This is the story of how the International Labour Organization (ILO) came in 2012 to use its standard setting and soft law powers to resolve upon a recommendation to all countries that they should establish a ‘social protection floor’ (SPF) containing basic social security guarantees that would ensure that over the life cycle all in need could afford and have access to essential health care and have income security. It is the story of how the concept of a ‘social floor under the global economy’ or the ‘global social floor’ was transformed from a term used by global social reformists challenging neoliberal globalisation at the turn of the century into a concrete global social policy measure. It is also the story of the compromises that needed to be made en route, which, in the view of some critics, meant that the initial concept of a ‘global social floor’ became watered down into the concept of ‘nationally variable social protection floors’. In part therefore it is a story of the internal politics of one of the major international organisations of the United Nations (UN). It throws light on the respective roles of governments, employers and trades unions on the one hand, who sit on the ILO's governing body and attend the annual International Labour Conference (ILC), and the permanent secretariat of the ILO on the other. It is therefore also the story of individuals who occupied positions within that context. It reveals who had influence inside the ILO and how it was used in order to win the institution over to promulgating the SPF Recommendation. The story throws light in particular on the role of the secretariat of the ILO. One of the first books to be published in the context of the ILO Century Project, a programme of work to write the history of the ILO as it approaches its 100th year in 2019, notes in its review of all the existing texts on ILO history (van Daele, 2010: 38) that: