feet. I pressed my palm to the door, felt its vibrations, and then I dragged it open so that the grand yellow air rose before me, buzzing. A tree's branch whipped past, splintered apart against the harsh stone house. The wind was furious, rasping and singing over the pale ground, whipping sprays of sand into the whitening east. There was no trace of human presence anywhere, neither trail nor footstep. It was so cold I expected to see my breath. I stepped out onto the threshold, the sand, stinging me, blinding me. Behind me, I thought I heard Tana call my name, but I did not turn. Could not take my gaze from the orange blur of the horizon. I gripped my arms around myself, went a few steps forward. The wind across my forward was like a living thing. Thank you. I look forward. Exactly. So I love that. I just thought you just did such a beautiful job of pulling that together and giving us a glimpse of the incredibly detailed, terrible work that you've done. I just super appreciate it, including the way you brought this transnational labor talk right into the roots of Halifax and the social life. Just wonderful. And I'm kind of, I'm brought back to, I had a conversation with our colleague Michelle Williams about Washington block this summer and she kind of made the point that she was a bit disappointed in the book because while it brings out this character of Washington block that is so lovely to have some visibility on, the other characters in the book are largely white, right? And we get this very narrow in some sense reality, I guess, if you're trying to sort of figure out what it's going to look like and how it's going to intersect with a broader sense of people. And so we've tied it into the kind of question I have for you about your talk. I'm curious about what you would see if in thinking about the history, you turn the lights down on the aisle and the league and turn the lights up on everything else and treated it as though it was in fact labor law. You know what I mean? What's happening there is so the kind of dominant legal framework but it's not, you know, I appreciate your regalion pluralism. But it's not the legal framework that is in fact occurring in the rest of the world and what would happen if you didn't just shine the light on some of the players in that conversation but turn the lights down there altogether and they started asking questions about what's happening elsewhere. So thank you very much for that reflection and the question. First on the reflection, I shared that concern about Washington Black and wanted to see more about the community that we see Wash working through but never quite belonging to. And that is true for his time in Nova Scotia as well although you do get glimpses of his engagement including with the other members of the Black community here. And here's where, if I may, I'll say that the Lord Dalhousie report does quite a remarkable job of giving a deep sense of what it means or meant to communities to land and to work in the context and face the language of mistrust that is used because in part of some of the working conditions that were available and of course the very limited support and less than arable land that folks when they did receive any land were required to cultivate. So that was an important piece which is hinted at in Washington Black. Wash travels a lot in that book and the meditation on the movement is what drew me to that book because it captured the spatiality of the slave trade. It captured that this really was global, right? And that one could live that in one person but usually it was compounded. I love your language of the dimming the light on the isle and I have to say I started in those shadows in this work so ten-ish years ago when I started and you know folks were I think a little surprised because I've done a lot of work on the isle but my intuition was not to start with the isle and to work with different places and different ways in which labor was understood and organized in different parts of the global south with a focus on different African countries and the African diaspora and that included then the south of the north in the Comoroff and Comoroff way of thinking of that. So that was the starting point and this narrative emerges in this sense of the richness and variety of forms of work, the language of informality and all that it masks was part of that work. And it occurred to me at some point I've actually not really looked long and hard at the isle itself and the margins that it not only accepted being a part of the world but actually more than reproduced, right? And so the archival work I've been doing has been very much about how the isle has framed and some of it like the isle's sense of itself as being deeply concerned with that current that was the abolitionist current and slavery as a labor condition was there, right? Contrary to what many in writing in and about the origins of the field would not have imagined and then of course they're the ways in which that gets obfuscated. So it's a really nice reflection. I see this part of the world, the work as a way to piece the look from below if you will with the look at what the isle did and of course they're not dichotomized are they? They're very much part of each other. Thank you. Yes. So thank you very much for very, very, very interesting talk. So I think it's a different aspect of a keen question. So rather than turn the light, turn the light on the isle, I'm interested in your thought on, I think something inside of it was how might the isle go back to maybe my childhood and now my words are passed in the same as, well, and passed in today's future. If we take keen work, for example, I try to rethink how that might happen. I'm curious today about now in the reproduction even of those systems, right, of oppression, like in the global south, and even in the global south. We can look at Canada, look at the indigenous communities and don't need to think about global south and global in this context. So on the one hand, it's also its intricate relationship with human rights regimes and even we should be thinking as the satirical document, I think