[Guy Ryder] Good morning, thank you Hugh for that introduction,
good morning everybody.
Let me just say that it’s really a pleasure to have this opportunity this morning,
not just to share a platform with this highly distinguished panel
but to be given the chance to talk about an issue such as the future of work.
We’re very seldom able to look to the horizons,
to look over the horizons of our immediate concerns,
our immediate policy preoccupations,
to look at the future in a rather longer-term perspective.
It’s even rarer to be invited to do that
putting aside - as three speakers have already invited us to do -
putting aside all of the customary taboos. So it’s really quite a dangerous invitation
and one which very briefly I hope I’ll take the fullest advantage of.
Let me start with the future of employment, not work but of employment.
We know, as we sit in the depths of a major crisis,
initially a financial crisis, which has mutated into a prolonged social and employment crisis,
we know that we face the challenge today
of finding jobs for the some 200 million -as Angel Gurria has reminded us -
who are currently without work.
And we know as well, looking forward, looking to the future of work,
future of employment, that 40 million new entrants to the labour market will join those numbers
unless we find jobs for them every year over the next 15 or 20 years.
Now the first question which I think we need to put our attention to
is our attachment to the objectives of full employment.
Not just full employment - in the words of the ILO
full, freely chosen, productive employment - but decent work, work of quality.
Do we stand by our collective commitment and determination to bring that about?
I think that it’s quite striking that no government that I know of,
no politician that I’ve listened to has ever been able to say that
in any way that objective is redundant, is impossible, is beyond reach.
Indeed, I think when we observe governments,
whom one might legitimately suspect of having departed
from that objective in the past
then they’ve been able to admit to so doing.
So I believe that we need to maintain that commitment,
I think that it is striking as well that the international community
as it sets about the task of putting together the development agenda for next 15 years
- that’s what the United Nations is currently engaged upon - seems intent,
seems at this stage of negotiations – it is not finished -
seems intent on making full employment and decent work for everybody
one of the sustainable development goals of the future.
So we have at least a situation
in which we all remain committed to the full employment objective.
And yet and yet and yet, we hear,
in the face of this dramatic challenge before us,
more and more voices apparently saying
“well we talk that talk but we don’t actually believe that it’s possible.”
My view, and Professor Fitoussi has said it, is that the future is unknowable,
of course, and it’s not yet written.
And it’s for us to construct a future
where full employment stands at the centre of our preoccupations.
Let me turn then to the question of the quality of jobs,
of quality of employment.
Decent work is what the ILO stands for
and yet we are seeing a dramatic transformation of the work experience.
It’s not tomorrow’s news, it’s today’s news,
it is yesterday’s news.
In Europe, we know that today 35% of those who go to work
are neither employees nor work full time. Neither of those two things.
This is a far cry, isn’t it?
From the expectations at least of my parents’ generation,
of that standard open ended full time job for a 30-35 year period.
By the way, that 35% is 5 percentage points above figure at the beginning of the century.
If we raise our horizons beyond Europe
and I know that we have a very strong focus on Europe here,
we know that more than half of the working population
either works in own account work,
or as unpaid family helpers already, or in informality.
That’s the experience of work and we have to understand the dynamics
which are bringing that about and we have to
understand how to manage those dynamics
if we are to reconcile them with the objective of quality, decent work.
We are seeing as well and others on this panel are much better placed than I
to expand upon it,
a transformation of enterprise structure, enterprise behaviour.
We know that outsourcing is becoming more practicable,
and preferable for many reasons;
we see subcontracting arrangements,
which add to the complexity of employment relationships
and give rise to complex production chains across nation states.
What does this mean? For employment relationships
and what does it mean for everything that flows from employment relationships,
including entitlements to social protection. Along with these elements we see
- and it’s been referred to already very strongly - a worrying increase in inequality,
not in the short-term, not for some but over a long period and for the many.
I find it at the same time encouraging
that there is greater recognition that inequality is a problem,
not simply from considerations of social justice
which would certainly animate the ILO
but from a purely economic, growth potential point of view.
We’re hearing the international monetary fund for example, speaking on these terms.
That’s encouraging.
