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Occupational Classifications for Sub-Saharan Africa? ISCO, International Organizations, and Technical Assistance (1958–1962)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2025

Maxence Demeule Open the ORCID record for Maxence Demeule [Opens in a new window]
Maxence Demeule*
Affiliation:
LARHRA, ENS de Lyon, Lyon, France CHS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
*
Email: maxence.demeule@ens-lyon.fr
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Abstract

This article examines how the International Labour Office (ILO) tried to disseminate one of its statistical tools, the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), in sub-Saharan Africa, in the context of decolonization and development planning. It sheds light on the changing relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s between the ILO, late colonial and then national administrations, and a regional organization, the Combined Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA). Although characterized by rivalry, misunderstandings, and sometimes indifference, these relations were also marked by partially overlapping interests. Focusing on the successive ILO experts responsible for developing occupational classifications, this paper shows how their interactions with local actors reshaped the project which they had to carry out. For instance, it gave a greater place to the training of national civil servants or contributed to the realization of the 1962 Nigerian census. In particular, the article analyzes the connections made with other international programs (relating to demography and economic planning) on the ground, and the resulting interdependence among them. By doing so, the ILO expert responsible for the project on occupational classifications benefited from the resources of other technical assistance programs and tried to demonstrate to national authorities the importance of the project which could apply in various fields. While unexpected difficulties limited the scope of the initial project to Nigeria alone, the paper discusses how ILO officials inscribed occupational classifications in the general framework of development planning.

Keywords

International Labour OfficeCCTANigeriadevelopment schemesexpertscategorization

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Special Feature
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International Labor and Working-Class History , First View , pp. 1 - 20
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

Introduction

In 1960, Joseph Habig, a Belgian management consultant newly appointed as “expert”Footnote 1 by the International Labour Office (ILO, the permanent secretariat of the International Labour Organization) to manage a project designed for sub-Saharan Africa, was given his terms of reference:

The main objective of your mission in each country associated with the project will be to assess the needs … for a new and improved classification system and to propose how these needs could be met.… The development of a regional [i.e., sub-Saharan African] occupational classification system is not an objective of this project, although the national classification systems to be developed on the basis of your recommendations should permit the compilation of occupational data which would be comparable internationally.Footnote 2

Habig’s mission thus had a double objective: first, he was asked to collect information about the instruments used to categorize African workers and to describe existing labor structures; second, he was required to build better interoperability between the occupational classifications used in sub-Saharan Africa and those used in the rest of the world. Though Habig’s instructions did not explicitly refer to it, the framework for international comparability was to be the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), which had just been released by the ILO in 1958.Footnote 3

By studying how the ILO tried to disseminate a specific statistical template, this article examines the tensions encountered through the implementation of international technical assistance programs in sub-Saharan Africa at the hinge between the last years of colonial rule and the first years following independence. It analyzes the strategic interactions between local civil servants, international organizations and their respective “experts.” These actors found themselves torn between the claimed universality of international tools and the necessity to adapt them to local conditions, concerns and needs.

Habig’s mission resulted from a series of discussions that had begun in 1959 between the ILO and another international organization, the Combined Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA). The CCTA had been founded in 1950 by the colonial powers to enhance mutual cooperation: inter-African conferences and specialized bureaus, such as the Inter-African Labour Institute (ILI), were created to address problems shared by the colonial administrations.Footnote 4 As has been noted in analyses dealing with late colonialism, the CCTA worked in the meantime as a “colonial barrier” to international scrutiny: despite its claim to being apolitical, it was designed primarily to prevent the United Nations (UN), deemed to be a vehicle for promoting anti-colonialism, from intervening in Africa through field offices or technical assistance programs.Footnote 5 Nonetheless as Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and Cláudia Castelo have shown, the meetings and technical projects organized by the CCTA contributed to the creation of scientific institutions in Africa, to the production and to the circulation, across colonial boundaries, of diverse forms of knowledge, of concepts and “idioms” relating to the field of development,Footnote 6 which the colonial powers had appropriated as a source of relegitimization after World War II.Footnote 7 In examining one of these CCTA projects, namely number 10, devoted to occupational classifications, the article proposes to reconsider the spaces for collaboration with the ILO (part of the UN system) which were opening up at the end of the 1950s, when the ILO’s first regional office in Africa was established in Lagos and new African states began to request its technical assistance to build and implement their development plans.Footnote 8 This article shows that occupational classifications became, at least for a time, a point of intersection between the ILO, the CCTA, and some African countries. While scholars have paid special attention to occupational nomenclatures in Western industrialized states, the history of these statistical tools in African contexts remains far less studied.Footnote 9

The paper follows two distinct but complementary and converging methodological approaches: the sociology of public policy instrumentationFootnote 10 and the sociology of standardization.Footnote 11 Both emphasize that standards and public policy tools are not natural and neutral, but are the results of choices: they convey values which structure particular representations of the social world, and thus ways of acting on it.Footnote 12 Moreover they point to the often invisible actors and work necessary to maintain a standard or instrument and to make it function.Footnote 13 From that perspective, what did it mean, for the various actors, to build occupational classifications and how did interactions among actors on the ground contribute to giving shape to concrete classifications, beyond the general principles established by ILO officials in Geneva and the initial agreements between representatives of international organizations? The paper contributes to the reflections about “international quantification” (according to Roser Cussó, the capacity of international organizations to compel individual countries to adopt an international nomenclature, when producing statistical data, rather than using their own local methodology)Footnote 14: it stresses the importance of technical assistance in attempts to disseminate one of the ILO’s international statistical tools, namely ISCO-58, precisely because technical assistance tried to adapt ISCO to local African contexts,Footnote 15 and to inscribe occupational classifications into the overall concerns of economic and social development.Footnote 16 Examining the evolving relations between several categories of actors, be they international organization officials or technical experts, colonial and post-colonial civil servants, or employers and workers, sheds light on the constraints and dynamics faced by technical assistance programs in a period of transition between colonial and post-colonial rule. Indeed, the project had to be redesigned several times because of conflicting political considerations, changing development priorities, or lack of resources.

Records of CCTA meetings (kept in the French Overseas Archives in Aix-en-Provence), and monthly reports from experts in the field to the ILO (collected in the ILO archives), offer insights into the practical conduct of the mission, the doubts expressed by both the ILO and the CCTA, and the project’s ultimate achievements.

Between ISCO-58 and colonial expectations: competing visions of occupational classifications

The impetus for a joint project on occupational classifications came from the CCTA. At the meeting of the CCTA’s Inter-African Committee on Statistics held in Lisbon in November 1958, L. Bodart, the chief statistician of the Belgian Congo, explained how difficult it was to compare labor statistics across African colonial territories due to differences in the methods used.Footnote 17 Regarding analysis of the structure of employment, he indicated that the government of the Belgian Congo had just developed a classification of occupations which it was willing to share with CCTA members. According to Bodart, however, closer collaboration between colonial powers would require appointing an expert who would be responsible for specifying and extending the Belgian classification in accordance with the categorizations used in other African territories. A project on occupational classifications thus appeared as a way to deepen imperial cooperation, not only by circulating already available information, but also by providing a new and common language to refer to work situations across colonial African administrations. The expert would also have to assess whether this classification could be rendered consistent with the recently released ISCO-58. The ILI was therefore asked to draft, “in close collaboration with the ILO,”Footnote 18 a formal project proposal. In addition to the preoccupation with international comparability, this can be understood in the broader framework of the CCTA’s statistical activity, which, as Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo argues, contributed to shaping a certain degree of legibility for international institutions so as to convince them of the ability of colonial governments to achieve their development plans.Footnote 19 At this stage, however, it was still unclear whether the expert would develop a common classification for all sub-Saharan African territories on the basis of the Belgian experiment and ISCO-58, or whether distinct classifications should be considered.

