Keynote Day 2 ILO Forum on Decent Work for a Fair Globalization

Nov 2, 2007

Final

Mary Robinson

Honorable Members of the ILO Governing Body, Director General Juan Somavia, Distinguished Participants, and Government of Portugal and EU Hosts

It is a great pleasure to join you today at this important event on fostering decent work for a fair globalization. As is often the case, I feel honored to be with a group of individuals who have so much experience in addressing the challenges of development. Having served on more than one International Commission, I must congratulate Juan Somavia and others who were involved with the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization on their contribution in laying the groundwork for a more inspired and inclusive approach to development than had been the standard throughout the eighties and nineties.

By seeking to build global consensus on how to shape policies and governance structures that would make the processes of globalization fairer, the Commission helped open up possibilities for new approaches and new actors to challenge conventional thinking. It certainly provided a major boost for organizations and initiatives working to address concerns about growing inequities within and between nations. I read with interest the three-year assessment of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization prepared for this conference. Clearly, the most practical sign of progress is the Toolkit for Mainstreaming Employment and Decent work into the approaches of all the multilateral organizations.

The project I founded in 2002, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative (www.realizingrights.org) also drew inspiration and guidance from the Commission, and its recommendations continue to inform our work.

Yet, three years later, we find that although some positive trends may be emerging, sadly, fears and tensions continue to grip our world today. A fairer globalization is still an unfulfilled promise. The current deadlock of the WTO Doha Round is illustrative of the bind we find ourselves in as trade policies of developed countries serve narrow self-interest rather than the poor and disadvantaged. In addition, in both rich and poor countries jobs are less secure, less in the formal sector and less protected.

I was asked to speak about my own experiences in helping to take forward the principles of human rights and in the commitment of Realizing Rights to an ethical globalization. Our work highlights and addresses imbalances in trade and the decent work deficit, inequities in health care, and some of the negative impacts of labor migration. But since this is the second day of the conference, and you have been going into depth on these and many other topics, I thought I would raise some points related specifically to human rights as we think about the context in which we must act going forward from here.

Drawing on my previous experience as President of Ireland and High Commissioner for Human Rights, I wanted Realizing Rights to help put human rights standards at the heart of governance and policy-making. Our goals are to strengthen local and national capacities and voice in ways that will realize human rights, especially social and economic rights. We aim to increase national and international accountability for promoting human rights, and to support principled leaders in doing so.

People often challenge human rights proponents about importing impractical ideas, or about our idealism. But think about the opening line of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. In my travels around the globe for five years as UN High Commissioner, I never visited a spot where people didn’t see the value of a stronger emphasis on human rights. Those in positions of power, whether public or private, may have balked, but not the citizens themselves.

Almost sixty years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed that a decent standard of living, including access to health and education, were fundamental human rights. Subsequent international agreements legally committed governments to progressively realize those rights.

What complicates the struggle to claim one’s rights – and what links together areas of work such as health and employment – are the fact that at the root of all unfulfilled rights is the same problem: inequalities and an imbalance of power and influence. This results in an unfulfilled struggle of people to claim their right to just and favorable conditions of employment, to the highest attainable standard of health, to fair treatment as a migrant.

Inequality within nations determines whether or not a child has a good chance of surviving to five, or whether a mother can live through a medical complication during childbirth. And inequality between nations determines whether precious health care personnel, doctors and nurses and other technicians, stay to serve their own communities, or leave to pursue better jobs, at better pay, to build financial security for their families and their senior years.

This is the case even though migrating usually imposes great hardships on the migrants themselves, and on the children and other family members left behind.

In the area of trade, the inequalities and their implications on social and economic justice are just as stark. The current proposals on the table fall far short of fair. This is reflected in current debates around the Farm Bill in the US, and the entrenched interests benefiting from subsidies that put poor developing country farmers directly in competition with the government of the most powerful country in the world. But the EU is also at fault, and there is a woeful talk of coherence between the development aid policies and the trade policies of the richer countries.

The solutions, as we know, lie in a far more inclusive, and I would say compassionate, approach to the world’s problems. Compassion may seen like an old-fashioned word to bring into this discussion, but I think that is what was in the minds of the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights almost sixty years ago as they developed what was to become the most accepted document in the world on global shared values..

Remember the time. We had emerged from the Second World War, the Holocaust, the dropping of atomic bombs; and the Cold War had begun. Those wise drafters knew that the world needed something that would bind us together, remind us of our obligations to each other, our duties to community, and our shared humanity, no matter what part of the globe we inhabit, no matter our color, religion, sex, or livelihood.

