88th Session, 30 May - 15 June 2000 |
Address
by Mr. Juan Somavia, |
Let me say that I cannot imagine a better inauguration of our plenary than the very deep and profound words that we have just heard from President Branco de Sampaio. You know well that I believe that, in the end, it is people that make a difference – and we have just heard a political leader who risked security, who risked much in his country for the things which he believed in; and I think that this is what the ILO is about. It is about being able to address the real problems of today and to call them by their real name and at the same time to be able to work together so that we can find solutions; I am therefore very happy that he has given us this framework for the beginning of our talks.
Last year, as you all remember, we adopted a new vision for the ILO: Decent Work. This vision, built around four strategic objectives – fundamental rights and principles at work; employment; social protection and social dialogue – guides our progress and the way we organize ourselves. Well, I have to report back to you. It has been an exciting year, a year with a lot of work, a lot of changes. We have been putting in place new programmes and structures in partnership with the Governing Body. In a management retreat we held some days ago, someone described our workload as changing the wheels while the car is moving, and I find that it is not a bad description. We have programmes that are going on and yet we want to change many of those things. It is not easy.
It is a big challenge and I think that we are delivering. Many are perceiving that a more relevant, tripartite ILO is emerging. I see a more cohesive ILO. We do not hide our differences but there is a greater sense of common purpose. All of this is reflected in the Director-General’s Report, Activities of the ILO 1998-1999 and particularly the update we have provided in Provisional Record No. 3.
I will not therefore talk about what we have done, but rather I would like to dialogue with you these days about where we are going and some of the challenges before us.
Decent work expresses the overall goal of the ILO in ordinary, everyday language. It is a way of integrating the ILO’s value-based agenda built around rights at work and social protection on the one hand, and a sustainable development agenda based on the growth of employment and enterprise on the other hand. We need both engines operating at full efficiency to stay on course with social dialogue fuelling the flight.
Decent work is an ambitious goal. It is what people aspire to. People have a right to be ambitious about themselves and their families: our job is to help them get there. To get it right, we have to see these things through the eyes of people – to understand the loss of dignity and personal insecurity that unemployment and poverty brings to families.
Some time ago I saw a Belgian film, maybe some of you have seen it - called Rosetta. Rosetta is a is a story of a 19-year-old woman who is looking for work and continuously gets different forms of dehumanizing work. We are talking about a developed country here. And the leitmotif throughout the whole film is her cry “I want normal work, please give me normal work”. And in looking at the film I said to myself – but this is what the decent work notion is all about. It is about giving people this incredible aspiration of having work that gives them dignity and that gives them opportunities. And realized that we did not invent anything when I produced a Report called Decent work.
The persistence of this need through our time came to my mind when, in the Department of Labor of the United States, I saw an exhibition of the 1930s – the middle of the crisis, the Depression showing workers who were unemployed bearing a placard that said: “Wanted, decent jobs”: This was in 1930, during the American Depression.
So this search for decency in work is an historical search and we have been able to synthesize it in our four strategic objectives; and I think that that will lead us into being able to connect with people, which is the essence of an institution like the ILO, to be able to connect with people in the way we talk and not to disconnect with people in the way the international organizations talk. And I can assure you after living for nine years in the United Nations in New York that if you take a resolution approved at the General Assembly and you hand it to somebody, a normal person, they will understand very little of it. We, at the ILO with our tripartite structure, should not fall into that trap.
So, decent work starts with people. It speaks to real life situations; it captures the diversity. It is not a straightjacket, a one-size-fits-all solution. On the contrary, it is a way of treating, in a coherent and dynamic way, the diverse aspirations and goals of different individuals, different cultures, different societies.
The response that I have found to this way of looking at things has been overwhelmingly positive. The question is how to make it real. We all understand that the possibilities for decent work evolve with social and economic progress and the goals can and should rise over time.
When I talk to people and we discuss what it is we are trying to do at ILO, I ask: “What is decent work? How do you see it in your own life and in the life of your family?” And the answer is: “It is work which allows me to educate my children, have a stable family life in health and in security and at which my rights at work are recognized - and if I play according to the rules I will have some pension at the end of my working years”- and when I hear that, I say to myself: “Is that a very revolutionary demand? Is it something that should make us wonder if we can possibly aspire to it?”
Now I find that it is a normal human reaction of anybody who would like to form a family in the world. And yet why is it so difficult? And not only “Why is it so difficult?” Some people have said to me: “You know the bar is too high. We need work first, any type of work. Let us worry about how decent it is later”. That is what we have been doing for the last 30 years with the result that informal and precarious work has grown worldwide. That approach is not working.
