Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

Original title: “Droit du travail et dette de vie: discours de réception du Bob Hepple Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labour Law 2025”. Revue internationale du Travail 165 (1). Text used as the basis for the acceptance speech given in Bangkok on 29 June 2025. Translation by the author, edited by the ILR editorial team. This article is also available in Spanish, in Revista Internacional del Trabajo 145 (1).

Chairman,

Dear members of the Organizing Committee,

Dear Supryia Routh and Judy Fudge,

Dear colleagues,

No recognition could mean more to me than yours. The res publica academica – the republic of scholars – is indeed the community to which I am most deeply attached. This republic transcends nations, genders and generations, for its members recognize each other by their shared purpose: to better understand the world. Rather than laws, it is guided by rituals that mark the stages of life of those devoted to advancing and transmitting knowledge – from the initiation of youth to the commemoration of ancestors.¹ The Bob Hepple Award ceremony is one such ritual, honouring the memory of this eminent jurist and recognizing the achievements of his successors. In view of the outstanding figures who have received it before me, I doubt very much that I deserve it, but I am greatly honoured to receive it in my turn – 46 years to the day after defending my PhD thesis at the University of Bordeaux.

At the end of each of the two world wars, the nations of the world, realizing that “universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice”,² endeavoured to build a new “world order” by establishing common rules and promoting cooperation between equally sovereign States. The neoliberal revolution replaced this project with that of a new “global order”, which instead fosters competition of all against all and subjects States to the sovereignty of a Total Market.³ Legal scholars are the custodians of basic terminological precision and must carefully distinguish between these policies of globalization (i.e. global ordering) and – in French – mondialisation (i.e. world making), given their fundamental opposition.⁴

The English word “world” and the French word “monde” have the same etymological meaning, denoting a space–time dimension made habitable for humans through their work and cooperation.⁵ The physical, climatic, historical and cultural conditions of this inhabitation of the Earth are extremely varied, such that humanity appears as a mosaic of societies, each with its own “spirit of laws”. These societies may fight or help each other, but nowadays they can no longer ignore each other, as their ecological and technological interdependence grows ever stronger. “Making a world” on a planetary scale means promoting cooperation that draws on the unique genius of each society to address these shared challenges and preserve the Earth’s habitability.

Unlike a world, a “globe” is a geometric figure – a spherical surface whose points obey the uniform and intangible laws of mathematics. The globalization project implemented over the last half-century treats humanity as a dust of contracting particles, governed by the so-called “spontaneous order of the market”. This order is said to emanate from the adjustment of the utility calculations of individual entities that are self-generating and bound only by contracts that operate like on/off switches, depending on consent. According to this view, governments must not impede this spontaneous order but rather facilitate its functioning. They must act, wrote Hayek, like simple watchmakers who “oiled a clockwork, or in any other way secured the conditions that a going mechanism required for its proper functioning”.⁶ This image mirrors the conception of the digital revolution, which aims to capture the entire world as discrete units of zeroes and ones. Once processed, it would not only be possible to represent human behaviour, but also to predict and shape it.

Globalization is thus born of two myths that are specific to Western civilization: the myth of the contractual nature of societies and the myth of the mechanical structure of the universe.⁷ These two myths are combined today in the globalist utopia of the governance of humanity by numbers. In this global order, the hierarchy of the public and private spheres is reversed; the Market, which adjusts the calculations of private interests, is the only Sovereign ruler and the States are merely its instruments. Democracy, assimilated to a “market of ideas”, is itself subject to economic power instead of economic power being subject to it.⁸ The only countries that escape this primacy of the dominium of private property over the imperium⁹ of States are the Communist countries that have embedded the market economy in a dictatorial framework. This is essentially the case of China, qualified by its own constitution as a “democratic dictatorship” and heir to the legal doctrine of the “two handles”, according to which the Prince must, on the one hand, encourage individual greed and, on the other, limit its excesses through fear of punishment.¹⁰

The consequences of half a century of globalization have been disastrous: accelerated global warming, destruction of biodiversity, explosion of inequalities, decline of democracy, identity-based fury, armed conflicts, epidemics, financial crises, riots, migration driven by war, poverty or the devastation of eco-systems, among others. It is in this context that autocrats are thriving today. In the absence of legal guarantees that ensure fair treatment for all, individuals, but also companies and states, find no other alternative than to submit to those who wield greater power and to subjugate those who possess less power.¹¹ Having lost all hold over a ruling class disconnected from their experience of reality, ordinary people watch on helplessly as their living conditions deteriorate. They are thus driven to pledge allegiance to a “great little man” they can identify with, who promises to avenge the injustices and humiliations they endure.¹² By diverting social anger against scapegoats and attacking the democratic foundations of the social State, these champions of ethno-nationalism are not opposing the neoliberal dynamic, they are prolonging it.

