I am very pleased to welcome you all to this symposium convened by the Governing Body - members of the Workers' and Employers' groups and Government representatives, reflecting the ILO's tripartite structure, as well as representatives of other international organizations, NGOs and all who wished to be present at this meeting. Thank you for taking the time to be here with us and to contributing to the success of this meeting.
The Beijing + 5 process is an important re-affirmation of the globalization of a commitment to achieve gender equality. We take another step towards globalizing social progress when we champion gender equality as a matter of rights and social justice as well as efficiency and good business sense.
As you know, when sailing by the stars, it is crucial to have a good compass and I believe in looking at the stars from time to time so that we can elevate our thinking. In putting forward our Decent Work agenda, we have put gender equality and development issues at the heart of the ILO agenda. I believe it is the right thing to do and also the smart thing to do.
The global changes taking place have undoubtedly generated many new economic opportunities. But, not enough have been able to reap the benefits. Consequently globalization is experienced by many as heightened insecurity, uncertainty or sometimes marginalization. Indeed, we can observe just by reading the newspapers that an uneasiness prevails about the process as a whole. The indications are that the pace of social progress for too many has been too slow. It has lagged behind the accelerated pace of the new global economy.
The concept of decent work encapsulates our response. It reflects the wish of women and men everywhere for work that will bring them security and assure a generally decent standard of living for themselves and for their families.
As poor women and men told us in the World Bank report on voices of the poor, well-being is "health; safety; food; belonging to a community; a steady source of income; a dependable livelihood" and "freedom of choice and action". There is nothing revolutionary about this, nor about people wanting decent work. And when people, individual women and men were asked "What do you mean by decent work?" The answer was "Work on which I can educate my children, and build a family in stability, security and health; work in which I am treated as a human being and work which will allow me a pension when the time comes, if I play according to the rules".
I think that the biggest problem today is that, because of the way the world is organized, we cannot deliver something as simple as that aspiration for every human being on earth. It is, I believe, the biggest challenge that we have as a global community. We may have formulated this concept of decent work in the ILO, but it represents a common task that we all have to address in our different activities.
And that is the context for the lack of female freedom which makes advancing women's empowerment so crucial to breaking free of 'development prisons' and 'jails of thought' on how things are "supposed to be." Empowering females and freeing males to challenge gender stereotypes liberates us all to transform the mainstream. And I think that that is the key to the sense of the meeting today. It is about empowering women, but also about freeing males of stereotypes with which we have all lived for too long. We will all benefit from that process.
We use the word "decent" because it is positive, because it is real, and, because it is dynamic.
Women and men can understand perfectly well what it means in their own lives, based on their realities as they change over time.
It goes beyond universal core standards that should constitute the social floor of any society. It allows thresholds to be set for work and employment based on the realities, the values and the goals of a given society. And it is also dynamic because the quality of work must keep in step with social and economic progress.
Work, we all know, is central in the lives of women and men everywhere - its availability, absence, quality or loss are key concerns not simply for the individual but for his or her family, community and nation. It is probably the most important single element that affects the life of individual human beings. Because work takes many forms, in many places and under many different conditions, our concept of decent work embraces everyone - in the factory, farm, home or street, seekers and dreamers in the workplace or in the workspace that the new technology is creating. We include not only those with formal employment but also the self-employed, casual and informal workers, those struggling with inadequate livelihoods, those who are paid, unpaid or who barter, also those we rarely see because of gender blindness.
But if you use a gender lens you can begin to see the patterns and differences - the warp and woof of work, that are woven with rigid ideas around gender. And this quilt of inequality is just not decent from my point of view. Women's work is much more often unpaid than men's, or women are paid less than men for the same work, or what they do is not even considered "work" at all! We seek to change women's relative position vis a vis men AND improve the overall choices for both.
Making decent work a reality means we marry equity with efficiency, while living in the home of sustainable development. We are integrating the ILO's traditional value-based agenda promoting rights at work and social protection with a sustainable growth and development agenda centred on jobs, enterprise creation and human resource enhancement.
And like any good marriage or partnership, it succeeds when we use our emotional intelligence not just our best brainpower. Realizing our decent work goals will depend heavily on social dialogue, negotiation and consensus building among governments, employers, workers and other parts of our communities.