I believe, on the contrary, that we have to build the wider aspirations of people into their work right from the start. If you do not, you end up with child labour, with discrimination, with highly dangerous jobs, with intolerable practices of all sorts and outright exploitation. I believe that we cannot tell people: “Sorry, the aspiration, to decent work is just for some people in the world. You happen to have lived or been born in a situation in which that aspiration is not possible”. I do not believe that ILO can take that stand, and I believe that we have to be able to transmit the hope that decent work is possible, although we know that it will take time to achieve from the present situation in which many people find themselves.
Achieving decent work for everyone will take time, it will take effort, but we need to set the process in motion and keep it on track. It has to be the responsibility of society as a whole, enterprises, workers, organizations, governments, political and social leaders and citizens’ groups.
The “decent work” vision is the compass that will guide us all. This is not just about how workers and employers work it out within an enterprise sector or even nationally. It is about a society as a whole setting a goal, an objective, and organizing itself to reach it. And we must determine what we are trying to do collectively through the four strategic objectives.
Our next challenge on the decent work agenda is to make it operational at the national level. We plan to work with tripartite constituencies of interested countries, to analyse together how the vision can be put into practice in different national situations.
Let me address some key issues that are relevant to our Conference.
We already have agreement in the national community about basic rights at work. That is the floor of the global economy, and decent work builds on it.
Freedom of association is a key enabling right. Women and men having the opportunity to organize, to act collectively, to promote and defend their rights. It is a precondition for all the rest. It is as true for employers as for workers. Freedom of association is relevant in every facet of human life. It is the expression of the freedom of the spirit.
Tomorrow we have a chance to debate this issue in depth when we look at the first Global Report under the Follow-up to the ILO Declaration. We have called it Your voice at work. The picture is not good. We expect a full day of lively and interactive debate. Your voices will guide the Governing Body this November to set priorities for technical cooperation and plans of action. For example, to exercise their rights, people need to know what they are. Could we not post the message of the Declaration in every workplace of the world. It would be a very simple practical step to make it known.
Last year the adoption of the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention was one of the highlights of the Conference. At that time I said that we should make this a global cause, and in the course of this year the Office has mounted an intensive campaign to do just that. The result is unprecedented numbers of ratification in the first year - in fact, the highest in the history of the ILO. We expect more than 30 by the time the Conference is over and many more are in the pipeline. On Wednesday there will be a special event to recognize these impressive efforts made by those countries which have already ratified.
But beyond ratification my message today is that it is indispensable and possible to confront the worst forms of child labour, now and fast. It is a moral obligation. We need resources, people and energy, but we can do it. Ten days ago, in a seminar in Washington, I listened to people who have been making it happen at the local level in projects big and small all over the world. Our job is to support them and help their actions multiply. Again, our next step is to work with countries that want to fix time bound policies to eliminate the worst forms of child labour. Among them already in talks with the Office, are El Salvador, Nepal and The United Republic of Tanzania.
In a few hours time, in New York today, the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly “Women 2000” will start. It is entitled “Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st Century”. We have a substantial ILO delegation at that Conference, where we will be underlining how gender equality has to be built into rights and representation, into social protection and employment.
Equality is the issue - the chance for both men and women to find fulfilling roles as producers, care-givers, citizens. We still have a long way to go, but there is a new atmosphere and clear decisions on this issue within the ILO itself.
To be credible, I feel that it is critical for this Organization to lead by example. I want your help to develop creative new strategies to achieve gender balance at all levels in the Organization. Let us analyse together what we might do to create this gender balance, not only in the Secretariat but in national delegations of the Conference and in the Governing Body.
In our Conference we have an issue on the agenda which is a perfect example of how gender equality is at the heart of decent work: maternity protection.
I want to go to the core of this debate - the human being concerned, the woman who would like to be able to bear a child safely and to nurture her child for some time after its birth without fear of losing her job, her income or her career.
It is not an unreasonable demand. This is part of the whole contemporary debate on work and family life and the stability of the family.
The response cannot be just a business or a market decision. It is too important. It is a societal decision. It is about the values we want to express as the ILO. It is how much we value the right of working mothers to bear children. It is about how welcome or unwelcome that girl or boy is going to be. It is about family stability and family values and, beyond that, about the difficulties of single parent households. And once we decide on that, once we decide on the values that we want to put in place, then it is about how we share responsibilities and costs. And of course these responsibilities and costs have to be well balanced in society and should not fall on any particular actor specifically.