Therefore, the problem we face today is not about choosing between the standardizing pressure of a “global order” and the identity-based reactions it provokes; it is about reviving the project of mondialisation – world making – which endeavours to address the ecological and social challenges that all peoples are facing today. Taking up this challenge would require a threefold normative paradigm shift. First, sovereignty should no longer be confused with omnipotence; we must instead recognise the sovereignty of limits, be they economic limits to the concentration of wealth, geographical limits or ecological limits. Second, a “world ordering” policy would mean breaking with the overhanging universalism, which claims to embody reason, and cultivating instead a crucible universalism, which respects the “equal dignity of cultures” and promotes their mutual learning.¹³ Lastly, it would mean breaking with the myth of the contractual nature of human societies, in order to recognize the intergenerational “debt of life”.

I will confine myself here to this question of the debt of life, because labour and social security law is historically the first to have brought it back into the liberal legal order. Liberalism – and even more so neoliberalism – is driven by a belief in a sense of the history of law, which would lead from status to contract.¹⁴ This creed stems from the myth of the “social contract” which, from Hobbes to Rousseau and John Rawls, has dominated Western thought for three centuries. In the eighteenth century, only two authors, both jurists – Vico and Montesquieu¹⁵ – opposed this myth. They argued that the primary social bond is not a contract but a filiation. Anthropology has since upheld the validity of this observation by revealing the primary and universal role of the prohibition of incest in alliance systems.¹⁶ At birth, every human being is first and foremost a constituent of a generational chain and genealogy is the original source of the obligation of reciprocity.¹⁷ However, this evident fact is repressed in the West, as it directly contradicts contemporary contractualism and its corollaries: the primacy of rights over obligations and the commodification of the world.

The catastrophic limits of this way of thinking were first reached in the nineteenth century in the field of labour relations. The commodification of labour had plunged whole swathes of humanity into a deadly spiral, endangering the reproduction of nations’ physical resources. By limiting the working hours of women and children, labour laws were the first to respond to the vital need to preserve – in the face of the short time frame of the market – the long time frame of human life and its reproduction. In turn, social insurance – then social security – established systems of solidarity to protect workers and their families from the risks of revenue loss associated with maternity, illness and accident, unemployment, old age or death. A status was thus inserted into every employment contract, without which the fiction of commodity work would have been unsustainable.¹⁸

One of the most remarkable elements of this status is the “pay-as-you-go” pension system, where the working generation provides the previous generation with the means to live, as the next generation will for them.¹⁹ This system of receivables and debts establishes what anthropologists call an “indirect alternative reciprocity” between three successive generations²⁰ – a form of intergenerational solidarity that eludes contractual logic. For the past half-century, neoliberal policies have sought to dismantle this system in favour of funded systems.²¹ The purpose of funded systems is to bolster the financial markets, but their effect is to replace solidarity between generations with antagonism, since the interests of pension funds are diametrically opposed to those of employees in the distribution of the value created by companies.

And yet, current ecological challenges demonstrate the urgent need to extend rather than reduce the scope of these intergenerational forms of solidarity. They apply the principle of the debt of life, whose crucial role has long been recognized by many non-Western civilizations.²² We have received life from our parents; in return, we must preserve their life and, above all, pass life on to our descendants. Although not explicitly recognized as such in contemporary law, this basic debt manifests itself in the form of the “rights of future generations”, proclaimed by various legal instruments in the face of global warming and the loss of biodiversity.²³ This notion shows that legal universalism is difficult to conceptualize in Western legal culture other than in terms of personal rights. Giving rights to subjects who do not yet exist raises logical and practical difficulties which are, however, circumvented by the notion of the debt of life. The issue of climate justice between rich and poor countries is, moreover, currently presented as one of “ecological debt”. This debt to future generations is indeed essentially an ecological debt: we must pass on to them an Earth that is at least as liveable as the one we inherited from our ancestors. But it is also an educational debt: we owe it to our children to educate and instruct them, so that they can each give their life on this Earth a meaning shared with others and leave their own mark on it.²⁴

Our task as legal scholars is to work towards labour and social security law that helps honour this dual ecological and educational debt to future generations. The ecological situation is inextricably linked to work. It is indeed through labour that mankind changes, improves or, on the contrary, destroys its ecosystems. Globalization has accelerated this destruction by engaging States in a social and environmental race to the bottom, and by encouraging an international division of labour that is ecologically unsustainable. On the contrary, a policy of mondialisation must seek to organize the work of nations in such a way as to curb global warming and protect biodiversity.