of the moment in which libraries, that's a totally different claim entirely, I don't subscribe to that if I don't know how that should happen. But you know maybe the first two, right, this reproduction of the systems as a way to maybe think of emancipation in the future, even as we continue to think about its relationship with human rights. Yeah. Thank you for that reflection and part of... So I've been pretty candid in the work that I have been doing around the origins of the definitions of enslavement. The definitions don't resonate with most of what the historical work says slavery is about. So we've got legal definitions that have served a particular purpose but have they served the purpose that aspirationally, rhetorically, evocatively, right, they evoke a history that we think we know and of course the transatlantic slave trade was not the only form of slavery but it existed for centuries. It coexisted with the development of our notions of liberalism. How is it that we've not spent more time with how our framing of freedom and exchange is rooted in or understood only in relation to unfreedom? And why is it that the definitions themselves speak so little to those dynamics? So curiosity had me go specifically back to that because I want to be about a project of thinking differently about the definitions we've received and the dichotomies that they evoke. And this is most definitely relevant as you suggest to thinking through the received understandings that we have about whether approaches are emancipatory or not in the global south, in settler colonial states and the global north. And we've just started, I think, to scratch the surface on this. There's a related twail critique, third world approaches to international law, critique that I think sits not entirely comfortably with this but it is in close relationship to this critique and it is very much about questioning what we've accepted of this heritage in labor as to be reproduced in the global south rather than dimensions of it that need to be challenged. But that's another paper. Thank you very much for that. As you know, I think that we've got a bunch of dimensions in the intersections. So I can't help reflecting that at a conference we hosted recently from my climate justice stream on racial capitalism and migration. And I wonder, because I know that the ILO has been deeply into but not, I think, fully engaging in the labor dimensions and implications possibly of our labor regimes for climate crisis and displacement. Others who aren't, couldn't even pretend in any way to come under the ILO's wings in there possibly to impact any bigger conversation. But I'm just curious if you have any reflections on racial capitalism, climate of the ILO or this assembly. And so it's an evocative question and the ILO's just transitions focus has very much been on workers who are in inefficient industries and where they should go. I do not know of any, I don't know of any engagement with racial capitalism at the ILO. So let's be clear about that anywhere. So in relation to the environment, I'd be very interested if that is there. And it's a complex institution, right? So what finds its way in a room where tripartite actors are discussing a declaration for the new centenaries, not necessarily what a committee of experts on one side might be thinking when it writes a general observation on racial discrimination, as it did this year, right? So there are, and it's a fascinating institution to study from that perspective because of how multifaceted it is. And then you learn whether different dimensions that are foregrounded at a particular moment are actually the dimensions that are most best placed to embody the kind of change, right? That the institution should be fostering. It's also a perennially beleaguered institution in quite real ways, right? Its long-standing position on the right to strike has garnered deep resistance recently by the employer's group primarily, but also governments, some governments at precisely the moment when the ILO is being taken very seriously by courts, including our Supreme Court, right? And so that has an impact. The prison-labored divide that I've spoken to is one of the other areas where that's happening. So the ability to... the ILO can't lead alone, right? Yeah, and I'd be very interested in a different conversation with you to have your sense on the extent to which the ILO is able to be in the rooms where the actors you interact with are able to take a lead on climate change. Because I think at this stage it's hard to say the ILO shouldn't be there, even if one's not saying it shouldn't take the lead. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I do think though, I tend to think institutionally about this and I think where institutions show up gives you an indication of whether it's a true blind spot or whether they are seeing themselves as not necessarily the leaders on an issue but one that should be taking its direction, right? So mapping potentially, not my favorite, but the SDGs might be a way into that. I wanted to... I'm curious to hear a little more about the ILO's engagement around the prison-labored issues. So I'm not aware of the context there but I was really appreciating your reference to Michelle for her presented shifting forms of slavery that she's developed. Yes. What I wonder if you're in Canada, you're dimly admittedly are the movements of prisoner laborers to unionize and those haven't managed to succeed at the sort of labor board level. Yes. And I'm not sure where the ILO sits on that. Yeah. So thanks for your question and so the main vehicle through which prison labor gets dealt with is the forced labor conventions. I've talked tonight about 29 and it makes a dichotomy between publicly run prisons and privately run and that reflects that historic mentality where it's largely giving states a pass, right? And interested in where the private actors might go and so that has nonetheless materialized in quite a strong critique on the part of the ILO framed around the conditions under which prison labor is deemed to be a form of forced labor and Feina Milman Sivan has