I stress the interconnectedness of our objectives. There may be a temptation to set aside certain dimensions of decent work like, for example, gender equality "until the conditions are right or "the moment is the correct one". But, delaying action will mean heavy costs in the present in terms of human, family and community life as well as, I want to underline, productivity. We know by now that most successful enterprises are those that have best industrial relations and labour management policies. Decent work is good for business. It is also good for governments - it is the principal source of social stability. Economic efficiency and social efficiency from this perspective must go hand in hand.
Decent work is also an aspiration, a goal to guide our efforts and judge our progress. It is the key to setting in motion processes of inclusion that will help to make markets increasingly work for everybody. It is a complex and I would even call it a formidable goal.
However, if we believe in the ILO's values, we must knowingly set the bar high for ourselves and persist in our efforts, jointly with others, to secure an expanding global commitment to its implementation. To do otherwise would be to abandon the essence of real development for concrete human beings, for individual men, women and children throughout the world.
To chart future actions, we must marshal our collective wisdom and resources to make breakthroughs in several areas. Let me list them in the context of the Symposium.
The first is poverty and rising inequality. Males still have a disproportionate share of wealth; females a disproportionate share of poverty. Our decent work strategy is a way out of poverty for women because it is based on principles of equality and equity at work and at home. This is a major point of convergence with the follow-up to the World Summit on Social Development.
Secondly, to respond to the rising public backlash against globalization, we must address the concerns of those left behind. We must focus on the informal economy, which has expanded rapidly. In some countries it maintains the majority of workers but, in fact, we must adequately describe the global workforce today. We have to understand how women, men and children are experiencing this informal economy. It means examining and possibly reshaping our statistics, policies, protection systems, organizing methods and employment practices in relation to their reality. We must learn to look at problems through the eyes of people.
Thirdly, the globalization of a commitment to gender equality is forcing us to rethink how we organize our lives. Women's increasing participation in the labour force is perhaps the most important factor in determining the social policy agenda in the new century. It changes traditional assumptions underpinning ideas about some aspects of the welfare state. It has also exposed the unreal universalism of social protection systems based on gender stereotyped and ethnocentric notions of full employment. It is challenging us to come up with new systems that can offer protection to all women and men in precarious activities, not just those in wealthy countries in the formal paid economy.
Fourth, we must focus more on the gender implications of a global surplus labour market and the challenges and opportunities arising from more open borders and open economies. Coupled with the advances in communications and information technology, matching demand with supply of labour is being profoundly transformed. Yet, because of persistent gender inequalities, women face different issues whether the work is high tech or high touch.
Fifth, we must look at the clash between what is valued in the market economy and that area of care which lies outside the market and which some call the "love economy". I would call it the "invisible economy" or the "taken for granted economy" on which part of the efficiency of the visible economy is based. Our notion of productivity would be radically different if the care economy was costed at market prices. I believe the way we treat labour market services and care work will be essential determinants of the character of society and work in the future. This will involve a basic recognition of a space where women have been central to the stability of our society and yet invisible and uncosted in terms of the real economy, or what is called the real economy.
Finally, there is an urgent need to move our focus from the impact of family responsibilities on work to the impact of work, or lack of work, on our family and personal lives. We must never forget that an unemployed person normally results ,also, in a very unhappy family, and worse still if it is a single parent home. Work is a means to an end as well as a means of expression, creativity, contribution and fulfilment. Women's leadership and more gender-balanced decision making at every level are crucial to this process of transformation.
I want to close by saying that I applaud the Governing Body's initiative in convening this symposium. I thank all of you for being present and I look forward to what, I am sure, will be a lively, thought-provoking and fruitful debate, and more evidence of our mainstreaming policy in action. I believe that the world community has understood the directions we must follow and the values that we have to implement in this area. But now we have to translate those directions, values and orientations into concrete instruments of action, methods of work and policies which permit us to actually change the life of individual women and men. However, as we know, the transition from the general ideas and direction that have been very strongly set by the global conferences to their actual implementation in specific societies is one of the most difficult challenges. I am very hopeful that, in the context of this Symposium and the whole Beijing+5 process, we will come up with policies with which we all feel comfortable but which, at the same time, place this agenda at the heart of our societal concerns for the future. It is definitely at the heart of the ILO agenda in the context of decent work.
Thank you so much for being here.