A NEW DEVELOPMENT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22744, 3 December 1935, Page 10

A NEW DEVELOPMENT

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE REGIONAL CONFERENCE TO BE HELD A new development in the methods of the International Labour Organisation will take place in the near future, when a regional labour conference will be held in Santiago, Chile, according to Mr E. J. Riches, New Zealand member of the economic section of the International Labour Office, who is at present visiting Dunedin. Mr Hitches stated, in an interview last evening, that to this conference every State .in North, Central, and South America would be invited to send delegations consisting of representatives of Governments, employers, and workers. This regional conference, he said, would differ from the ordinary annual sessions of the International Labour Conference in that it would be attended only by delegates from the various States of the American Continent, and not by representatives from all the leading industrial countries of the world. Moreover, it would make no attempt to draft international labour conventions, but would confine its activities to examining the position as regards the ratification and enforcement of existing conventions in the countries represented, and to considering what questions of special interest to those countries might be suggested for discussion at the regular annual sessions of the International Labour Conference. Mr Riches added that the conference was to be held in Santiago at the special invitation of the Government of Chile, which had undertaken to bear a large part of the expense involved. Like a number of the other Latin American States, Chile had, in recent years, taken a marked interest in the work of the International Labour Office, as was shown by the fact that she had ratified 19 international labour conventions.