It is my privilege to introduce this morning my Report to the Conference. It carries a central message: we need to reduce the global decent work deficit. We need to make decent work a reality in our countries and embed this goal in the global economy.

For the last two decades, governments and international financial institutions have focused on bringing down budget deficits. As we all know, this has been a sort of mantra of the international system - and rightly so. I think it is now time to focus with the same energy on strategies to bring down the decent work deficit. That is a goal that all of us at the ILO cannot deliver on our own - but we can and must be the catalysts to create an expanding global consciousness for decent work. We must lead by example by showing that there are policies through which the goal can be progressively achieved because our capacity to pursue the ILO's vision of social justice depends on our ability to address this global challenge. Yet we know that we cannot simply decree decent work into existence. We need the will and the means to do it.

In our debates in the Conference, we must all ask ourselves: what can we do together and individually to strengthen the ILO and make it more effective for this purpose? What are the key issues on which the ILO needs to be further empowered?

The question that we address today is how best to build on the foundations we have developed over the last years. We have crafted a decent work agenda on the basis of dialogue amongst ourselves and tripartite consensus. That has been no small task, and no meagre achievement.

Decent work has given us focus. It is a goal that connects with people's aspirations. It provides a policy framework; it is a method of organizing ILO programmes and activities and it is a platform for external dialogue and partnership. It has become a key management tool for me to carry out my responsibilities as Director-General and I have listed in my Report a number of the resulting outcomes.

You have also given me the mandate to go out and project a clear and coherent message of what the ILO is about today, and I have invested much time in doing just that.

Let me tell you what I have found.

The message of decent work strikes a chord practically everywhere: among our tripartite constituents, in international organizations, with women and men as they ponder the future of their families, particularly in poor and single-parent homes; and even in groups with diametrically opposed views on globalization.

We have defined a message which has universal appeal and an agenda which, I believe, the vast majority of people want to see realized. It is perceived as a personal goal for individuals, a development goal for countries and a necessary goal for the international community. It has created expectations and we must respond to them.

To move forward we need to confront the wide-spread perception that we in the ILO and in other places who address social issues are playing in the minor league of the global economy, while the hardball actors in the world of commerce and finance occupy a superior sphere of policy.

This orthodoxy should be, and is being subverted. It is being subverted by the reaction of people all over the world and their perception of the failure to deal credibly with their social concerns and priorities in the age of globalization. And I think that many of them would agree with the President when she stated that "what is alarming is the possibility of a global black hole, which no amount of pole-vaulting or leapfrogging can prevent us from falling into".

In this setting, I have observed that our decent work agenda can be a key agent of positive change for the benefit of all, as well as a consensus-building platform to bring together divergent interests and perceptions.

Last year, in my speech to the Conference, I called for a global coalition for decent work. It is beginning to happen. And let me just mention a few examples of ways in which our proposals are being referred to throughout the multilateral system and elsewhere.

• The Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly to follow up the Social Summit last year gave explicit backing to the ILO's Programme on decent work; as did the Millennium Summit, in addressing youth employment.
• On 1 May last year, his Holiness Pope John Paul II gave backing to the call for a global coalition for decent work
• I found the same echo at the World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, which I addressed last year.
• South Africa's President Mbeki, conveying the message of the Non-Aligned Movement of the Okinawa G8 Summit, stated that "decent standards of living, adequate nutrition, health care, education and decent work for all are common goals for both the South and the North".
• The UNDP Human Development Report 2000 identified "freedom for decent work - without exploitation" as one of the seven types of basic freedoms.
• And one that I must say I like very much: in concluding a historic agreement at the Joint Maritime Commission earlier this year, shipowners and seafarers declared that they were proud to be, and I quote "torch bearers for the ILO campaign to promote decent work the world over".
• Finally, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD has referred to decent work as a part of its poverty reduction strategy.

So the response is out there.

The ideas underlying decent work have always been part of the ILO's vision. We are building on the strong foundation of an 80-year history. Our next task is to address the hard issues of creating an integrated policy framework for decent work within the Office, at the national level, and as our contribution to consistency within the multilateral system.

It is a policy package. Only by addressing our four strategic objectives simultaneously can we maintain momentum and cohesion. We all have to look beyond our immediate concerns or specific interests towards the integrated development of our common agenda. If we are creative enough, we have the opportunity of reconciling the interests of people, the environment and markets.

This is clear when we look at the role of decent work in development. Decent work is a development goal. It expresses the people's right to development and a country's right to a fair share of the benefits of globalization.

Fundamental principles and rights at work are the essential foundation, "the floor" of decent work. And people must have work if these rights are to be realized, so employment must be part of the story.

