As a leader of the French trade-union movement, Jouhaux represented workers at the post-World War I peace conference. He believed that “better working conditions remove the causes of war,” and proposed an organization where governments, employers, and workers could negotiate together—the ILO. When the ILO was formally created by the Versailles Treaty in 1919, Jouhaux led its governing body and conferences, helping draft conventions on banning child labor and shortening the workday. These global standards reduced economic tensions and the exploitation of migrant workers, laying a foundation for peace. During the inter-war years and after World War II, he continued to promote dialogue and social justice, steering labor activism toward negotiation rather than violence and thus safeguarding international cooperation. This lifelong effort earned him the 1951 Nobel Peace Prize.

Léon Jouhaux (1879–1954), having witnessed labor unrest at the Saint-Gobain glass works, rose to become secretary-general of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in France. At the 1915 Amsterdam conference he advocated binding international labor standards, and during the 1919 Versailles negotiations he was pivotal in drafting Part XIII of the Treaty, which became the ILO Constitution. The ILO’s tripartite structure—governments, employers, workers—gives it a quasi-legislative role, enabling conventions on minimum wage, accident compensation, and freedom of association. Jouhaux chaired the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in the 1920s, warning that wage-cut policies amid economic crises would fuel international conflict and pushing for trade treaties with social clauses. Imprisoned under Nazi occupation, he later helped reunify the labor movement and supported the ILO’s 1946 transition into the UN system, maintaining a non-aligned defense of workplace human rights during the Cold War. His career exemplifies an expansion of peace from the mere absence of violence to the presence of equitable social structures.

Jouhaux played a seminal role in embedding labor activism within the architecture of international public policy. In drafting Part XIII of the Versailles Treaty he codified the principles that labour is not a commodity, that governance must be tripartite, and that a dual layer of binding conventions and non-binding recommendations should exist—elements that later informed social-clause-based multilateral agreements. His negotiation of ILO Convention No. 26 on wage-fixing institutions operationalised a tripartite pay-off distribution that transcended pairwise bargaining, approximating a solution outside the cooperative game-theory core. From the 1930s he analysed how competitive currency devaluation and wage deflation under the collapsed gold standard generated “social dumping,” an endogenous pathway to conflict. After World War II he devised compliance strategies mixing technical assistance and moral suasion to raise ratification levels of ILO conventions, and he sought to alleviate North-South disparities through coordination with UN ECOSOC. These achievements coalesced into what the Nobel Committee in 1951 termed a ‘lifetime struggle against war through the advancement of social justice.’