 No.156 9 November 2001
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"There is no overstating the priority of job creation. Access to work is the surest way out of poverty, and there are no workers' rights without work. Moreover, getting people into productive activities is the way to create the wealth that enables us to achieve social policy goals." |
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Juan Somavia
The global challenge of decent work
Here is an essential summary of his remarks from the Forum on how creating policies for
"decent work" will become the global agenda of the 21st century.
The Director-General of the International Labour Organisation,
JUAN SOMAVIA, is a passionate advocate for "decent work" in the world.
ON DECENT WORK
It is about your personal abilities to compete in the market place, keep up with new technological skills and remain healthy. It is about developing your entrepreneurial skills, about receiving a fair share of the wealth that you have helped to create and not being discriminated against; it is about having a voice in your workplace and your community.
In the most extreme situations, it is about moving from subsistence to existence. For many, it is the primary route out of poverty. For many more, it is about realizing personal aspirations in their daily existence and about solidarity with others. And everywhere, and for everybody, decent work is about securing human dignity.
Decent work is a development strategy. It is a goal not a standard. It does not offer a "one size fits all" solution. It is a personal goal for individuals and families and a development goal for countries.
Decent work is missing when:
— there is involuntary unemployment and poverty;
— there are abuses of rights at work and forced and child labour exist, and discrimination
is practised;
— basic income security is missing and workplace anxiety, depression and exhaustion are
commonplace;
— workers and employers are either not organized to make their voice heard, or face obstacles
to effective dialogue;
— life at work cannot be properly balanced with the claims of the family.
ON THE MEANING OF WORK
Do we not generally prefer the challenge of work to the passivity of welfare? Do we not also know that safety nets are essential? How else do we cushion ourselves and our families against risk and survive in hard times? And are we not aware that at all times we need strong institutions that care for people and all life on this shared planet?
I know that unacceptable trade-offs are a daily diet for far too many working people, trapped in circumstances and systems. This experience of work is profoundly at odds with what work at its best is about. We know that work can be an expression of our unique talents, a way of contributing to the common good, an avenue for engaging deeply and meaningfully with a community.
ON THE DECENT WORK DEFICIT
The headline figure understates the true extent of the tragedy, because whole families are its victims. If we then consider the underemployed, the number skyrockets to at least 1 billion. Of every 100 workers worldwide, six are fully unemployed according to the official ILO definition.
Another 16 are unable to earn enough to get their families over the most minimal poverty line of US$1 per person per day. These are the poorest of the working poor. Many more work long hours at low productivity, are in casual or precarious employment, or are excluded from the workforce without being counted as unemployed. All countries, developed and developing, have their working poor. The scale of the problem is astonishing. This year's World Employment Report calculates that 500 million new jobs will be needed over the next ten years just to absorb new entrants to the labour market and to make some inroads into unemployment.
Decent work offers a way of combining employment, rights, social protection and social dialogue in development strategies. The difficulties faced by the traditional structural adjustment policies of the Bretton Woods institutions lie in part in their failure to incorporate these goals, and poverty reduction strategies will not succeed unless the same goals are built into them. At present, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers produced under the auspices of those institutions do not frontally address these issues. Reducing the decent work deficit is the quality road to poverty reduction and to greater legitimacy of the global economy.
ON SUPPORTING THE VISION
According to the Report of the United Nations Secretary-General to the Millennium Summit in September 2000, one of the eight priority ways of attacking poverty is "to develop strategies that will give young people everywhere the chance of finding decent work".
On 1 May last year, Pope John Paul II supported a call for a global coalition for decent work.
South Africa's President Mbeki, in his letter to the Okinawa G-8 Summit on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement, stated that "decent standards of living, adequate nutrition, health care, education and decent work for all are common goals for both the South and the North".
The UNDP Human Development Report, 2000, identified as one of the seven types of basic freedom "freedom for decent work — without exploitation".
In concluding a historic agreement between shipowners and seafarers at the 29th Session of the Joint Maritime Commission earlier this year, employers and workers declared that they were proud to be "torchbearers for the ILO's campaign to promote decent work the world over".
In my contacts with Heads of State, with parliamentarians, with business leaders, with workers, with private individuals, with religious and spiritual leaders, with leading activists and academics, I have time and again found a favourable echo and a willingness to work with us.
I do not wish to overstate the situation. It is encouraging that the ILO consensus on decent work has an attraction beyond those who initially constructed and subscribed to it. But we still have many people to convince. It will not happen if we just continue with "business as usual". The opportunity is there. Seizing it depends on our own capacities for creativity and imagination.