What is seen as decent is built on universal rights and principles, but reflects the circumstances in each country. In that sense, there is a floor but there is no ceiling. Decent work provides a development goal that evolves as the possibilities and priorities of societies evolve. The threshold advances with economic and social progress. That has been the history of today's high-income countries, and it is also one reason why developed countries today also have decent work deficits.

The experience of countries around the world shows that there is plenty of room to promote decent work, whatever the level of development. Yet I have heard people say: "Decent work is all very well, but what we need at the moment is jobs, any jobs: work first, decent work later". Unfortunately, far too often "later" never comes.

The fact is that the social floor is critical for people living in poverty at any level of development. Take child labour. If you do not ensure that people have a decent childhood, you undermine their chances for decent work as adults - and create inequalities which are hard to change. Freedom from discrimination and greater gender equality are essential if all are to have the same opportunities. The right to organize is vital if the poor are to claim rights, to improve their capacity to earn a living, to train and educate themselves, and to secure a fair share in economic benefits to train and educate themselves.

In my Report I give the example of freedom of association, in which I say that in Chile, in Nigeria, in Thailand or in Sweden, workers have the right to organize and to bargain collectively. Now the result of that negotiation is obviously going to be different. It is going to be dependent upon the actual conditions prevailing in the country concerned. But all have a right to sit down and negotiate for their rights in the reality of their own society. This is what the floor is about - and that is why the floor is an enabling floor precisely to permit people to advance.

I have also heard people say that moving towards decent work is costly, an unaffordable luxury. This, of course, has been a long-standing debate since the nineteenth century. Every social advance was costly, was going to be difficult to deal with. But history has given us the answer. With the right policies, enterprises and economies benefit from decent work, because it helps to raise productivity, to use resources more effectively and to promote legitimacy and commitment. It permits to deal better with issues of employability and adaptability. We have to be clear that there is a positive economic dividend. Can we really advance decent work objectives in the informal economy, which accounts for most employment in poor countries? The answer again is yes. There are success stories in the work of the ILO and many others that show that it is possible. SEWA in India has shown that it is feasible to deliver organization, opportunities and social protection to hundreds of thousands of self-employed, mostly poor women. New institutions deliver microcredit and reach millions who were previously excluded, most of them women again, so that the Micro-Credit Summit can credibly aim at reaching 100 million of the world's poorest families by 2005. Micro-insurance offers health protection to many more in different parts of Africa.

Of course all of this is tough. Living in the informal economy is difficult. People are living at the margins of organized society in many, many countries. But the success stories show that it is possible to make rights, employment, protection and dialogue part of one development package. The real basic challenge confronting us now is to multiply the successes and mainstream them into general public policies. The aim must be to reach everyone and to bring them closer to public institutions and to formal markets.

So our task is clear. It is to make decent work happen at all levels. We in the Organization - the Office and the constituents working together - can put decent work into practice where it matters most: at the national level.

Since the last session of our Conference we have launched a first effort to do just that - a new programme which is developing the policy methods for decent work. We have started in the Philippines, in Panama, in Denmark and in Ghana - at the request of the different countries - working in close collaboration with the tripartite constituents, learning from their experience as well as aiming to contribute to their priorities.

We plan to work in several other countries in the second phase. We have already started to discuss the possibilities with Bangladesh, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Peru and Mauritius. I recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with China based on the ILO's four strategic objectives. We are also linking the decent work agenda at the national level with the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers of the Bretton Woods institutions in Mali, Honduras, Nepal, the United Republic of Tanzania and Cambodia.

All of this effort of bringing the decent work agenda to the reality of a country is designed to explore how the decent work framework can be mapped onto a practical policy agenda, adapted to the concerns and circumstances of each country. That means policies to promote enterprise and employment alongside policies to defend basic rights at work: policies to strengthen the social partners and reinforce their dialogue around the decent work goals; policies to extend the reach of social protection and mainstream gender equality. But above all, it is a strategy which shows how action in each of the aspects of decent work can reinforce the others.

The aim is coherent policy packages which can reduce the decent work deficit, developed through partnership between workers, employers and governments. We will use and multiply these experiences, so as to offer methods and options, advice and cooperation, to countries which wish to participate in this endeavour.

All of this makes heavy demands on the ILO's knowledge base. In the key fields of the decent work agenda, we have to be thought leaders, the one place in the world where people can turn to for quality information on its different dimensions. The discussion of social security in our Conference illustrates this well; here is an issue of fundamental concern to all of our constituents, at the heart of national strategies for decent work and at the heart of politics in all of our countries. To meet the demands we need quality information and quality analysis. I insist we need to have a solid knowledge base and we need to decide to be thought leaders on the issues in which we have established as our priorities. The same applies to our discussions on cooperatives and on health and safety in agriculture.

Our work at the country level with individual member States has to be complemented by action in the international system because in today's world, many of the decisions which impact critically on the realization of decent work are taken at the international level.

