Highlights of interviews with the participants
“If you had asked me 4 years ago if it would be possible to have so many people here from government, trade unions, business and civil society, all united under the banner of Decent Work, I wouldn’t have believed it. This is a terrific achievement. It’s the beginning of a campaign. And the important thing now is to take the message out… to make Decent Work the key driver of the kind of globalization we want.”
Giampero Alhadeff, former Secretary-General of Solidar and Secretary-General of British Labour Party at the European Parliament
“The Decent Work Agenda is absolutely critical, but I think it needs a lot more promotion. My organization works on the ground in about 60 countries, inspecting factories’ observance of international labour standards. We find on average worldwide 17 violations per factory… Unfortunately, most employers I talk to have never heard of the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda. And even when I talk to local industry and export associations, they are unaware of the work that the ILO is doing. So the advantage of a meeting like this is that you’ve invited more voices, more organisations and we can go back and relay the message to our counterparts in countries. But I would appeal to the ILO to build more bridges beyond their traditional counterparts and partners, because there is definitely an information gap. It’s not getting to the ground in a practical way.”
Auret Van Heerden, President of the Fair Labor Association
“If we want to create coherence among the international organizations in the interest of growth and decent work, we do need to have more voices and much more dialogue. These international organizations like the IMF, the World Bank, the ILO and the WTO can no longer work in independent silos. They are starting to talk to each other and engage, but if we really want to see more coherence to our approach to work and development in the world, there is going to have to have much more effective engagement and dialogue between the major economic institutions….”
Raymond Parsons, member of the Management Committee of Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) and Overall Business Convenor at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC)
“The main thing that struck me in this meeting is the way in which the ILO is seeking to make decent work into a broader movement. I believe that the time is right for a shift towards a production- and employment-oriented approach to development and poverty reduction—and within UNCTAD, the research I do on Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is promoting such a shift. We argue that the key is to develop productive capacities and the associated expansion of productive employment—and that poverty reduction and development strategies as well as international cooperation should be oriented toward that goal.”
Charles Gore, Chief, Research and Policy Analysis, Division for Africa, Least Developed Countries and Special Programmes, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
“Labour and employment issues are in a sense the ones that members of parliament get elected on—or not elected on: ‘You don’t create jobs, why would we re-elect you?’ So it’s always been on the agenda. However, Decent Work and Fair Globalization are not concepts that politicians are actually very at ease or familiar with… We need to raise awareness and inform them… In IPU we are going to make sure that we place the Decent Work Agenda more centrally on our own agenda and start energizing them and bring them into these processes. There is an enormous knowledge base here. The debates we’ve had have been extraordinarily interesting.”
Anders Johnsson, Secretary General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU)
[from French] “The report of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization helped the global community overcome the extremist debates on globalization and engage into a more realistic and balanced discussion. It put forward several recommendations for a fair globalization, notably to bring international organizations together to see how to contribute to more coordinated and concerted forms of global governance. This Forum is a continuation of that effort.”
François Périgot, Honorary President of the International Organisation of Employers and member of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization
We see more and more the value of the Decent Work Agenda in dealing with domestic political elections, how we can hold politicians accountable and get them to think of what kinds of [decent work] programmes they can implement in their own countries.
John Sweeney, President of the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and member of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization
[from Spanish]: There are few places and opportunities in the world to have such a frank debate and with such a plurality and quality of participants….
….I think that the principles underlying the Decent Work Agenda were one of the engines of Argentina’s process of economic recovery following the profound crisis that the country experienced after having pursued the recipes that predominated in Latin America in the 1990s. With a combination of integrated decent work components - including raises in minimum wages and pensions, social security and a strong active labour market policy - we managed to put Argentina back on its feet. That is why we say that for a long time we were considered the best student of the IMF, while today we are proud to be one of the favourites of the ILO.
Carlos Tomada, Minister of Labour, Employment and Social Security of Argentina
Decent Work continues to be a key challenge for all the people who live in rural areas and principally for those who depend upon agriculture for their livelihoods and who live in conditions that are unprotected, irregular, where they are not able to earn enough to survive. …. So we really have a lot of work to do in identifying what the key problems are, in generating the data needed to characterize particularly what the informal economy looks like for agricultural workers and then to address these needs.
Eve Crowley, FAO
“The next step is to create a set of tools to enable countries to master the implementation of the decent work agenda in a way that is tailored to the real needs of workers and employers in each country."
Honorée Epee Kotto, National Social Security Fund, Cameroon
“I had a lot of information and suggestions for my organization from this Forum. We need to work harder on the ratification of the international conventions on migrant workers and their families, in particular in receiving countries. We also need to work harder on organizing the migrant workers themselves and form them into associations, into trade unions. This is the only way they can fight for their rights to decent work.”
Caridad Sri Tharan, Migrant Forum in Asia