International Labour Organisation director-general Juan Somavia has urged government, worker and employer delegates at the ILO’s annual labour conference to develop policy tools for a global “Green Jobs Initiative” aimed at achieving an environmentally-sustainable process of development.
In an address also highlighting a wide range of issues, from the impact of globalisation to reducing “decent work deficits”, Somavia said the Organisation was “moving forward” through its Decent Work Agenda, which had been endorsed by the United Nations and other international and regional bodies, including the G-8 Summit in Germany last week.
“We can show important advances in our cooperation around decent work objectives on each of these issues in so many countries”, he said. “But we know that we cannot go it alone. Delivering on the Decent Work Agenda means ensuring that other organisations and other policies are also working with us.”
Somavia said a key issue for action now was decent work as part of economic, social and environmental policies.
“The inconvenient truth is that production and work consumes energy and other resources and leaves behind waste and greenhouse gases at a rate dangerous for our planet and our health”, he said. “Adjusting to new patterns of natural resource use and conservation is a challenge to the capacity of the ILO’s constituents to anticipate change, prepare and then implement an efficient and just process of adaptation.”
Somavia said the ILO needed to “assess the potential scale of technological, production and employment shifts involved”, and find “low emissions strategies for development that do not slow progress in poverty reduction”.
“I think that tripartism should begin developing, through social dialogue, the policy tools for an ILO ‘Green Jobs Initiative’ to support workers and enterprises through the transition to a much more environmentally sustainable process of development”, he said.
Somavia suggested that the ILO’s Governing Body could discuss the issue in its Working Party on the Social Dimension of Globalization this November, and “follow up with the required technical work”.
“There is a tremendous opportunity before us”, he said. “The UN Environmental Programme estimates that the market for clean energy technology could be worth $1.9 trillion by the year 2020. That’s a lot of investment and a lot of jobs.”
Regarding trade and social policies, Somavia recalled that the ILO and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) had recently published a “sober” report on trade and employment, concluding that “trade liberalization produces both job destruction and job creation”.
“In the short run, the effects of liberalization may be positive or negative depending on factors like the functioning of the labour and product markets, as well as the pace, depth and sequencing of market opening, the fairness of international rules, and the existence or not of social protection measures to weather the adjustment needs”, he said.
“I believe the tripartite ILO is today well-placed to develop a balanced approach to trade and employment issues that respects the interests of developed and developing countries, and those of workers and employers of all regions. And do so away from imposed conditionalities but with clear commitments to the values of all strategic objectives in the Decent Work Agenda”, he said. “We can do this in cooperation with the WTO and other interested international organisations. The basis is an integrated approach that recognizes the need for fair trade rules, sustainable enterprises and appropriate employment and social policies.”
Somavia noted that these issues were unfolding amid a “squeeze on wage share” and “widening gaps in the distribution of income and wealth in many countries”, noting labour income in 16 developed countries fell, on average from around 68 per cent to around 62 per cent as a share of national income. This squeeze on wages was reflected in the widening gaps in the distribution of income and wealth in many countries, he said.
“Income gaps between the richest and poorest countries are growing”, he added. “Average income per person in the 20 most prosperous countries is 112 times than in the poorest 20, compared to 49 times 50 years ago, which was already rather scandalous. We all have to be concerned by these developments, the ILO especially because it is increasingly looking like the interests of capital are better protected than those of labour. This is not sustainable. These issues are at the heart of our constitution (and) at the core of our mandate.”
He also highlighted the need to develop better methodologies to capture the reality of unemployment in developing countries, especially in terms of “labour underutilization”. He noted that combining data on underemployed informal economy workers and those conventionally recorded as unemployed could give a more realistic picture of the extent of unemployment.
“I think we must move forward on this and investigate new ways to capture statistically the reality of labour underutilization” because “we may be under representing the extent of real unemployment in the world.” Better data was vital, he said, to ILO policy-making as well as measuring progress towards the Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015.
Somavia also noted that the ILO was involved in discussions toward practical reforms and promotion of better policy coherence within the UN system. He said that the Organisation was pursuing UN reform issues in the context of its tripartite identity, standard-setting mandate and supervisory system.
Somavia said a combination of the ILO’s globally-backed Decent Work Agenda, its increasing number of Decent Work Country Programmes which could be incorporated into “Delivering as One UN programmes” and its reliance on social dialogue as a core value “is a pretty strong contribution to a better multilateral system”.
Another contribution, he said, was that the ILO’s “unique tripartite governance structure and mandate adds value to the international system’s effort to deliver as one”. In addition, he said international labour standards could provide a common reference point in the emerging global market economy “vital to building the cooperation at workplaces that is the foundation of successful enterprises”.
Among the examples of new global standards that represented the ILO’s achieving a consensus on “contemporary and workable conventions” was the ILO maritime convention adopted last year, and a new convention on the fishing sector expected to be submitted to the ILC for adoption this week.
“The support beyond this hall and the people you represent for the Decent Work Agenda demonstrates that we have focused our efforts on an issue of global significance on which we can make a difference”, he said. “We have raised hopes and expectations. The ILO is only as strong as its constituents who in turn are only as strong as the mechanisms of dialogue that bring them together for action on shared goals and priorities.”