Many of us try to put those principles into practice through our day-to-day work. And what we have learned in doing so is that if we do not reach out to those who make decisions and represent very different constituencies, our work is unlikely to make a difference.

To build on the migration session yesterday I’ll mention a practical example from our work. Together with several others, Realizing Rights has helped to address the crisis of health worker migration through the Health Worker Global Policy Advisory Council, officially launched in May 2007. The Council works in partnership with the Global Health Workforce Alliance to assess and promote innovative global, regional and national policy action to support the management of health worker migration globally – respecting the rights of migrants while acknowledging the responsibilities of sending and receiving nations. The project has met with significant interest from a range of policy makers including the WHO, member states, and individual Ministers, they are eager to implement policy recommendations from the Council and formulate new bilateral and other agreements to more fairly address the impacts of such migration on sending and receiving countries. Our aim, with our partners, is to have significant policy impact, both at the global level in terms of developing a framework for a Global Code of Conduct, and at the national level through direct policy recommendations to countries such as the US, Norway, EU countries and others.

In the area of economic rights we have been championing the work of the ILO and others on Decent Work. While promoting equitable trade policies, we realized that trade reforms had to be measured against whether or not they promoted more and better jobs, and had any impact on those most disadvantaged economically – farmers and those in informal employment. We recognized that at least one aspect of the Doha Round does have some development potential – Aid for Trade.

This could build the capacity of African and other developing nations if it were used, for example, to support rural infrastructure and to increase the capacity of small and medium businesses to engage in cross-border trade.

But are trade reforms going to expand or shrink jobs in the agricultural and industrial sectors? We and a number of other groups and experts stated in a Communiqué to the G8 meeting in Germany earlier this year that trade policies and funds earmarked for Aid for Trade must be spent in ways that create more and better jobs. A study which Realizing Rights commissioned, reviewing the potential impact on Ghana of EU Economic Partnership Agreements, shows how important it is that trade negotiations take into account the employment implications of reforms, because trade liberalization will not automatically generate more and better jobs.

We also see the huge outstanding gap in the aid discourse and aid programs on how to secure economic rights and fair conditions of employment for those same people, especially in the context of the increasing informalization of sectors of economies.

Hence the need to promote the Decent Work agenda, especially reaffirming that respecting just and favourable conditions of employment is not an aspirational goal, but a right which States and others are obligated to progressively realize, and an enabling factor in development. Moreover, as was mentioned yesterday, we must match the search for expanded agricultural employment with the search for more productive and higher value-added agricultural employment, so that employment in agriculture does not become a dead end.

My colleague Heather Grady, who is here, and I visited an ILO Decent Work program in Ghana that incorporates:

- Policies and practices that create productive and gainful employment opportunities

- Respect for social and labor rights, in particular ILO Core labor standards

- Incorporating social protection

- Social dialogue between the government, private sector, workers organizations and civil society more broadly

This local economic development program aims to embed within local District Assemblies both the concepts and practices that stimulate more and better jobs. The approach addresses the precarious nature of informal employment, and helps informal micro and small businesses formally register with the government so that they can benefit from access to finance and government services. Technical assistance and savings and credit facilities are offered, which have helped many of the businesses expand and prosper, though lack of access to credit still greatly limits formalization and expansion. Training has included awareness-raising on child labor and promoting equality and non-discrimination, particularly in terms of women’s employment. Social dialogue is bolstered by creating District Assembly Sub-Committees on Productive and Gainful Employment that include public officials and representatives from the private sector.

What we appreciate about this program is how it has incorporated an innovative mix of interventions that build on individual initiative and entrepreneurship, combined with the strength of collectives and associations of individual farmers and artisans. These groups traditionally have difficulty standing up for their rights and interests. It also reinforces important human rights standards as well as human rights principles, such as accountability and participation.

Moreover, by mainstreaming social protection aspects, the program can achieve success where many other development programs have failed. For example, the associations and individuals joining the newly-formed Credit Unions are encouraged to enroll in the National Health Insurance Program which the government is struggling to expand. A recent impact assessment of the program found that participants were as enthusiastic about having access to regular health services as they were about specific improvements in their economic activities.

What about Corporate Responsibility? If the Decent Work agenda is largely absent from the trade discourse, and only recently taking hold in the aid discourse, it is equally rare in the discourse of Corporate Responsibility when it comes to the extensive value chains of companies that lie outside the actual workplace. These value chains include millions of farmers, traders and artisans in the informal economy.