Harmonizing the categories used to account for the occupational structure of a territory would help colonial governments compare their respective labor policies.Footnote 20 But other incentives were at play in setting up this shared project with the ILO. It echoed wider political concerns, given that the inauguration of the ILO Field Office, which had been fiercely rejected by CCTA member states in previous years, was now scheduled for January 1959. Since the strategy of strict opposition had obviously failed, the best remaining option for the colonial powers was to carry out a policy of conciliation towards the ILO and to try to channel the circulation of both the material resources and technical experts it would bring.Footnote 21 Negotiations to establish formal relations between the ILO and the CCTA finally succeeded in August 1959.Footnote 22 Conceiving of a shared technical project thus became a lever available to both organizations: for the ILO, an exploratory project, as proposed by the Inter-African Committee on Statistics, would be a first step in demonstrating the ILO’s expertise in Africa before it developed its own programs.Footnote 23

Promoting ISCO-58 proved equally important to ILO officials. The recently created statistical tool was still largely unknown to local colonial administrations. ISCO consisted of a list of occupations assigned to three hierarchical classes—“major,” “minor,” and “unit” groups—with each occupation defined according to the set of tasks a worker was expected to perform. The groupings were based on similarities between the tasks rather than on other criteria such as the worker’s status (skill level, existence of a contract and its type, etc.) or the economic sector (public or private) he belonged to. Each occupation was assigned a five-digit code representing the different aggregation levels which could be used to produce statistics. For instance, “7-11.10” referred to “Tailors (Made-to-Measure Garments)”: “7” designated the major group “Craftsmen, Production-Process Workers and Labourers Not Elsewhere Classified,” the first “1” referred to the minor group “Tailors, Cutters, Furriers and Related Workers,” the second “1” to the unit group “Tailors, Dressmakers and Garment Makers,” and “.10” identified the specific occupation.Footnote 24 The answers given between June and December 1959 by African statistical services to a preparatory questionnaire indicated that only the British East African territories and Northern Rhodesia were already basing some of their statistics on ISCO (for migration or census data), while Ghana, Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and South Africa were just beginning to revise their classifications along ISCO lines.Footnote 25 Later, when the joint project was launched in 1960, Habig noted that officials in the Nigerian Ministry of Labour had only “a very superficial knowledge of ISCO.”Footnote 26 The ILO’s strategy was therefore to combat this lack of familiarity so that its classification would not go unused by local governments, as had many of the statistical categories and nomenclatures developed during the interwar period by the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS).Footnote 27

However, the subsequent negotiations between the CCTA and the ILO revealed how difficult it was to depart from old prejudices, to reconcile their respective priorities, and to clearly define what the expert to be appointed was to be responsible for. CCTA representatives regularly insisted that the classification used in the Belgian Congo had to be at the core of the joint project. It was no coincidence that an official meeting between Jean Orizet, the director of the ILO African Office, and ILI director Thomas Haighton, took place in Léopoldville. There Bodart presented the work that had been achieved in the colony;Footnote 28 he also emphasized the limitations of ISCO, arguing that the classification established in the Congo contained additional and more precise definitions of occupations than those in the international framework.Footnote 29 Major firms (e.g., the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, Forminière, and Chanic) had been visited to assess how work was concretely organized and performed. This was a way of demonstrating to ILO officials the centrality of the CCTA to the project: colonial administrations relying on grassroots knowledge would be essential to adjusting ISCO to African labor conditions by including new occupations or rearranging those already present in ISCO. As scholars later showed, the ISCO definitions had been produced mainly by European statisticians on the basis of the Western experiences of industrialization.Footnote 30 Thus, although the general structure of ISCO could be used, the occupations and their description had to be “Africanized.”Footnote 31

In June 1959, the ILI’s governing board issued a recommendation asking the ILO to recruit an expert who would “study the form and uses of existing occupational classifications in Africa south of the Sahara,”Footnote 32 with the CCTA paying the expert’s transportation and accommodation expenses in Africa. Yet officials in Geneva had quite a different view on the purpose and approach of the project, which in this new recommendation no longer included any direct reference to ISCO. Just before Habig was sent to Africa, H. Riley, the head of the ILO’s statistical division, warned ILI deputy director Guy de Lusignan: “In order to avoid any risk of confusion, I find it useful to indicate that I do not consider that the classification of Belgian Congo should be the ‘starting point’ for Mr Habig’s work.”Footnote 33 Another ILO statistician stressed that the expert should be able to think “from a broader viewpoint than that common to Belgians (which has not been favorable to ISCO).”Footnote 34 The respective place to be given in the project to the international classification and to colonial ones had become a bone of contention between the ILO and the CCTA: the ILO denied any real universal value to the Belgian classification, while colonial powers reproached ISCO-58 for being too general. CCTA members themselves were far from unanimous, despite the image that official resolutions tried to convey. Reporting about the ILI board session of June 1959, R. Gavin, who was responsible for colonies within the ILO, noted the acrimonious debates about the project.Footnote 35 The United Kingdom was especially reluctant: replying to the above-mentioned questionnaire, it asserted that the classifications used in its territories were satisfactory.Footnote 36 According to K. Penniment, a member of the ILO’s statistical department, Britain feared that the project would ultimately result in a single occupational classification for all of Africa, which would represent an excessive infringement on British sovereignty. Divisions among colonial powers became more visible when the South African government refused to join the project, stating that “a visit to this country by an expert would serve no real purpose.”Footnote 37 This betrayed the fear that technical assistance would turn into international inquiries against apartheid. Colonial powers remained suspicious towards the ILO and hesitated on how to protect their interests, between true commitment and mere facade to cooperation.

