BANGKOK (ILO News) B Building and maintaining roads and other infrastructure in developing countries in Asia and the Pacific constitutes a vast, relatively untapped, resource for jobs, ILO Regional Director Mitsuko Horiuchi told engineers and development planners from 10 countries gathered in Bangkok today.
In the presence of Cambodia=s Under-Secretary of State (Ministry of Rural Development) Ms Horiuchi pointed out that the ILO=s labour-based technology programmes had created 3 million workdays of employment for Cambodians while helping them rebuild war-torn infrastructure. In doing so the ILO had organized credit facilities and exemplified the Organization=s labour standards of non-discrimination, safe and healthful working conditions, minimum age, etc. Thanks to specially designed tools, disabled workers could earn money rebuilding the country=s roads and irrigation systems.
AWherever unemployment challenges are great and the cost of labour reatively low, labour-based work methods should be the technology of choice@, Horiuchi said. Though countries like Japan have tended to regard public-works programmes as temporary measures in economic recovery programmes, she insisted that labour-based technology offered Amuch more than a temporary fix@.
The message is getting through to the international community. In Asia and the Pacific alone, the ILO approach is being applied in 13 countries, from Nepal to Fiji.
The technology holds special potential for post-conflict East Timor, where an ILO expert has just been called in under the Organization=s Programme on Crisis Response and Reconstruction to plan for the training of East Timorese to take up the many jobs to be offered in the building sector.
Infrastructure investment has been a casualty of the Asian financial crisis. In Thailand=s housing market, for example, occupancy rates nose-dived in 1998 by over 50 per cent. Construction projects, both governmental and private, ground to a halt as investment dried up.
Thailand=s Kirasak Chancharaswat, Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, told the meeting that he wanted to see a greater share of governmental programmes earmarked for labour-based methods. He was Aparticularly encouraged to see several universities working with the ILO to explore the wider potential for labour in ongoing works and to develop appropriate training materials@.
The ILO approach has no less to offer in South Asian countries, which largely escaped the brunt of the crisis but still face a huge challenge to put their many unemployed poor to work.
A recent ILO study holds that 200,000 new jobs can be created in the Philippines using labour-based technology in existing government infrastructure programmes. As a result , President Estrada issued Executive Order 94/1999 that made labour-based methods the technology of first choice.
In Indonesia, the ILO says the adoption of labour-based technology in ongoing government programmes would create 1.2 million new jobs for no more than it would cost to continue using equipment-based methods.
Among the socio-economic impacts of these programmes are lower transport costs, greater disposable income and easier access to basic services.
The pursuit of these programmes, which have drawn support from the Asian Development Bank and World Bank B both of which are participating in the Bangkok workshop B requires changes in regulatory frameworks, notably concerning contracts, to permit the use of labour-based technology whenever it offers the best option.
Participants in the two-day ILO workshop, many of them directors of public works agencies, are seeking to achieve the right balance between labour and technology in order to create sustainable employment in the infrastructure sector in their countries.
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