In Realizing Rights, we are bringing this into our program on the private sector. I am encouraged by a stronger human rights focus within the UN Global Compact, and by projects like the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights, a group of multinational companies which have committed to integrating the Universal Declaration and human rights principles into their business practices. With the interest of African and other developing countries in stimulating more economic growth, and encouraging greater foreign investment, it is extremely important in my view that we pay attention to how business can play a role in promoting, rather than ignoring or even undermining, human rights.

An Oxfam-Unilever study of poverty impacts in Indonesia three years ago estimated the distribution of value in the company value chain. It found – not surprisingly - that those people working at either end of the value chain in the informal economy – the primary producers of agricultural inputs like cassava and sugar, and retailers and sellers – made up the bulk of people in the value chain. But they were accruing only a small portion of the value generated, and had the most precarious conditions of employment.

The finding reminds us of important policy questions for governments, and normative and operational questions for companies interested in corporate responsibility: How do you increase power in markets for the poor? If their main asset is labor, how do you support them through decent work policies, legal empowerment, stronger associations or negotiating power? Looking at the entire value-chain of a company’s operations – not just specific product areas – will elicit important distributional issues that are extremely relevant to contemporary debates on globalization, the informalization of labor, and how to address increasing wealth disparities within and between nations.

The evidence shows that where companies and governments apply themselves to promoting human rights, the results have been very positive. Expanding decent work opportunities in domestic and international supply chains, for example in cocoa and other agricultural products, should be a stated objective of investment. Equally important, given the rich oil and mineral resources owned by many developing countries, it is essential that the benefits of expanded extractive industry activities are balanced with the risks to the livelihoods of communities who are being displaced, particularly given the competition for the same land, water resources and investment. Some multistakeholder initiatives, including the BLIHR companies, are addressing this.

I want to give special emphasis to the importance of promoting women’s rights. We face challenges as we address specific themes such as Decent Work. We have an historic opportunity to move cross-cutting concerns such as human rights and gender from the margins to the center of our approaches.

There has been an assumption that gender mainstreaming is both sufficient to ensure women’s equality goals, and that gender mainstreaming at current levels is sufficient.

But recent studies have challenged this. The evidence does not show that gender mainstreaming in isolation contributes to the promotion of women’s rights and gender equality. Moreover, the frameworks of the Beijing Platform of Action for Women, and CEDAW, are far stronger than what we have now in the MDGs. Those earlier frameworks should not be forgotten.

We know that average earnings are lower in the informal economy than in the formal economy. There is also a hierarchy of earnings and poverty risk within the informal economy. Within this hierarchy, women are disproportionately represented in segments of the informal labor force with low earnings and high poverty risk.

At the same time, there is a growing global movement in support of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy, and much of the impetus and inspiration for this has come from the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India. It includes eight national and two regional associations of home-based work organizations called HomeNets. This global movement of informal workers is one of several global movements inspired or led by grassroots women leaders, including the environment movement, the shack-dwellers movement, the women’s rights movement, and the micro-finance movement.

All of these movements play a critical role in increasing the voice of grassroots women and the visibility of their working and living conditions, including their economic insecurities. I hope some of these values and struggles will be captured in the report of yet another Commission, the Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP), on which I serve, and which will report early next year.

Let me conclude by urging all of us to get involved in marking the 60^th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10^th 2008.

Louise Arbour and her team at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights are already gearing up for a strong push among UN agencies and others in the run-up year, beginning this 10 December, just over a month from now. The Elders, of which I was surprised to find myself a member, are also working with a range of civil society organizations, businesses and multilateral agencies to help reaffirm and reclaim the importance of the commitments and obligations in the Universal Declaration. Throughout the coming year we will be marking particular themes, including the theme of decent work – and incorporating ideas about how businesses can work more actively to promote Decent Work opportunities.

I hope you will join this effort because it requires a groundswell of individuals and institutions working on it together around the world, in a sustained way, to make it happen. The UDHR’s 60^th anniversary, and the 10^th anniversary of the ILO’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work next year, offer ideal opportunities to move the decent work agenda forward in practical ways. Just as human rights are universal and apply to all of us, the right to social protection applies to all of us, no matter what kind of work we do, or where we live. I look forward to working with all of you to bring about the paradigm shift needed to get to the next phase on decent work that is needed to make globalization fairer for all.

Thank you very much.