Thus, the final roadmap given to the expert by the ILO excluded a common African classification, an effort to find a middle ground. The mission nevertheless encompassed the development of national classifications, exceeding the ILI’s careful recommendation in which the only task envisaged was to collect information about the different systems. However, the ILO’s wording was vague enough to please both sides. Moreover, the expert’s profile was to be conciliatory. Although hired by the ILO, Habig was Belgian and had worked in the Congo since 1946.Footnote 38 A management consultant (organisateur-conseil), he had been employed by several private and state enterprises, including the Office des Transports du Congo and the Compagnie Maritime Belge.Footnote 39 Since 1959 he had been an adviser to the Belgian Ministry of the Colonies on vocational training and job evaluation, a position in which he became familiar with the employment classification system that had been developed in the Belgian Congo.Footnote 40 As well, in addition to French, he spoke Swahili, Kikongo, and English, which was an asset in a cross-colonial project. In that respect, Habig’s colonial background represented a guarantee that colonial interests were secured although he was hired by the ILO, and his previous experience apparently made him reliable to the ILO even though officials had pointed out his lack of proper statistical training.Footnote 41

Appointed in May 1960, Habig soon had to address several difficulties. First, though he was to visit the Congo (Léopoldville) during the first months of his mission, the directors of the ILI and the ILO Field Office suspended the trip because of the riots and political unrest which began in July 1960 following the country’s independence.Footnote 42 Habig therefore could not assess in the field how the Congolese classification was being used, even though it was considered one of the potential models for other African territories. Moreover, tensions between the ILO Field Office, CCTA representatives, administrators in the participating territories, and Habig rapidly developed. Habig’s first trips to Ghana, Nigeria, and Northern Rhodesia were too expensive for the ILI’s limited budget and revealed the discrepancy between the operational capacities of the ILO and the CCTA. The CCTA was not a development agency and could not afford such a large project.Footnote 43 Discontent was further fueled by Habig’s attitude. He was described as not actively engaged in helping local services to build or revise their national classifications: in Ghana, he was said to have made “little or no impression,” while in Nigeria Orizet reported that “the Employment Commissioner tells me frankly that Mr Habig contributes little to the work of the Department’s committee on occupational classification.”Footnote 44 Considering this general impression of slow progress and his lack of statistical training, Habig was increasingly considered incompetent in the circles of both the ILO and the CCTA: withdrawing him from the project was under examination from then on.

In fact, far from the ILO’s and the CCTA’s headquarters, Habig had a broad room for maneuver: it is clear from internal ILO and CCTA reports that Habig was well aware of existing divisions between the two organizations—he noted that he had received contradictory orders—and that he tried to exploit these divisions.Footnote 45 For example, although he had been recruited by the ILO, he refused to follow its guidelines; invoking the former ILI’s recommendation, he limited himself to comparing the different existing occupational nomenclatures. In that perspective, he achieved some results, emphasizing that no harmonized classifications existed even at a territorial level. In Rhodesia for instance, four main classifications could be found, each for a distinct purpose: one for the statistical service, another for the employment exchanges, another to establish collective bargaining agreements, and finally ISCO-58, the use of which was restricted to immigration statistics.Footnote 46 Since the ILO and the CCTA faced obstacles in maintaining control over the mission on the ground, Habig tried to reshape the project according to his own conception. Although setting up a single African classification had been officially abandoned, Habig still pushed for this option, arguing that if he had to establish different national classifications, it would be difficult to promote ISCO, since “its main quality [was] being international.”Footnote 47

These cumulative difficulties led the CCTA and the ILO to suspend their joint project in October 1960. However, Nigeria had already begun working on its own national classification and therefore needed further assistance in order to complete it. The remaining question for the ILO and the CCTA was thus to decide whether the classification project could be restructured, and if so, how.

Scaling down technical assistance: ISCO in Nigeria

Habig’s withdrawal did not result in the revival of the joint project: after a couple of uncertain months, ILO officials decided to focus on Nigeria only and appointed new experts whose profiles were more compatible with the ILO’s agenda. Contrary to Habig’s, the approach adopted by the new experts was to collaborate more closely with Nigerian labor officials, employers and workers in order to convince them of the utility of developing a national classification derived from ISCO.

First of all, only a few CCTA members had officially requested the proposed assistance in developing an occupational classification at the time when the initial project had been suspended. Some of them, like the Congo (Brazzaville), had initially expressed their support for the project but ultimately rejected it: Brazzavillian authorities were using the categories included in already existing collective bargaining agreements and they thought that these were precise enough for giving a picture of occupations in the Congo.Footnote 48 Others, like Chad, Gabon, and the Central African Republic, promised to issue a request, but never did so.Footnote 49 This lack of enthusiasm can be construed as resulting in part from the project’s original development between the ILO, the ILI, and the Belgian Congo’s statistical administration: other countries were involved in the debates only at a late stage. Furthermore, these colonial territories became independent countries just when the project was being designed, which likely caused their priorities to shift: requesting assistance would, for instance, mean that African states would have to designate civil servants to work with the expert and make equipment available, which was expensive. Moreover, compared with other indicators such as national income, occupational statistics reflected social and economic changes only indirectly and were considered to be less central both to political communication, which aimed at staging development in the making,Footnote 50 and to the planning process itself.Footnote 51 Finally, ILO officials themselves were not very inclined to collaborate again on this project, given the difficulties they had encountered with the CCTA.Footnote 52 It was therefore decided to continue the revision initiated in Nigeria, but without the CCTA, and to restrict the project to this country only. This choice shows the ILO’s capacity to adapt to changing circumstances but also its efforts to keep its promises of assistance to Nigeria—which became independent on October 1, 1960—thereby proving to African countries that it would be a reliable development agency.

The transition from an interorganizational, pan-African project to a one-country, ILO-planned program affected both the way technical assistance was delivered and the features of the persons responsible for it. First, the directors of the statistical and manpower divisions in Geneva devoted more attention to the profiles of the new experts. Those of the two persons selected were clearly different from Habig’s. A one-month interim mission was initially carried out in March 1961 by Alfred Klein, who had been a member of the ILO’s manpower division since 1956 and had taken part in the development of ISCO.Footnote 53 He presented two advantages for the ILO: as an in-house specialist and an architect of ISCO, Klein could immediately evaluate the revisions initiated by Habig, ensuring that this time the ILO’s classification structure would be correctly followed.Footnote 54 The other new expert, Walter Weir, appointed in June 1961 for a one-year term, also offered some assurance. He had spent almost ten years as a labor official and manager of an employment exchange in Edinburgh, where his duties included recording labor statistics. This familiarity with statistical methods is noteworthy, given that Habig had been reproached for his lack of such knowledge. Moreover, Weir had worked with the ILO on the elaboration of ISCO in 1956, and so was already well informed about it, unlike Habig. Finally, he had no colonial acquaintances, which, along with his existing connections with the ILO, made him appear more trustworthy and easier to control.Footnote 55

Weir’s mission was also defined more precisely than Habig’s had been. From the beginning, Weir was asked to develop a single “multipurpose” classification in Nigeria. For ILO officials, such a national classification would give Nigeria an effective instrument for describing the state and evolution of the employment structure of the country and for obtaining statistics in many different fields, such as job placement and labor needs, which would in turn help in the designing and monitoring of vocational training programs.Footnote 56 A Nigerian classification based on ISCO-58 would also make more labor-related statistical domains available for national and international comparison and would thereby facilitate knowledge circulation and utilization.Footnote 57 From the ILO’s perspective, the flexibility of a well thought-out occupational classification that could apply to various fields of development was precisely its main interest.

