88th Session, 30 May - 15 June 2000 |
||
Address
by Mr. Jorge Fernando Branco de Sampaio, |
I would like to begin by thanking the Secretary-General for his very kind and stimulating words, and pay tribute to the way in which he has undertaken his great task to lead the International Labour Organization. It is a very great honour for me to accept the invitation to address this eminent audience of so many distinguished personalities and representatives of organizations with great functions and great responsibilities for the present and the future of the dignity of the work of women and men throughout the world.
One of the main responsibilities of all those who have been voted into office is to guarantee the freedoms and to promote equalities among the societies in which we live and to contribute therefore actively to ensure that citizens’ rights are at the effective centre of the political decisions that determine the future of humankind.
As a Portuguese and European citizen, I am pleased and greatly honoured to be addressing this 88th Session of the Conference. Even more so, since it is only right to recognize immediately that both the model of social protection that prevails in Europe and the development of industrial relations in Portugal owe much to decades of serious research and technical cooperation with the International Labour Organization. I would also like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you in Portuguese, a language spoken in several continents by more than 200 million people of rich and varied cultures.
The second half of the 1990s saw the International Labour Organization develop its place within the United Nations system lucidly and determinedly. It has been consolidating new methods of action that may do much to enhance the international tripartite role in a forward-looking reinvention of the concepts of labour rights. Because I consider it essential for such efforts to be successful, I would like to contribute to the debate on the older and the newer forms of inequality caused by the economy, as well as the definition of the frontiers that separate decent and dignified work from mere work.
The world in which we live is, as we all know, very different from the one into which we were born. The systems of social values and aspirations of relations between citizens and nation States, between countries and regions, are conditioned nowadays by factors that did not exist when the International Labour Organization came into being.
Whilst not forgetting other determinant factors, I would like to highlight three of these: the globalization of financial flows, the transnationalization of business, and the development of information and communications technologies.
I am convinced that these factors have altered the premises of economic development worldwide, and have altered indeed the concept of social solidarity in the governing of contemporary societies, and the collective representations of time, space and, more importantly, of the power relationships of our times.
It is true that the globalization of the financial markets, the increased power of multinational corporations, and the revolution in information and communications technologies, while creating unprecedented opportunities for development, have also worsened the situation of inequality in which a large number of populations live.
These are even further removed than they were in the past from participating in world competition and from benefiting from ongoing changes. In my opinion we are in the presence of new risks and serious threats to the rules, systems and organizations which history has shown to have a decisive role to play in promoting and defending the values of human dignity and social solidarity.
I would like to reaffirm that I do not believe that the imperatives of business competitiveness condemn us to decide between mutually exclusive possibilities, i.e. between economic efficiency and social justice. I reject the idea that the intervention of governments and international organizations is so limited today that in many cases they would be incapable of ensuring civic and political rights; I reject also that social rights could become a mere luxury affordable only in wealthier regions, and even then only during times of prosperity.
As we all know, in the scientific community, the unions, business organizations, and political institutions, a growing number of arguments have been raised against the inevitability of so-called economic and technological determinism. It is becoming increasingly clear that the world in which we live, and the future we can build, are not confined by a time and a space where the biggest and the most powerful always prevail over the small and the vulnerable; where social ethics must be sacrificed to competitiveness, or even to the speculative logic of the financial markets.
As far as the latter aspect is concerned, I would like to state here that it seems to me necessary to develop within the international organizations, such as the International Labour Organization, a thorough ongoing debate on the ways to regulate international money markets in the face of conspicuously speculative movements of capital. We know that these have been responsible for shocks and disturbances in the economy and in employment with extremely serious repercussions in society. We also know that proposals have been made by renowned economists on the need to discipline these movements and to minimize their most harmful effects, whilst simultaneously creating those conditions which should consolidate more balanced forms of relationships between nations.
I do not think it is legitimate to ignore these contributions, nor put off for much longer a serious and coordinated effort within the international institutions to assess the accuracy and operability of such proposals. I am convinced that unless we move in this direction we will gradually lose all hope of being able to introduce any rationality in the international economic system. In my view we should and must do all we can for the economy to develop and to improve the well-being of humankind, and satisfy its legitimate aspirations. It is within the framework of a humanist social ethic that we must find the values that can organize societies and give them cohesiveness, just as it is up to the democratic political institutions to regulate relations between people, and between people and nature.
I would like now to turn to a few other subjects, which although relating to Europe, the economic social and cultural area to which my own country belongs, will nevertheless enable me to discuss the more general issues of work and employment.
In the last two decades the so-called European Welfare State has been under fire from those who consider that it is impossible to cope effectively with the triple challenge of economic competitiveness, of job promotion, and of limiting social inequalities at one and the same time.
In spite of the millions of poor and unemployed people in Europe, industrial relations systems, social protection systems and most instruments designed to promote social citizenship, have been, and in some cases still are being, criticized for allegedly being responsible for the loss of European competitiveness. We all remember the simplistic recipes which stated that Europe had to reduce the levels and drastically limit the scope of the civic and social guarantees that distinguished it from the other countries of the world.
I include myself in the group of those who consider that the so-called European social model, with its own system of industrial relations, has been at the basis of decades of economic growth and social progress in the democratic European countries of the post-war era.