As you all know, the approach to the revision of this Convention has raised legitimate concerns that the final results might be to lower the standards set half a century ago. It appears odd that after 50 years we might need to lower standards, but this is a real preoccupation that has emerged. The worry, then, is that the final result may be to lower the standards set half a century ago which many countries have since gone beyond, rather than modernize them. Of course, 50 years down the road you need an element of modernization, but we should not confuse one thing with the other. We should not confuse the values we want to put in place with the instruments which the ILO has adopted, and how the cost is going to be distributed in society once we put in place the systems that we believe are the correct or just ones.
At the end of these negotiations, I trust that we can all say that this has not happened, and that the standards have not been lowered.
I firmly hope that the instruments you adopt will be as strong as necessary to provide effective maternity protection in the reality of today’s societies as a key component of decent work.
Developing our capacity to help countries formulate a national policy agenda for decent work is central to our future activities. But it also depends very heavily on what happens in the new global economy.
It is time to re-examine the rules and policies that underlie globalization. The criterion for success is not only growth or financial returns but whether the global economy has been meeting people’s needs.
I believe it has not – clearly, not sufficiently. As I have often said, the hard reality is that the benefits of globalization are not reaching enough people. We know that the global economy is not creating enough jobs, and especially not enough jobs or sustainable livelihoods that meet people’s aspirations for a decent life. Perceptions of uncertainty and insecurity are spreading across societies.
Unless we tackle the growing disenchantment with the present form of globalization, the backlash will continue – the visible and vocal backlash on the streets and the silent backlash in the home, round the dinner tables of our homes. If questions of unfairness and inequality are not addressed by the international community, the policies promoting globalization, with all its potential to generate economic growth, development and wealth, will be rejected by increasing numbers of people and countries. I believe that imagination and creativity will be needed to make markets work for everybody. It is becoming a precondition for social legitimacy.
We often hear that globalization cannot be changed and is irreversible. This is only partially true, and let me say why.
I believe that the information, communication, technological revolution that we are living through is irreversible – it is one of those jumps in technology that history systematically produces. This one is a new one; it is going to stay. We are in the infancy of the process, and we need to be able to adapt to it and to assume it as a reality. But there is nothing irreversible about the policies that have accompanied globalization – the macroeconomic policies, the trade policies, the financial policies, the social policies, the development policies, the debt policies. If these policies are not delivering the goods for people, are not generating a reaction where people say: “Hey, this is really good for me and my family”, then we have to fine-tune them, we have to modify them, we have to change them, if necessary. So let us not get confused about the inevitability of globalization. “Yes”, on the technological front, not on the policy side. And that is the space in which the ILO needs to be aware and to be active.
The global economy needs a framework of rules so that it meets everyone’s needs. In the Governing Body, the Working Party on the Social Dimensions of Globalization gives us a forum where we can take these questions further, first in a discussion between ourselves as a tripartite structure of the ILO and then with other international organizations which may want to discuss this issue with us.
As I have said, today the shape of globalization is bound up with the new knowledge economy. I believe it is full of potential.
Global information networks foreshadow the end of closed societies. That is a major change in front of us and the implications for networking, for information, for participation are enormous.
Better communications are leading to new networks and new services. Telecentres and telecottages are creating employment from Senegal to the Dominican Republic. Conditions are favourable for gender equality, as shown for instance in the use of mobile phones by women to provide new services in rural Bangladesh.
There are better opportunities for education and training, particularly distance learning. Education should prepare young people for the new realities of the enterprise and develop their capacity to be creative in an increasingly sophisticated workplace.
New economic opportunities are multiplying, and not only in the North. In Brazil and India software companies are mushrooming with a capacity for global competition.
The list is long. I believe that this opens up new potential for everyone.
But there is a real risk of a digital divide, a chasm that could swallow up all this potential and create new dimensions of exclusion. We need to look at where jobs are being destroyed and where they are created and build bridges between them, especially by widening access to skills and competencies. The next World Employment Report will come out early next year and will tackle all of these issues in depth.
The spread of the new technologies is accelerating and there is the opportunity for individuals and nations to leapfrog. It comes down to empowering people and giving them voice. The potential is enormous.
But – and this is an important but – investments in infrastructure are needed if we want to expand its use, and access to opportunity is needed if we want to take full advantage of the knowledge economy. Walter Reuther, the American labour leader, said it in a different context. He said: “ You cannot build an automobile economy on bicycle wages”. Well, in my view, you cannot build a knowledge economy ignoring workers’ rights and social protection. They have to go hand in hand. Ninety per cent of working-age people do not have formal protection in the world today.