Adapting ISCO to Nigeria required accurate knowledge of the local working conditions in order to register differences from the original definitions of the international classification. Weir therefore managed an “occupational classification unit” at the Ministry of Labour in Lagos. His task was to review ISCO and supplement the definitions of each occupation with information gathered by Nigerian labor officials in firms and by regional advisory committees, which would include employers and workers’ representatives.Footnote 58 Weir and the Nigerian officials in the classification unit set up a number of forms pertaining to each ISCO-defined occupation, detailing a list of tasks that they imagined the workers had to achieve. These “draft statements” were thus expanded from the very brief definitions contained in ISCO. For instance, the occupation “Coppersmith,” under unit group 7-54 (“Sheet Metal Workers”), was described in ISCO as follows:

Works mainly with copper in making and repairing articles such as containers, ducts and pipes in copper sheets; also uses drawn copper pipes. May tin articles and also work aluminium, stainless metals and various alloys. May specialize in articles made and designated accordingly.Footnote 59

In the draft definition developed by Weir, operations were more concrete, with eleven tasks identified, such as “Cuts metal using a template or guide,” “Punches or drills holes for rivets, bolts or screws,” or “Smooths surfaces.”Footnote 60 These forms were then sent to local labor officials, who were to make workplace visits in order to investigate whether the occupation existed in their area, and if so, to observe how the job was executed; in total, three different workplaces had to be visited for each occupation.Footnote 61 Finally, the officials sent back a new form indicating the additional information collected about the occupation. The task variations and occupations with no ISCO equivalent, observed in the field, were then synthesized in Lagos to form the national classification.

This method was inspired by the job description and evaluation techniques developed in the United States during the interwar period.Footnote 62 These were viewed as “modernizing” tools intended to establish “rational” pay scales according to the relative difficulty of each task.Footnote 63 In Nigeria, breaking down occupations into successive tasks was considered particularly useful for job center officials, who could then more easily identify the skills required for a given job, and so propose suitable workers.Footnote 64 The national classification of occupations would thus make the labor market more fluid and would sustain economic growth by allowing for quicker responses to workforce requests from employers. Moreover, adapting ISCO to Nigeria was not a mere transfer of an international statistical template: Western national tools and traditions were also conveyed through this job description approach. Indeed, Weir asked the ILO to send him the US Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), whose purpose was to compile and analyze all the jobs existing in the US, as well as its British equivalent: they would serve as references in writing the extended draft statements for some of the occupations which Weir did not know well.Footnote 65

Though Weir mobilized his previous experience as a labor official in Britain and the instruments frequently used in industrialized states, he also had to cooperate closely with Nigerian civil servants, workers, and employers. For Weir, these were both intermediaries for apprehending the local conditions of work and the subjects of the educational dimension of his assignment. Indeed, the technical assistance mission was intended to help consolidate the know-how of the country’s new labor administrators. In Lagos, a Nigerian counterpart had been designated to assist Weir in the classification unit: Mary Ekpiken, who had graduated in economics from Queen’s University Belfast in 1955 and then became a senior official in the federal Ministry of Labour, was assigned the task of learning how to adjust the national classification to future changes in the labor market.Footnote 66 The research work to be carried out by local officials also required that they understood what a classification of occupations was and what they were supposed to do in relation with Weir’s unit. Training courses were therefore organized by Ekpiken and Weir, in Lagos and in the regional capitals of Enugu, Kaduna, and Ibadan.Footnote 67 The program included some historical information regarding American, British, and ILO occupational classifications, a presentation of Weir’s mission, and the fields to which classifications could potentially apply.Footnote 68 Training efforts were thus not limited to top managers, but reached a wider group of administrators (thirty-five Nigerian civil servants by the end of the August 1961 session). Moreover, a syllabus designed by Weir made it possible to give further training to Nigerian officials so that they could continue to revise and use the occupational classification after his departure.Footnote 69

Finally, Weir strove to promote the national classification of occupations among employers and trade unionists. The creation of regional advisory committees, meant to assist Weir, was repeatedly postponed because of rivalries between the two main trade union federations, the Western-leaning Trade Union Congress of Nigeria and the Nigerian Trade Union Congress, affiliated with the communist World Federation of Trade Unions.Footnote 70 In spite of this, Weir delivered lectures to employers’ and workers’ organizations in order to present the work of his unit and to ensure collaboration with the labor officers conducting research in workplaces.Footnote 71 The best results were achieved among employers: the secretary of the Nigerian Employers’ Consultative Association invited Weir to meet its members and passed a resolution in support of Weir’s work, offering him the opportunity to publish an article in the Association’s newsletter about occupational classification and ISCO.Footnote 72 Some trade unionists expressed interest in ISCO in other ways. For example, a member of the Tobacco Workers Union explained to Weir that the union was about to file a lawsuit to settle an industrial dispute relating to the categories in which some jobs had been placed by the company, and according to which wages were determined. The union intended to show that, in ISCO-58, the work performed by the workers corresponded to occupations other than those defined by the company.Footnote 73 It believed the international character of ISCO and the clear definitions of each occupation’s tasks legitimated the workers’ demands for reclassification and thus for increased wages. Although the court ruled against the majority of these requests,Footnote 74 this shows that Nigerian trade unionists had appropriated the ILO’s technical and statistical resources for their own “claim-making” purposes, in an industry which was becoming one of the “leading growth sectors” in Nigeria.Footnote 75 Thus, unlike what had happened from the 1940s up till then, trade unionists no longer referred only to the ILO’s social norms (recommendations and conventions) to back their demands when negotiating with governmental or private employers.Footnote 76 Here, the presence of an international expert fostered a form of workers’ statistical activism.Footnote 77

Thus, the occupational classification project had been extensively reshuffled since the decision was made to focus on Nigeria. With a different expert profile, the ILO ensured that ISCO became the main statistical template of reference for the project. Scaling down the project to one country also allowed the ILO to focus more on local actors (civil servants, employers and trade unionists) who could be a source of information for the adaptation of ISCO-58 to the conditions of work in Nigeria and who, through their collaboration with Weir, could be convinced of the utility of a national classification. In that respect, emphasizing the flexibility and multifunctionality of the future occupational classification was a way of inscribing it in the overarching project of development planning, and of attracting the interest of Nigerian politicians and civil servants. However, looking more closely into the connections with other international experts and technical assistance programs is equally essential for understanding the development of the Nigerian classification of occupations.

Building interdependence between international technical assistance programs locally

Despite Weir’s attempts to closely rely on Nigerian labor officials for developing the national classification of occupations, he received little support from senior civil servants of the Ministry of Labour. Building interdependence with other international technical assistance programs in order to give more importance to the occupational classification project therefore represented a solution to this unexpected difficulty. In the meantime, these connections altered Weir’s original project by giving it new duties and objectives.

Indeed, though the ILO occupational classification scheme was generally welcomed by Nigerian employers and trade unionists, either as a way of organizing labor more efficiently or for the purposes of collective bargaining,Footnote 78 misunderstandings and tensions were paradoxically encountered within the Ministry of Labour, the very institution which had requested technical assistance. Weir regularly complained that he lacked assistants and secretaries to type the forms before he could send them to local labor officials,Footnote 79 which resulted in delays in field investigations.Footnote 80 Another problem was that no priority had been given to the project by the Ministry of Labour itself. Field inquiries were thus an additional load for local labor officials, who could not deal with them while still carrying out their usual work.Footnote 81 More generally, the Ministry of Labour was not a priority for the Nigerian government, hence the “meagre distribution of thinly staffed field offices” as compared with other ministries.Footnote 82 Even employment offices, the service where the national occupational classification would be most useful, barely functioned.Footnote 83 Therefore the ILO project was disregarded within the ministry: the Permanent Secretary, the Ministry’s highest civil servant, felt that it was “too grand an idea at the present time,” and threatened not to extend the mission if no substantial progress was made, arguing that Ekpiken would be able to complete the classification by herself.Footnote 84

The situation led Weir to look for external support. Associating his own project with parallel ones became a means of demonstrating that the classification of occupations was not an isolated task and could work with other technical assistance programs which were considered more essential.Footnote 85 This strategy was also an attempt to counterbalance the compartmentalization of development schemes and to cope with the unexpected difficulties arising from insufficient knowledge of local situations (in particular, of the administrative setting) during the preparatory phase of the projects.Footnote 86 Interdependence between development projects was thus built a posteriori and from below; indeed, each of Weir’s reports to the ILO contains a section entitled “Work Contacts and Relations,” which sheds light on the efforts he made to meet and get advice from other international experts.