Similarly, the organization of work is a laboratory for the good and bad uses of our new machines. In the past, Taylorism treated workers like decerebrate cogs; today’s governance by numbers treats them like bipedal computers.²⁵ In addition to the hold that machines have on our bodies, they also now have a hold on our minds, extending beyond the workplace and reaching children from an early age. Globalization has thus given rise to what Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism”.²⁶ It has also allowed big companies to free themselves of responsibility for the supply chains that they control. A “world making” policy would consist, on the contrary, of putting our new digital machines at the service of humans, instead of enslaving humans to them.

Under the terms of the ILO Constitution (in its French version), nations must strive to bring about a “régime de travail réellement humain” – a “truly humane labour regime” – throughout the world.²⁷ In view of the ecological and technological challenges of our time, such a regime must promote the proper use of digital technologies, as well as the reduction of the ecological impact of work and its products. To this end, freedom of association and its corollaries – the rights to representation, collective bargaining and collective action (including the right to strike²⁸) – should be extended to qualitative considerations regarding the content and meaning of work.²⁹ This broadening of the scope of social democracy goes hand in hand with the broadening of the scope of social justice, as foreshadowed by the Declaration of Philadelphia at the end of the Second World War. This Declaration enjoins the nations of the world and the ILO to achieve “the employment of workers in the occupations in which they can have the satisfaction of giving the fullest measure of their skill and attainments and make their greatest contribution to the common well-being”.³⁰ Nowadays, “giving the fullest measure of [one’s] skill” implies putting the so-called “intelligence” of our machines at the service of human intelligence and not the other way around;³¹ and making “the greatest contribution to the common well-being” entails providing workers with both the individual and collective freedom to voice opposition and reject tasks that are likely to result in harm to the human mind or the environment. In this way, labour law can contribute to honouring the debt of life we owe to our children and future generations. By embarking on this path, lawyers will be following in the footsteps of Bob Hepple and his determined fight for the full and equal recognition of economic, social and cultural rights.