Unfortunately, we are dealing with an information revolution when we have not yet overcome the problems of the industrial revolution. Poverty was not invented by globalization but, as World Bank figures show, neither has globalization reduced poverty and exclusion.
Tinkering with existing approaches, I think, will not take us very far. We need to find radically new solutions to the global problems of intense poverty and the working poor. All the creativity of workers, employers and government will be needed to develop a new paradigm. It is an extraordinary challenge for us at the ILO.
In looking for creative solutions we must stop thinking of markets as forces of nature but rather as social mechanisms which are imperfect and which can be enhanced to serve human needs better.
I believe that all of us really need to develop a questioning attitude, rethink our policies, come up with new alternatives. Old habits are comfortable, we all know that, but if we continue as we have always done, open markets and open societies will be at risk
Can we not work in partnership to increase the options, the freedom of choice, the purchasing power of the 3 billion poor who subsist on less than $2 a day in the world? Can we not increase and improve self and wage employment opportunities for these women and men?
This is a fundamental way of linking the rights and protection agenda with the development agenda. Nearly everyone would have a stake in this challenge – business, workers, their organizations, governments would all benefit. If we are successful, the positive economic and social impact would be dramatic, the effect on global growth enormous.
I ask myself: Is this a dream, the idea of taking 3 billion people with less than $2 a day and incorporating them into the mainstream of their own societies and the global economy? I believe that it is not. It will happen if we decide to make it happen, but it won’t happen on its own. And I ask myself : Where can we find the energy, the thought, the experience to begin thinking in very practical terms. As you know, I believe that the value systems of the commitments that I hold very dear to me are clear. Unless you make things happen in practical terms then you are just making speeches. So, when I think in terms of how to do these things in practice, I think about all of you.
You know that for some time now I have been in the international system, but also in national politics, and in civil society organization and in business. I have had a rather varied life before getting here.
Let me tell you one thing, there is no single institution in the world that has the potential of being able to solve this problem better than the ILO. Now, we can choose to use the potential or not; we can choose to say “Well, but it’s not our responsibility, it’s not really in our mandate”, etc. There are a thousand things that we always find when we do not want to do things.
What I want to tell you is that, if we are going to find a solution to this problem, it is the experience of the enterprise, it is the experience of work, it is the experience of the employers’ associations, it is the experience of governments working together, thinking together that links us to reality, because what we have sitting in this room today is the real world. We are talking about the world of work, about the world of the economy, about the places where employers and workers get together and where governments set some sort of a basic overall regulation for their work. So what I want to tell you is that the challenge is enormous. The potential is there; it will just depend on whether we want to do it or not.
What I would like to say, and with this I will end, is that I believe that we should be at the forefront of forging a global coalition for decent work. To do so we need a new spirit of entrepreneurship. I believe profoundly in entrepreneurship as a creative phenomenon, but I think that we all have entrepreneurship in ourselves. The capacity to combine resources means ideas to make something happen, to make a new product emerge. Everybody has that potential in him or herself. We have to unleash it; we have to decide to use it and to make it happen in practice. So we need a new spirit of entrepreneurship, to invent new enterprises, new cooperatives, new initiatives, new international agreements, new global networks that respond to unmet human needs.
We must start from a firm commitment to cohesive tripartism, with each group bringing to the task its own indispensable contribution. And we must make sure that the ILO’s work itself forms part of a renewed effort by the multilateral system to get to grips with the social challenges of globalization in a way that it has not managed to do so far. This is the basic flaw of the present global economy; it has a great economic structure, but it has a weak social structure, and consequently people are reacting to it.
Enterprises are the place where economy and society come together. Without them we can go nowhere, because it is there that the jobs are created that offer the way forward from poverty. The ILO has to work with the Employers’ group to create the enabling environment in which these enterprises can prosper and become what I would call nurseries of decent work.
Today, we see creative enterprises across the world working in partnership with trade unions, investing in their workforces, functioning as part of the community. They are efficient, they are dynamic, they are the future. They are competitive in the world market and yet they are socially relevant and have good industrial relations.
While large enterprises play a dominant role in the global economy, the jobs are mostly created in micro, small and medium enterprises. We need to help all the smaller enterprises to move forward on the high road.