Among them were an Israeli UNESCO-sponsored education adviser, Dr Levy.Footnote 87 Discussions suggested a possible cooperation between Levy, Weir, and a newly created structure, the Inter-Regional Manpower Board, which was responsible for all activities relating to manpower in Nigeria, including workforce training.Footnote 88 This helped to recenter Weir’s project, since the Board was connected with various government departments: both the Ministry of Labour and the authorities in charge of economic planning and development—which were far more prestigious and powerful—were likely to be interested in its activities. In this context, Weir met Narayan Prasad, the economic adviser to the prime minister,Footnote 89 about the Manpower Board. As Mary S. Morgan shows, Prasad was highly influential, since he chaired the Joint Planning Committee, the institution which oversaw the whole planning process and since he was able to intervene at any stage to influence it, bypassing the authority of other economists.Footnote 90 Weir and ILO officials saw this as an opportunity to explain that the projected classification compiling occupations and detailing work tasks would be a prerequisite for any manpower program to be articulated with the future economic plan. This would make Prasad an ally who, given his central position within the Nigerian bureaucratic structure, could put pressure on the Ministry of Labour.Footnote 91 Indeed, Prasad proved to be an asset for Weir: he proposed that if Weir’s contract was renewed at the end of his first technical assistance period he should be attached to the Ministry of Economic Development in order to facilitate collaboration with the Manpower Board.Footnote 92

The contacts that Weir developed with UN demographer A. H. Fell had even farther-reaching consequences on the contents of the classification project. Fell was preparing the scheduled May 1962 population census of Nigeria, the first since independence.Footnote 93 He first asked Weir to prepare a set of questions for the census enumerators which would help them determine which occupational category really corresponded to a worker, regardless of the latter’s own claims, “e.g., the electrician mate or ladder holder who reports that he is an electrician.”Footnote 94 Additional questions about the individual’s education level, his level of decision-making, and the types of tools or machines he used, were therefore established to help the enumerators decide which major group (professionals, craftsmen, etc.) the worker fell into.Footnote 95 Fell later requested as well an index listing all the occupations known in Nigeria and assigning each of them a two-digit code (i.e., minor group level), so that post-enumeration officials could process the census results into occupational statistics by the end of June 1962.Footnote 96 The development of the index was given priority over the construction of the detailed national classification: it was a means both of drafting the general structure and codes of the national classification and, by providing a concrete result, of legitimizing Weir’s assignment to the Ministry of Labour.Footnote 97

Compiling the index also reoriented Weir’s work in another direction. Since the Nigerian census was to be carried out in English and Hausa, the ILO recommended that a multilingual index be created: in front of the English occupational titles there should appear their equivalents in the main Nigerian languages (Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba).Footnote 98 This would allow Weir to add this extra information to the classification, which already had to contain the various English titles relating to a single occupation. Weir and the ILO hoped that the inclusion of these languages would encourage the adoption of the classification by regional administrations or by regional economic actors who might have been more familiar with the Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba terms. But this task proved difficult: after a tour to supervise operations, Weir was disappointed with the collected titles. For example, spellings differed widely from one labor official to another, and so Weir considered these terms “suspect”: “e.g., a bricklayer would be a ‘buricular,’ or ‘birikila’ both doubtful ‘Hausaised’ forms of English.”Footnote 99 This formulation reflects the implicit idea which oriented this linguistic research: Weir was interested first and foremost in ways of naming occupations which sounded like “pure” Hausa, Igbo, or Yoruba expressions. Spelling differences were thus disregarded or viewed as mistakes rather than as reflecting distinct forms of pidgin English—hybridizations between English and vernacular languages—and variations in pronunciation which would be worth recording.Footnote 100 But the terms collected might have actually been the most usual ways of naming certain activities, especially those which had not existed as separate occupations before colonization and for which the vernacular languages had no strict equivalent. As Yoruba and Igbo were the languages where these spellings differences were most widespread, Weir abandoned the idea of building an index and a classification in these languages.Footnote 101 Instead, he chose to take into consideration only vernacular occupational titles referring to distinct occupations in English, such as “‘makeri’ which is … used by and in respect of blacksmith, goldsmith, silversmith, or glass maker.”Footnote 102

These considerations are not purely linguistic matters, as they more broadly question what was considered a “real” occupation, and pertain to the capacity of the classification-building process to grasp the diversity of work in Nigeria. They illustrate the limits of what adapting ISCO-58 to local conditions meant: ultimately, Weir’s initial representations about Nigerian occupations were only partially counterbalanced by the field inquiries, and these representations remained essential in explaining which occupations he chose to include in the index and classification, and which he set aside. Indeed, field inquiries seem to have been conducted primarily in firms employing ten or more workers:Footnote 103 the method chosen thus overrepresented the occupations and ways of naming them which existed as wage labor, and partially confirmed the bias of the classification system derived from industrialized contexts. Nevertheless, it was congruent with the general endeavors towards development, seeing industrialization as a desirable, though distant horizon, while self-employed occupations were often perceived as low-productivity jobs and were only slowly attracting the attention of international experts.Footnote 104

In short, the connections made with Levy’s, Prasad’s and Fell’s projects show how interdependent technical assistance programs could become, locally. Interdependence between international projects was not planned by international organizations from the start but was built by international technocrats on the ground, as they had to cope with unexpected obstacles (such as little support from national administrations). These international experts hoped to increase their efficiency by benefiting from the resources that other projects could bring. It was also a way of forging and inscribing their respective projects in a broader vision of development. Interdependence derived from prolonged interactions between experts and had transformative effects on the original projects: new objectives and perspectives, such as the attention to linguistic issues or the building of an index, stemmed from the interactions and the mutual needs of the experts.