I also belong to the group of those who know that the success of this model was not at all the result of any automatic economic or technological process. On the contrary, it came about because of the continued efforts made by advanced democratic societies to restrict and reform through the appropriate institutional framework those inequalities which had been caused by market economies. I do not believe that the solution to the difficulties of competition which business has to deal with, or the problems of unemployment and employment experienced by European societies, can or should involve dismantling this common trait of our collective identity which is the close link between citizens’ civic, social and political rights, even if it were to be done cautiously.
Before this particular audience I will not linger over listing or discussing the reasons that have led me to add my own voice to all those who, because of the crisis in the employment system, in the industrial relations system and in the models of European social protection, advocated reinvention, by which they mean readaptation of this system to the challenges that social equity and economic efficiency have to deal with these days. I know full well that this is one of the hardest, as well as one of the most important, tasks we have today in governing our societies.
Reinventing the conditions of full employment, adapting industrial relations systems to economic change and to the new social divisions, and improving the level and equality of social protection systems in terms precisely of existing or foreseeable changes are obviously important tasks. That requires no further emphasis from me. We also know that although these transformations are urgent they cannot be accomplished overnight, nor can they be achieved by the government of any Member State of the European Union acting alone, or indeed by any other European country, which may be a candidate to join the European Union.
The challenge facing Europe does not consist in defending at any price a model that requires reform. We must find effective answers to the challenge of how to adapt our labour legislation, our institutions, and the practices of our social and collective bargaining to the requirements of economic competition where innovation and knowledge occupy an unprecedented place. This requires restructuring social protection systems to eradicate poverty; it requires facilitating social integration of the most vulnerable groups. In short, it requires restricting inequalities and promoting social equity and dignity in the world of work.
I believe firmly that the answer to this extremely complex challenge must involve a serious tripartite social consultation and it implies daring and willingness on all sides to make political commitments. If the institutional players of political and social life are not open to dialogue and to shared responsibilities, if they are unaware that the common good and the idea of public service must remain above the interests and strategies of private actions, then this will seriously reduce the probabilities of their being able to contribute to the building up of what I may call really inclusive societies. Political action, public administration, and, generally speaking, all the social institutions run the risk that they may no longer be seen as active instruments of participative democracy but increasingly as a merely superfluous factor in citizens’ lives.
This we cannot allow. The World Summit for Social Development, held in Copenhagen in 1995, and the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, held in Singapore in 1996, traced out a path which was developed and made clear by the International Labour Organization Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its Follow-up adopted here in 1998.
I wish here to reaffirm at this session of the Conference that Portugal adhered to these essential core values and I assure you that I am deeply convinced that human dignity and social progress of humankind have much to expect from the follow-up methods laid down in that Declaration.
Portugal has been a Member of the ILO since its inception and Portugal is proud to belong to that group of countries that have ratified eight Conventions concerning the ILO standards and that give tangible form and body to these four pillars of fundamental labour rights. It is a pleasure for me to say that we have just ratified the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182).
After decades of dictatorship in which citizens’ rights and the opportunities for economic and social development were restricted, my country knows full well the value of freedom of association, the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of all forms of forced labour, the effective abolition of child labour and the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.
Portugal is optimistic about the role of the Organization in the modern world and considers that it should contribute so that the ILO should always have the resources to accomplish its indispensable function as a forum for the social regulation of economic development and the progress of society.
Over the past few years Portugal has developed its cooperation with the ILO, both bilaterally and multilaterally. I would just like to highlight the programme for the development of social dialogue with Portuguese-speaking African countries and the pioneering project in developed countries of technical cooperation to eradicate child labour. In our country, in both cases, the results obtained have been very positive and this gives us an added reason to be enthusiastic about cooperation with the ILO, both for developed countries and for those countries where the levels of development still require progress. At a time when the International Labour Conference is for the first time applying the methodology adopted in 1998 to assess the progress made in the first of the four pillars which structure fundamental labour rights – freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining – I am extremely pleased to see here that the efforts being made to complement the instruments of tripartism are being consolidated.
This is why I would like to terminate these remarks by offering a suggestion and launching an appeal. My suggestion is that all the potential created by the new information and communications technologies should be used to inform public opinion throughout the world more quickly and more efficiently of labour problems in the world, and to inform you about what is being done to ensure that throughout the world an increasingly smaller number of children, women and men should be forced to work in abject conditions.
All those who fought for the dignity and the rights of the East Timorese people to self-determination know that public opinion can be a decisive factor in creating an atmosphere where freedom and citizenship can shift from being mere proclamations to tangible realities exercised and enjoyed every day by the citizens.
And therein lies also my appeal to the international community of intellectuals, writers, artists and reporters. From this prestigious rostrum I would ask you all to support the International Labour Organization in its worldwide campaign with the same generosity that you display in supporting the great causes of mankind. Using articles, pictures, dance, theatre, and all the old and new technologies in the media we should be able to raise awareness in international public opinion to the injustices, the inequalities and the exclusions that continue to prevent the world of work from fulfilling human beings’ extraordinary capacities for creation and progress.
Esthetics, technics and ethics do not have to stand alone in life. Why should we not bind them together in one splendid demonstration of solidarity. I will leave that appeal with you.
Updated by HK. Approved by RH. Last update: 5 June 2000.