Alain Supiot

Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France

International Fellow of the British Academy

Notes

1. See Françoise Waquet, Respublica academica: rituels universitaires et genres du savoir (XVIIe-XXIe siècle) (Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris-Sorbonne, 2010). ⮭
2. ILO Constitution, Preamble, paragraph 1. See also the Declaration of Philadelphia, Article II. ⮭
3. See Alain Supiot, The Spirit of Philadelphia: Social Justice vs. the Total Market (London: Verso, 2012). ⮭
4. See Alain Supiot, “Globalisation or ‘Mondialisation’? Taking Social Models Seriously”, in Social Justice and the World of Work: Possible Global Futures – Essays in Honour of Francis Maupain, ed. Brian Langille and Anne Trebilcock (Oxford: Hart, 2023), 13–22; Alain Supiot, “L’esprit des lois à l’époque globale”, Revue internationale de droit économique, t.XXXVII 2023/3 (2023): 5–22. ⮭
5. “World”, like “Welt” in German, comes from the Proto-Germanic word “werald”, composed of “wer” (man) and “ald” (age) – see Robert K. Barnhart, The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (New York, NY: H.W. Wilson Company, 1988), see “world”, 1244; Pascal David, “Welt”, in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Le Robert/Seuil, 2004), 1390–1396. The French “monde” stems from the Latin “mundus”, which, like the Greek “cosmos”, designated the inhabited Earth, as well as ornament or adornment, as opposed to “immonde” (foul), referring to chaos – see Alfred Ernoult and Antoine Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: histoire des mots, 4th ed. (Paris: Klincksieck, 2001), see “mundus”. In Russian, the word “mir” means both world and peace, such that during the First World War this homonymy inspired the slogan “Mir meru!” translated as “Peace to the world!” – see Malamoud, “Mir”, in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles, op. cit. 803–808). ⮭
6. Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, Vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1982), 128. ⮭
7. See Jean Lassègue and Giuseppe Longo, L’empire numérique. De l’alphabet à l’IA (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2025). On the religious origins of this mechanical image, see Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1934), 12–18. ⮭
8. US Supreme Court, Citizens United v. FEC, 21 January 2010. See Timothy K. Kuhner, Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Alain Supiot, “Democracy Laid Low by the Market”, Jurisprudence 9, No. 3 (2018): 449–460. ⮭
9. The neoliberals have adopted this distinction made by Carl Schmitt – Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974 [1950]), 17. See also Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, 10–11 and 219ff. ⮭
10. On this theory, see Fei Han, Han-Fei-Tse ou Le Tao du prince: la stratégie de la domination absolue (Paris: Seuil, 1999), Chapter VII [translated and introduced by Jean Lévi]; Léon Vandermeersch, La formation du légisme: recherche sur la constitution d’une philosophie politique caractéristique de la Chine ancienne (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1965 [repr. 1987]), 192ff; Romain Graziani, Les Lois et les Nombres: essai sur les ressorts de la culture politique chinoise (Paris: Gallimard, 2025), 295ff. ⮭
11. See Alain Supiot, Governance by Numbers: The Making of a Legal Model of Allegiance (Oxford: Hart, 2017). ⮭
12. Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, Vol. 3, ed. Géza Róheim (New York, NY: International Universities Press, 1951), 279–300. ⮭
13. See the Guiding Principles (Article 2) of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions [2005], adopted by all UNESCO members, except Israel and the United States. ⮭
14. According to Henry Sumner Maine’s famous thesis “the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract” – Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas, with an introduction and notes by Sir Frederick Pollock, fourth American from the tenth London edition (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1906 [1861]), 165. ⮭
15. See Charles Edwyn Vaughan, Studies in the History of Political Philosophy before and after Rousseau, Vol. 1, From Hobbes to Hume (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), 204–302. ⮭
16. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2017 [1949]). ⮭
17. See Pierre Legendre, L'Inestimable objet de la transmission: étude sur le principe généalogique en Occident (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 137–173. ⮭
18. Alain Supiot, Critique du droit du travail, 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2009 [1994]). ⮭
19. See Eri Kasagi, ed., Solidarity across Generations: Comparative Law Perspectives (Cham: Springer, 2020). ⮭
20. See Marcel Mauss, “La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires” (1931]), in Œuvres, t. 3, Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 11–26. ⮭
21. See the recommendations made by the World Bank, Averting the Old Age Crisis: Policies to Protect the Old and Promote Growth (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994). ⮭
22. See Charles Malamoud, “La théologie de la dette dans le brāhmanisme”, in La dette. Puruṣārtha: sciences sociales en Asie du Sud, No. 4, ed. Charles Malamoud (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1980), 39–62; Charles Malamoud, ed., Lien de vie, nœud mortel: les représentations de la dette en Chine, au Japon et dans le monde indien (Paris, Editions de l’EHESS, 1988); Étienne Le Roy, “La dette infinie: représentations africaines, solidarité écologique et développement durable”, VertigO – la revue électronique en sciences de l'environnement, Hors-série 26 (September 2016), https://doi.org/10.4000/vertigo.17506. ⮭
23. See United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 43/53, Protection of global climate for present and future generations, A/RES/43/53, 6 December 1988; United Nations, Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, A/CONF.151/26 (Vol. I), 12 August 1992, Annex I; United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 79/1, Pact for the future, Annex II, Declaration on future generations, A/RES/71/1 (22 September 2024). See also the advisory opinion issued on 23 July 2025 by the International Court of Justice on the obligations of States in respect of climate change. At the regional level, see the Council of Europe’s Reykjavík Declaration (2023). ⮭
24. This duty is enshrined in the form of a “right to education” by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26). ⮭
25. Alain Supiot, Governance by Numbers: The Making of a Legal Model of Allegiance (Oxford: Hart, 2017). ⮭
26. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). See also – published ten years earlier – Éric Sadin, Surveillance globale: enquête sur les nouvelles formes de contrôle (Paris: Climats, 2009). ⮭
27. ILO Constitution, Preamble, paragraph 3 (only the French version of the Constitution contains this notion – the English version is less ambitious, not aiming for a “labour regime”, but only “conditions of labour”. For a historical and comparative approach, see Pierre Musso and Alain Supiot, eds., Qu’est-ce qu’un régime de travail réellement humain? (Paris: Hermann, 2018). ⮭
28. Since 2012 the international recognition of this right has been under frontal attack from the international employers’ organization, with the support of the world’s most authoritarian regimes. See Alain Supiot, “Vers un droit international de la grève?”, Le Monde diplomatique, January 2024, https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2024/01/SUPIOT/66442; Francis Maupain, “Le droit de grève devant la CIJ: un défi historique pour la cohérence et l’impact du système de contrôle de l’OIT”, Revue de droit comparé du travail et de la sécurité sociale, 2025/1): 6–47. On the importance of the right to strike in struggles for the emancipation of peoples, see Bob Hepple, Rochelle le Roux and Silvana Sciarra, eds., Laws against Strikes: The South African Experience in an International and Comparative Perspective (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2015). ⮭
29. See Alain Supiot, “Labour is not a Commodity: The Content and Meaning of Work in the Twenty-First Century”, International Labour Review 160, No. 1 (2021): 1–20. ⮭
30. Declaration of Philadelphia, Article III (b). ⮭
31. See Gerg Gigerenzer, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms (London: Penguin, 2023). ⮭