By the end of Weir’s contract in September 1962, his collaboration with Fell had profoundly altered the ILO’s mission: the index, which already counted more than 3,700 occupational titles in July 1962,Footnote 105 had occupied much of Weir’s attention during the last months he spent in Nigeria. After the index was completed, the Ministry of Labour did not renew its assistance request to the ILO, and Ekpiken was put in charge of finalizing the classification. Presented to the press in 1967, this classification gathered a total of 1,175 occupations following ISCO’s general structure.Footnote 106

Conclusion

This article has shed light on how a technical assistance project led by the ILO evolved through changing political and institutional settings at the beginning of the 1960s. The change in actor constellations, prompted by decolonization, strongly influenced the strategies of the organization and thus, the resulting classification of occupations. The increasing involvement of the ILO in Africa, and the attempts of the colonial powers at imperial reform through economic and social development, opened a space for practical collaboration between the ILO and the CCTA at the end of the 1950s. Both organizations were interested in occupational classifications: the ILO saw it as an opportunity to promote its new instrument, ISCO, while the CCTA hoped for more accurate and mutually comparable statistics on their respective workforces. Despite the initial failure of the project, reflecting persistent disagreements and distrust between Geneva and the colonial powers, it survived thanks to the adaptability of the ILO’s technical divisions, which reshaped the project on a one-country basis in the newly independent Nigeria. During this period, the profile of the international experts also changed from colonial to technical advisers already involved in the ILO networks and activities. The connections Weir built from below between technical assistance programs created interdependence and made them function like an ecosystem, which allowed him, confronted with doubtful authorities, to entrench his occupational classification project in the broader goal of development planning. Emphasizing the flexibility and multifunctionality of a national classification of occupations was also a way of inscribing it into this framework. Finally, this paper has stressed that disseminating the ILO’s nomenclature in Nigeria was not a simple mechanical transfer: it implied to conduct surveys and collect information about what occupations actually existed locally, and whether additional ones or potential task variations needed to be reported. But ultimately, these inquiries only partially went beyond Western representations. Disseminating ISCO-58 in Nigeria encompassed a series of other activities, such as the training of civil servants and the choice to record certain occupation titles in specific local languages, which oriented the image that the national classification reflected of the occupational structure of Nigeria.

Therefore, the ILO mission had mixed results. It did contribute to training Nigerian officials to use its statistical tool and resulted in the adoption of a classification structure directly inspired by ISCO. But while the transfer and adaptation of ISCO-58 was initially supposed to concern all sub-Saharan territories, only Nigeria had welcomed an ILO expert on this subject by 1962. Thus, in the following years most sub-Saharan African states either continued to rely on previously existing classifications or adopted the original ISCO framework but without including local occupations and further details regarding job execution. In 1965, the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) summarized the partial and uneven state of international comparability for occupational data in Africa. Including North Africa, only fifteen countries had transmitted their occupational classifications to the ECA secretariat: classifications in six countries could be “approximately converted to the three-digit level of the ISCO [unit groups]” but the classifications in seven countries could “only be converted into the one-digit level [major groups] or [were] not consistent with ISCO. For example, the national classification of Kenya [was] based more on social class (skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled workers) than on the precise type of work done.”Footnote 107 This situation presumably lasted until the mid-1970s, when an ILO mission completed its work in Tanzania, and preparatory studies were initiated in Ghana.Footnote 108

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank several persons for their comments on earlier versions of this paper: my PhD supervisors, Profs. Pascale Barthélémy and Isabelle Lespinet-Moret, the participants to the writing workshop, the coordinators of this special feature, especially Drs. Laure Piguet and Léa Renard, ILWCH senior editor, Prof. Mae Ngai, and the two anonymous reviewers.

References

Notes

1. More biographical information about Habig will be given in the course of this paper. In the ILO’s terminology, “experts” were people recruited from outside the ILO for a specific assignment on a fixed-term contract, in contrast to international civil servants, permanently employed by international organizations. The category “experts” refers more generally to individuals whose scientific or technical knowledge was increasingly requested, especially from the interwar period onwards, by colonial governments in a series of specific fields (agriculture, education…). On experts and expertise in colonial and post-colonial situations, see Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Philippe Bourmaud, Norig Neveu and Chantal Verdeil, eds., Experts et expertise dans les mandats de la Société des Nations: Figures, champ, outils (Paris, Presses de l’Inalco, 2020).

2. Riley (chief statistician) and Lyman (head of the Manpower Division) to Habig, 19 May 1960, Inter-governmental Organizations Series [hereafter: IGO] 020-6-J1, ILO Archives, Geneva [hereafter: ILOA].

3. Discussions within the ILO about an occupational classification dated back to the first International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) held in 1923. Suspended during World War II, the debates resulted in the 1957 ICLS adopting the first version of ISCO.

4. In 1959, CCTA members included France, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Belgium, South Africa, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and the newly independent countries of Ghana and Guinea. On the history of the CCTA, see John Kent, The Internationalization of Colonialism: Britain, France and Black Africa, 1939–1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 263–85; Isebill V. Gruhn, “The Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa, 1950–65,” Journal of Modern African Studies 9 (1971): 459–69.

5. See Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940–1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 148–49. Damiano Matasci also describes the CCTA as a “colonial front” against UNESCO. Damiano Matasci, Internationaliser l’éducation: La France, l’UNESCO et la fin des empires coloniaux en Afrique (1945–1961) (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2023), 128.

6. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “Les organismes inter-impériaux et l’internationalisation des politiques sociales (des années 1940 aux années 1960),” Études internationales 54, no. 1 (2023): 5, 38–46. Cláudia Castelo, “Recherche et développement dans les colonies portugaises d’Afrique: L’impulsion de la coopération scientifique interimpériale (1950–1962),” Revue d’histoire contemporaine de l’Afrique 3 (2022): 36–48. In total, the organization launched twenty-four technical projects, ranging from the creation of a climatological atlas to a survey of migrations in West Africa, between 1950 and its integration into the Organization of African Unity in 1965; see Castelo, 40.

7. On the links between development rhetoric and colonialization, see Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds. International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7–8; Andreas Eckert, “‘We Are All Planners Now’: Plannung und Dekolonisation in Afrika,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34, no. 3 (2008), 375–97.

8. Andreas Eckert (“We Are All Planners Now,’” 394) shows that among African political elites a new “planning euphoria” expressed hope for rapid economic and social progress in the wake of independence. The ILO’s pioneering role in technical assistance practices has been discussed by Véronique Plata-Stenger for the interwar period, although she indicates that they were designed in relation with European and South American countries; Véronique Plata-Stenger, Social Reform, Modernization and Technical Diplomacy: The ILO Contribution to Development, 1930–1946 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020).

9. On European occupational categorizations, see Alain Desrosières and Laurent Thévenot, Les catégories socioprofessionnelles (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 7–29; Bruno Duriez et al., “Institutions statistiques et nomenclatures socio-professionnelles: Essai comparatif; Royaume-Uni, France, Espagne,” Revue française de sociologie 32 (1991): 29–59. One major exception regarding Africa is A. J. Christopher, “Occupational Classification in the South African Census before ISCO-58,” Economic History Review 63 (2010): 891–914.

10. Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès, Gouverner par les instruments (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2005).

11. See Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Stefan Timmermans and Steven Epstein, “A World of Standards but Not a Standard World: Toward a Sociology of Standardization,” Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 69–89.

12. See Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès, “Introduction: L’action publique saisie par ses instruments,” in Gouverner par les instruments, ed. Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2005), 12–16; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 5; Timmermans and Epstein, “A World of Standards,” 71.

13. Lascoumes and Le Galès, “L’action publique,” 14; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 5, 14–15; Timmermans and Epstein, “A World of Standards,” 79–81.