looked very closely at this dichotomy as it's played out in a number of states that have ratified the instrument but that are deeply challenging the ILO's approach. Several European states and Israel is one of the states that has been pushing back at the ILO. The second instrument which I didn't talk about today is convention number 105 and it was adopted alongside the UN's second or supplementary convention on slavery and I mentioned in my talk that the U.S. had not ratified convention 29 but it did ultimately ratify convention 105 and through that lens, again the subject of another paper the ILO was able to speak to the overrepresentation of African Americans in the private prison complex and there's been some space to address some of the issues via that second instrument but also not much of a dialogue on this. The spaces come through the forced labor instruments there was some attempt at the time that the first forced labor instrument was being adopted to consider specific standard setting on prison labor but that did not get off the ground and so the window in is not a huge one but it is one that has allowed the ILO to make some of the rare pronouncements frankly from an international organization on the challenges and the limits to that form. The Canadian initiatives, it's a whole other lens but I think it's an understatement to say that our courts have had an extremely difficult time even getting past the first hurdle which is imagining prisoners as employees and the hold of reasoning that sees labor as rehabilitative in itself is tremendous and so we haven't been asking the kinds of questions that I raised today around just losing the dichotomization allows us to then think about what's required to make a positive vision of labor and it's hard to see those in much of what we see in the carceral context, in the Canadian context. I'm thinking sort of comparatively and I have this sense that the North American models whether it's on the humanized sector or in statutory condition is so kind of particular and domestic and labor lawyers can go for years ignoring the ILO and the international kind of world and I'm wondering whether you see any potential role in the recent Supreme Court cases which have recognized the ILO's conventions on one hand and I think perhaps, usefully, talentally said that they're not going to constitutionalize the labor after they're laying their act upon so that you can map challenges about conditions of work based on the kind of the work of the ILO and is there an opening to get beyond this head on the sand and kind of a column along the North American worldview so that's one aspect of the question. And the second thing was to say do you have any sense that in Europe where there's a kind of more openness to international law and some levels within the legal systems do you notice things are better anyway from the perspective that you should see the world more often? Wow, so great questions. So I'll start with an anecdote. When I started Articling I had just come from the ILO and the lead partner rolled his eyes and said, oh, the I'll help us. That same practitioner was at the forefront of litigating many of the cases that have depended on international labor law to broaden our vision certainly of the freedom of association and I see great potential in those cases not because they cite international labor law as such but because they're working international labor law into the fabric of understanding where our limits are as well as what our freedoms are. So there is room, the understanding is deepening. That oft-repeated quote is Peter Gall to not to any particular form. I've trotted it out too but I think it's kind of wearing off a little bit because we have the labor relations system that we have until we don't have it but we can also work with it, revise it. So our labor relations system looked a lot like the U.S. labor relations system. It still does but except for the really important ways in which it doesn't and which are a significant reason why we still have unions and some union density. So I'd like to see us and I think this is part of a process of deepening where we're less concerned about some mythical constitutionalization of a system and more concerned about inclusion and usually I'm happy if a case doesn't actually get appealed but I suppose the case of a decision in Quebec around home care workers of a variety of sources where an inclusive approach to labor law and to understanding Section 2D in that case was adopted. So I think it was actually a much better decision than the line that was very similar to the Fraser line that did go to the Supreme Court and was illustrative of this. European systems, yes, some cases, yes. Certainly often more engagement with international labor law. The European Court of Human Rights as well to the extent that it is invoked is very much accustomed to drawing upon and interpreting its provisions in a way that gives space. The European Court of Justice has also had to deal quite considerably with what it means by fundamental rights and how one frames it. So yeah, important dialogue, important uses also beyond the courts within different systems that reflect and seek to adapt international labor standards to the context. But I don't think there is an El Dorado for international labor law anywhere. I don't either think that we should be seeking something of a standardization in approach but I do think we should be building a thick domestication, if you will, of international labor law and a practice of considering it and understanding it and invoking it to allow our own system to broaden and grow. So I hope that's responsive. Thanks. We're almost done. We could stretch it to one more question if it is one, if not. And I think with that, I am going to hope we have a very good here. Professor Black, it's a warm thank you to you first for coming, of course, for sharing your expertise with us. And may I say, I'm trying to find the words like a beautifully textured analysis of labor law. Thanks very much. And we have a little present for you. You take away, it's a small token. I appreciate it. Thank you.