We need trade unions, trade unions faithful to their historical mission which combines ethics and practicality in recognizing that their task is not to defend islands of decent work against a rising tide of inequality and injustice at work. The challenge to them, and I would like it to be a challenge to the ILO as a whole, is to close the representational gap which the Global Report highlights. The answer is always to organize and for us to help eliminate obstacles to organization when confronting complex situations. But how do you organize the knowledge worker? How do you organize the work in the informal economy? These are major difficulties, great questions with which trade unions will have to cope in the future. We should be able to be relevant in our thinking with them. And to help answer these questions, because we all know that organization is better for everybody.
In addition to the organization of small enterprises in the informal sector – which practically does not exist – we shall have to face the enormous challenge of linking ourselves to the real world, where production is actually happening.
Our social partners need to be able to work with governments which make the cause of decent work their own, governments which are ready to integrate decent work into their national policy programmes. By prioritizing the task of making decent work operational at the country level, we would be committing the ILO to working with such countries in the concerted effort required to take decent work out of the conference halls of Geneva to the fields and factories and offices of your countries.
The challenge I propose to all of you is that we should work with those countries. We have to think together how to do it. We have to think in a tripartite way. But why don’t we try? Why don’t we see how these notions and this effort at integrating the four strategic objectives can, in fact, come about when you try to look at it in a national context.
All of this needs to be put into a new multilateral framework if it is to work. The credibility of international institutions and international policy-making has been eroded by the social policy deficit that has grown up as globalization has accelerated. We have to tackle that social policy deficit in the multilateral system.
More socially sensitive policies are required, of course, but also a more integrated approach by the multilateral system whose organizations need to stop behaving like independent actors. I use the word “actors” because you sometimes look at the way institutions operate and it would seem that rather than operating as a team we are representing our own institutions. And I say to myself: What? All these problems are interlinked and interconnected; how can we pretend to solve many of the issues that we have seen just by looking at them with a financial eye, or a trade eye, or a social eye, or a development eye? They are interlinked, they are interconnected, and in that sense I believe the multilateral system is underperforming.
We have been trying to push it towards operating much more with a common vision of how we solve the problems. We have been building bridges with our sister organizations in the system. We have, for example, agreed to work with the World Bank at a country level to bring the decent work agenda of the ILO together with the Bank’s Comprehensive Development Framework.
One week after the close of this session of the International Labour Conference the Special Session of the United Nations Assembly dedicated to the follow-up to the World Summit for Social Development will open here in Geneva. It represents a major opportunity to establish integrated action as the leitmotif of the international system as it tackles the social dimensions of globalization. Another will come with the United Nations Millennium Assembly in September. You would expect us to be at the centre of this action, and we are. We are following it and we are very active. In the documents of the World Summit for Social Development we are receiving enormous support for what the ILO is doing, for our projects and our programmes, and that will, I think, be a very important dimension of all this.
As the champion of decent work the ILO is also called upon to be a thought leader at the service of the international community in this field. We must be prepared to continue to invest in finding solutions true to our values that are relevant to the modern world and to the common interests of our constituencies.
Let me say something which I think is important. We talk a lot about the changes under way and the need to deal with them, and I have just mentioned the need to look at them in an integrated way. I think that we have reached the limits of sectoral analyses of integrated phenomena and, consequently, of sectoral solutions to integrated problems.
What all this means is that the knowledge base with which we have been working up to now does not necessarily contain the elements of solutions for the new phenomena that we are dealing with. This is extremely difficult to deal with because, when you say “Look, maybe the policy that one is expert in may not be the policy that solves the problem”, first of all you have an individual reaction of “Oh my God! I am going to have to defend this policy because this is what I know how to do.” This is a very, very complex problem, and we may need new knowledge that is not necessarily the knowledge that is there at present in terms of the policies that we have been pursuing in the past.
We have the obligation to say to ourselves: “Well, let’s check! The values are there. We are not going to change them, but the instruments and the way we make it happen may have to be different.” Some knowledge development may be necessary in the work of the ILO.
What this amounts to is an appeal to all of you in this hall, and to all of those that you represent, to unite your efforts behind decent work. We have been privileged to hear President Sampaio’s stirring call to the international community to work with us for the dignification of work. Let me echo that call and urge you all forward as the key actors in a global coalition for decent work.
As I have said throughout this speech, the opportunities that we have, the opportunities that you have, the challenge that is there, the capacity to take the challenge and to run forward – all this is extremely difficult and complex. But this institution is better placed than any other institution in the world to do it if we want to.
What I want to propose to you is that you should want to do it. If you want to do it, you will have the Office behind you.
Updated by HK. Approved by RH. Last update: 6 June 2000.