14. Roser Cussó, “Should ILO Statistical Activity Be Viewed as ‘International Quantification’? Interwar Production of, and Cooperation on, Labour Data,” Working Papers D&S 4 (2020): 1–26, https://umr-devsoc.pantheonsorbonne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/Cusso_Roser_WP_2020.4_0.pdf.

15. For the ILO, these questions have been raised mostly in relation to its activities in setting social standards—conventions and recommendations–, rather than to its statistical standards. On the adaptation of international labor conventions pertaining to gender and women workers, see Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann, ed. Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

16. On the variety of development options and practices, see Cooper and Packard, International Development and the Social Sciences, 9–10. Hodge underlines how development was a “negotiated process”: see Hodge, “Beyond Dependency: North-South Relationships in the Age of Development,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empires, ed. Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 628–34. For a synthesis on the ways quantification practices contributed to the shaping of international development, see Stephen Macekura, “The Historiography of Measuring Development,” in Perspectives on the History of Global Development, ed. Corinna R. Unger et al., Yearbook for the History of Global Development 1 (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022), 133–54. A more specific article is Gerardo Serra, “Development Indicators at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, 1980–1990: Statistical Visions in the Era of Structural Adjustment,” Histoire & Mesure 33, no 1 (2018): 149–72.

17. “Relations BIT-CCTA. Compte rendu des entretiens qui se sont déroulés à Brazzaville le 20 janvier 1959,” 1H52, Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence [hereafter: ANOM].

18. Ibid. (my translation).

19. Bandeira Jerónimo,”Les organismes inter-impériaux,” 41.

20. “Compte rendu des entretiens qui se sont déroulés à Brazzaville le 20 janvier 1959,” 1H52, ANOM.

21. This strategy continued after independence. On the surveillance of the ILO’s activities in the former French African colonies during the 1960s, see Paul Mayens, “‘Sous l’œil du préfet’: Les activités du Bureau international du travail dans l’Afrique des années 1960 et leur surveillance par les services français,” in Mondialisation et justice sociale: Un siècle d’action de l’Organisation internationale du travail, ed. Marine Dhermy-Mairal et al. (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2024), 175–87.

22. Haighton, “Institut interafricain du travail (IIT): Septième rapport annuel,” 30 December 1959, Inspection Générale du Travail 46, ANOM.

23. Lyman to ILO Field Office, 23 May 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

24. For the structure of ISCO-58, see ILO, International Standard Classification of Occupations (Geneva: [ILO], 1958), https://webapps.ilo.org/ilostat-files/ISCO/newdocs-08-2021/Previous%20versions%20of%20ISCO/ISCO-58/ISCO-58%20EN%20Structure%20and%20definitions.pdf.

25. Penniment, “Summary Results of Questionnaire by CCTA/ILI (Agreed Upon with ILO) on Occupational Classification in Africa South of Sahara,” undated [February 1960], IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

26. Habig, “Rapport à l’OIT n°2,” 6 October 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA (my translation).

27. Laure Piguet, “La justice sociale par les statistiques? Le cas des accidents d’attelage des wagons de chemin de fer (1923–1931),” Le Mouvement Social 263 (2018): 31–43; Léa Renard and Theresa Wobbe, “La statistique internationale comme instrument de globalisation? La carrière de la catégorie de ‘travailleurs familiaux’ au sein de l’Organisation internationale du travail,” Revue française de sociologie 60 (2019): 601–4.

28. “Compte-rendu des entretiens qui se sont déroulés à Léopoldville, le 23 janvier 1959,” IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

29. Ibid.

30. See Duriez et al., “Institutions statistiques,” 32.

31. Haighton (quoting Bodart) to Riley, 20 December 1959, IGO 0-20-6-J1, ILOA.

32. CCTA, “Possible Cooperation between CCTA and ILO in the Field of Occupational Classification,” 29 June 1959, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

33. Riley to de Lusignan, 19 May 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA (my translation).

34. Penniment to Manpower Division, Habig’s personnel file, P8973/B, ILOA.

35. Gavin to Jenks, Florès, and Lacroix, 4 June 1959, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

36. Penniment, “Summary Results of Questionnaire by CCTA/ILI,” undated [February 1960], IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

37. Haighton to Lacroix, ILO Statistics Service, 31 August 1959, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

38. Habig’s curriculum vitae (CV), P8973/B, ILOA.

39. On the similar French occupation of “ingénieur-conseil,” see Odile Henry, “L’impossible professionnalisation du métier d’ingénieur-conseil (1880–1954),” Le Mouvement Social 214 (2006): 37–54.

40. Habig’s CV, P8973/B, ILOA.

41. Penniment to Manpower Division, undated [February 1960], IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

42. Habig, “Rapport à l’OIT n°1,” 26 July 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA. On the decolonization of the Belgian Congo, see Matthew G. Stanard, “Après nous le déluge: Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, ed. Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 145–61.

43. Orizet to Director-General, 23 July 1960, P8973/G, ILOA.

44. Orizet to Director-General, 24 August 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

45. Orizet to Director-General, 7 July 1960, P8973/G, ILOA.

46. Habig, “Rapport de visite à la Fédération de Rhodésie,” 26 July 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

47. Appendix 4 to Habig’s report no. 1, 26 July 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA. My translation.

48. Haighton to Lacroix, 3 September 1959; Habig, report no. 1, 26 July 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

49. Koulischer, Director of the African Field Office, to Director-General, 3 November 1960, IGO 0-20-6-J1, ILOA.

50. Daniel Speich, “The Use of Global Abstractions: National Income Accounting in the Period of Imperial Decline,” Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 20–21; Daniel Speich Chassé, “Les statistiques comme mode de communication politique: Le cas des premiers plans de développement au Kenya,” Politique africaine 145 (2017): 101–6.

51. The ILO (and also some economists in Nigeria) nevertheless considered that the workforce was a resource to be managed and that its composition should be known. Occupational data could help in this. Aaron Benanav, “The Origins of Informality: The ILO at the Limit of the Concept of Unemployment,” Journal of Global History 14, no. 1 (2019): 111; Mary S. Morgan, “‘On a Mission’ with Mutable Mobiles,” Working Papers on the Nature of Evidence: How Well Do “Facts” Travel? 34, no. 8 (2008): 9.

52. Lyman to Riley, Florès, and Blanchard, 17 August 1960, IGO 020-6-J1, ILOA.

53. Lyman to Koulischer, 31 January 1961, Organization’s Technical Assistance [hereafter OTA] 202-1-E-J1, ILOA.

54. Klein, “Report of Mission to Nigeria (5–26 March 1961),” OTA 202-1-E-J1, ILOA.

55. Weir’s CV, OTA 202-1-E-J1, ILOA.

56. Lyman to Weir, 20 June 1961, OTA 202-1-E-J1, ILOA.

57. Ibid.

58. Weir, “Tentative Plan of Work,” 26 July 1961, OTA 202-1-E-1-J1, ILOA.

59. ILO, International Standard Classification of Occupations (1958), 119.

60. Draft statement “Coppersmith,” annex to Weir’s report no. 4 (November 1961), OTA 202-1-E-1-J1, ILOA. All subsequent reports by Weir are from the same file. The month of each report is indicated when first mentioned.

