On the centenary of the ILO adopting the eight-hour day, India is violating it

On the hundredth anniversary of the ILO adopting the eight-hour working day, it is being violated in India. It was at the first session of the Labour Conference held in Washington in October-November 1919 that the principle of 8 hours of work a day and 48 hours a week was adopted.

The International Labour Organization was formed under the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War.

1918-19 was a time when the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic caused huge job losses and great hardship for workers.

The Russian Revolution took place in 1917. Great hardship and the energy drawn from the Russian Revolution roused the fighting spirit of workers across the world, and waves of workers' struggles swept the world. Even before the First World War broke out in 1914, the international workers' movement had been constantly raising the demand for the eight-hour day. In this situation, the principle of 8 hours a day and 48 hours a week was included where Article 427 of the Treaty of Versailles refers to the ILO, and it was called an important and urgent matter.

Five years before the ILC adopted the eight-hour day in 1919, the demand had been dismissed as entirely unacceptable and impossible to implement. That it was accepted under the pressure of the international workers' movement is regarded as a great achievement.

Four countries, Cuba (1909), Panama (1914), Uruguay (1915) and Ecuador (1916), had adopted the principle of the eight-hour day even before 1919. On November 14, 2019, the ILO celebrated at its Geneva headquarters the centenary of the first convention adopting the eight-hour day. Only months after the ILO celebrated that centenary, at a time when a pandemic like the Spanish flu is spreading across the world, many states in India are violating it and amending labour laws. The CITU and other trade unions have decided to raise protests against this.