What’s less encouraging is that this recognition of the problem
seems to continue to be accompanied by policy recommendations
which perpetuate and continue inequality.
If this was translated into a clinical setting,
it might be taken as a symptom of cognitive dissonance.
We need to take inequality seriously and not just deplore it.
What does this mean for the future, what could we do about it?
Well, it’s not my job to anticipate,
or to do the job of the panelists who are on the left here
but it seems to me that
there are three or four drivers of change in the global economy that we need to address.
One is technology. And we’re going to hear about that,
I’m sure.
Of course, I’m reminded – an organization of
100 years old has to be reminded – as the ILO is
– that every time we seem to be on the cusp of unfurling technological revolution,
we have this dialectic of creative destruction.
How much jobs will be created and promoted, and how much destruction is going to occur?
And I suspect at each moment on the cusp of that unfurling wave,
there’s a moment when we feel that we’re face to face with a jobs apocalypse.
Is this time different? Is this technological revolution different
from the internal combustion engine, from the steam engine?
I think that debate has to be had.
We have the question of demographics, which I won’t go into,
except to say that those of us in Europe should not believe that
our demographics are the same as demographics of other regions,
they certainly are not.
We have as well and we’ll all be back at this city at the end of next year.
We have to deal with the challenges of climate change
and the unprecedented transformation of the productive system
and hence of the world of work,
that has to come with the transition to a sustainable green future.
Something which I think the world of work is addressing,
has acknowledged as a challenge before it.
It still has a long way to go before it can truly say
that it has really grasped as a challenge.
Lastly, and I want to finish with this, we have the onward march, or not,
of globalization and how we manage globalization.
Clearly globalization has had an enormous impact on the actors in the world of work
and hence on the future of work.
I think it’s fair to say as well that the multilateral system
of which the ILO of course is a part, is experiencing significant difficulties
in its collective management of the globalization process.
We see that in the field of trade,
I suspect that we’re going to see it in the field of climate change
and believe me we feel it in the ILO as well.
My last – I just said it was the last statement – here’s my last statement.
It worries me on occasions that we seem able to talk about the future of work,
developments in labour markets sometimes in abstraction from the human realities
that lie behind those developments and sometimes forgetful of the reality
that work is a values laden concept, it’s a values laden experience …
and those who are active in the world of work,
be they enterprise leaders, be they labour leaders or others,
I think they are inspired by values, values about the dignity of work –
it’s rather hackneyed, I know... but it’s there -
and the commitment of those actors to certain societal goals.
I think we need to cling to those values, we need to recognize them,
we need to feed them into our calculations,
we need to value the labour institutions that we have and too frequently neglect,
we need to value the role of social dialogue, we need to value the role of collective bargaining.
We will not make work in the future of work from the outside; it will come from the inside.
It will also come from the actors who are those who mould the world of work.
So with those few comments, I thank you for your attention, thank you.
I think it’s been an extraordinarily interesting and useful session,
--
I think we’ve hit on most of the big issues, not all of them.
I’ve enjoyed the discussion about full employment
although there are clear disagreements about what it means.
I would love to subscribe to the idea that there is no compromise
on this full employment is what we know as being today,
but I hear a lot of the people say that it’s not feasible
so let’s redefine it in a different way.
I’m glad we got on at the end of the discussion about the nature of work,
contractual relationships.
I’m fascinated and somewhat dubious about the notion of the “salarié mercenaire”.
It might apply to a very small section of work force,
it’s not what I see happening in the world.
What I see is a movement from established
– I’m not saying jobs for life relationships -
but at least an employer/employee relationship,
a labour relationship in an enterprise, to a commercial relationship, a service provision.
So when somebody says to the worker “you can work when you want,
you can take as many holidays as you want, you can stay at home and work,”
there’s two-sides to that thing
because basically what you are being invited to do is to provide a service,
not to have the statute of an employee, and I think it’s a very dangerous and different
thing
and I think we need to reflect on that a bit more.
We haven’t touched and it is unfortunate we can’t touch on everything,
about questions of finance and investment in job creation,
I think it’s an enormous issue, it’s fallen outside the scope of our discussion this morning
but by and large it was a tremendous discussion.