61. Annex III to Weir’s report no. 2 (September 1961).

62. Silke Neunsinger, “The Unobtainable Magic of Numbers: Equal Remuneration, the ILO and the International Trade Union Movement 1950s–1980s,” in Women’s ILO, ed. Boris, Hoehtker, and Zimmerman, 138–39.

63. These features can be seen in the contacts between the ILO and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, and in the preoccupations of European technocrats during the 1950s and1960s. See Ibid. and Ferruccio Ricciardi, “‘Equal Pay for a Similar Work’: Le mythe du salaire au poste dans l’Europe de la CECA (années 1950–1960),” Travail et Emploi 133 (2013): 13–24.

64. Press statement by S. Koku, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Labour, 3 February 1967, OTA 202-1-E-J1, ILOA.

65. Weir’s report no. 2. On the origins and structure of the US DOT, see Pamela Cain and Donald Treiman, “The Dictionary of Occupational Titles as a Source of Occupational Data,” American Sociological Review 46 (1981): 253–78.

66. Eric Morier-Genoud, “Mary Ekpiken,” Africa and Africans @ QUB, 13 November 2018, https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/africa/2018/11/13/mary-ekpiken/.

67. Weir’s report no. 1 (August 1961). Nigeria became a federation of three regions (Eastern, Northern, and Western) with the 1954 Lyttleton Constitution. Lagos was a federal territory under the responsibility of the central government. See Toyin Falola and Matthew Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 153.

68. “Staff Training Programme,” annex to Weir’s report no. 1.

69. Weir’s report no. 1.

70. Tentative Plan of Work, 26 July 1961, OTA 202-1-E-1-J1, ILOA; Hakeem Ibikunle Tijani, Union Education in Nigeria: Labor, Empire and Decolonization since 1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 100.

71. For example, a seminar gathered trade unionists and management representatives at the University of Ibadan; see “Memorandum on the Preparation of Nigeria Occupational Classification System,” annex II to Weir’s report no. 2. The venue was no coincidence, as the University of Ibadan had delivered “labour and industrial relations courses” since the 1950s, in line with the education policy of the unions, as pursued by the colonial and postcolonial authorities. See Tijani, Union Education, 99.

72. Weir’s report no. 1.

73. Weir’s report no. 9 (May–July 1962).

74. Ibid. The union member in question also asked Weir to testify in court, which he refused to do.

75. Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 163.

76. Adewumi Damilola Adebayo, “The ILO and the Political Economy of Labour Policy-Making in Nigeria, 1930–1960,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50, no. 2 (2022): 368.

77. On the links between quantification and the history of social struggles, see for instance Agnès Hirsch, “Compter et classer pour défendre ses intérêts: les fédérations ouvrières face à l’objectivation du monde social (France fin XIXe-début XXe siècles,” Histoire & Mesure 38, no. 1 (2023): 105–26.

78. Describing the tasks of a series of occupations made it possible to combine them into one position or break them down into several. Definitions would additionally avoid misunderstandings between employers and workers, which could result from using only occupation titles during negotiations. See annex I to Weir’s report no. 2.

79. Weir’s report no. 5 (December 1961). See also report no. 6 (January 1962).

80. For instance, the definitions for major group 7/8 (“Craftsmen and Production Process Workers”) should have been completed by December 1961, but they were still ongoing in July 1962. See Tentative Plan of Work, OTA 202-1-E-1-J1, ILOA, and Weir’s report no. 9.

81. Weir’s report no. 2 and report no. 9.

82. Weir to Chief of Field Services Division, Geneva, and Director, African Field Office, 9 November 1961, OTA 202-1-E-1-J1, ILOA.

83. Commentaries to Weir’s Tentative Plan of Work, OTA 202-1-E-1-J1, ILOA.

84. Weir’s report 5.

85. For an overview of the main development fields after the independence of African countries, see Corinna R. Unger, International Development: A Postwar History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 79–125.

86. On the unavoidable gaps between blueprints and concrete implementation, see Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, La revanche des contextes: Des mésaventures de l’ingénierie sociale en Afrique et au-delà (Paris: Karthala, 2021), 7–9.

87. Weir’s report no. 9.

88. Ibid.

89. Prasad was an expert with the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, sent to Nigeria (together with other economists) to prepare the 1962–1968 economic plan. See J. I. Dibua, “The Post-Colonial State and Development Planning in Nigeria 1962–1985,” Journal of Eastern African Research & Development 24 (1994): 215.

90. Morgan, “On a Mission,’” 22, 28–29.

91. Lyman to Weir, 13 March 1962, OTA 202-1-E-1-J1, ILOA.

92. Walker, Acting Director of the ILO West African Field Office, to Director-General, 29 September 1962, OTA 202-1-E-J1, ILOA.

93. The results of the census were finally ruled invalid, since part of the Nigerian population considered them biased. As Serra and Jerven report, the census would have altered political equilibrium as it was supposed to provide a basis for the distribution of parliamentary seats and was detrimental to the Northern Region. Gerardo Serra and Morten Jerven, “Contested Numbers: Census Controversies and the Press in 1960s Nigeria,” Journal of African History 62 (2021): 242–43.

94. Weir’s report no. 1.

95. “Nigeria Census 1962,” annex to Weir’s report no. 7 (February 1962).

96. Weir’s report no. 7. The capacities of the tabulating machine were limited to a two-digit code but Weir decided to produce a three-digit index from which more accurate data based on unit groups could be used for future censuses.

97. Ibid.: “The fact that the Census Authorities were really interested in the project had now been confirmed to the Permanent Secretary.… Great was the excitement thereof—what did I want!” See also Lyman to Director of the African Field Office, 20 February 1962, OTA 202-1-E-1-J1, ILOA.

98. Ibid.

99. Weir’s report no. 8 (March–April 1962).

100. On pidgin English in Northern Nigeria, see Philip Atsu Afeadie, “Language of Power: Pidgin English in Colonial Governing of Northern Nigeria,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 17 (2015): 63–92.

101. Weir’s report no. 8.

102. Weir’s report no. 9.

103. Although Weir’s documents are not clear on this point, Adewumi Adebayo recalls that Nigerian labour officials usually excluded from their reports businesses with fewer than ten employees due to insufficient time and resources. This deeply biased the representation of work in Nigeria in favor of large firms within the overall wage labor, not to mention other forms of informal, self-employed work. See Adebayo, “The ILO”, 355-56.

104. On the transition from this situation to the growing attention paid to informality, see Benanav, “The Origins of Informality,”107–25.

105. Weir’s report no. 9.

106. Press statement by Koku, 3 February 1967, OTA 202-1-E-J1, ILOA.

107. ECA Working Group on Censuses of Population and Housing, “Some Problems of Enumerating Economic Characteristics of the Population in African Censuses,” Addis Ababa (21–29 June 1965), 22–23.

108. United Nations Development Programme and ILO, “Occupational Analysis and Classification. URT/70/002. Tanzania. Project Findings and Recommendations” (1975), https://webapps.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1975/75B09_633.pdf; Alfred Klein, “National Vocational Training Programme. Ghana. National Classification of Occupations” (1975), https://labordoc.ilo.org/discovery/delivery/41ILO_INST:41ILO_V2/1261819810002676.