Undoubtedly, accelerating globalization has lent urgency to this need. But we are not breaking entirely new ground here; already in 1944, the Declaration of Philadelphia had understood this. It says that it is the responsibility of the ILO "to examine and consider all economic and financial policies and measures in the light of (the) fundamental objective" of the Organization. Indeed, it is telling us to look at events beyond the frontiers of the ILO to see how they impact on the objectives of the Organization. This is our mandate.

I believe that we need a common approach in the international system, which encompasses our decent work goals. Situations which we have all lived through, in which member States have received different and contradictory advice from different international organizations, amount to policy schizophrenia. It is a disservice to their citizens and a discredit to the international system itself. The absolute minimum is that we cease to operate at cross-purposes.

For this to happen, there is going to have to be progress too in the consistency of governments' positions across different organizations. We can call for cooperation between organizations; we can tell the secretariats to please come together to discuss common objectives; but it is the governments, it is the governments in the governing bodies and in the boards of these organizations, that have to take the decisions. And I think that the governments have taken too long; they have left the responsibility to the secretariats when the responsibility for policy coherence actually lies with the governments themselves, who have to guide the actions of the different organizations in such a way that structural adjustment is compatible with caring for people, for example. So I believe that it is essential that the system stops acting as if it were a series of unconnected islands, and begins to put together the type of integrated responses required by the interrelated challenges of the global economy.

These are issues which will be taken up in next week's meeting of the Governing Body Working Party on the Social Dimension of Globalization.

In this connection we also have to be aware that the image of the ILO as a "toothless" institution still surfaces from time to time. Our recent efforts have raised the ILO's profile and shown that it is a relevant actor that can exert more influence than might previously have been supposed. But I think that this is not enough. We must have the will to make a difference to the path of globalization. We must contribute to fair rules of the game and the level playing field for both people and countries.

Most importantly, the ILO tripartite constituency will have to agree that it should take on a significant role in tracing social road maps for the global economy. The opportunity is there; seizing it depends on our capacities for creativity and imagination - and also a concept of what this institution should be and the role it should play in the world of today. We must deepen and expand our knowledge base and forge a strong tripartite alliance that is open to the world.

Let me say that dealing with these issues is also linked to the follow-up to the Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. This year the Global Report under the Declaration jolts us into realizing that forced labour persists in a variety of forms around the world and not only in developing countries. I look forward to our debate on this issue.

The decent work agenda makes demands on each of the ILO's tripartite constituencies as well as on the Office. The ILO has a particular institutional responsibility to provide services to its constituents to help them respond effectively. We need stronger employers' organizations and stronger trade unions with increased representative capacities and better gender balance. Equally, we need to work with governments to ensure that States are better able to carry out, individually and collectively, their responsibilities in the world of work.

I have been heartened in our contacts by your obvious awareness of the challenges you face and the priority you attach to constructing new and innovative strategies to meet them.

All of us - constituents, ILO bodies and the Office - face the danger of inertia, a reluctance to change. Even those who recognize that the world is changing all around them often get bogged down in old ideas. It requires an effort to shift gear. Routine, "business as usual" is of course easier, and after all, how do we know that the new ideas will work? Why take the risk? Large international bureaucracies are vulnerable to that sort of thinking, but so are governments and national organizations. Yet we must change to take advantage of new opportunities. And we are.

For example, in a field which concerns us all, standards, we have started to look at how we can modernize our methods while retaining our value base. Looking at families of standards with decent work as a guide may provide a better overall framework for normative action and I am persuaded that we could be more proactive in our use of the supervisory system.

In driving the change process, I have repeatedly found ILO staff, at headquarters and in the regions, willing to experiment, to be creative, to question old assumptions. They are the breeding ground of the decent work generation that will lead this institution in the future.

Our common determination to achieve decent work is vital, but it should not lead us to think that we can do it all on our own. The goals of the ILO Constitution go far beyond our immediate areas of influence. Employment and security depend on wider economic policies - so dialogue and cooperation at the national level with finance, trade and other ministries, and with multilateral organizations internationally, are absolutely essential.

And in the increasingly diverse forms of organization of civil society there are many possible partners who share our values and are able to do things which we cannot. Why would we refuse to listen to and work with those who can help us achieve our goals? The decent work agenda provides a platform of partnership; and we should be able to build on it while retaining our structure of decision-making.

As we tackle the challenge, it has to be accepted by all, as I have already stated, that the decent work agenda is a package. There is always a risk that one or other of the ILO's constituents will say: "I am only interested in standards", or "I am only interested in employment". I believe that that will not work basically for two simple reasons. First, the different dimensions of decent work do reinforce each other; and second, there has to be a shared commitment, and that means that everyone's priorities have to be in the package. That is what cohesive tripartism is all about.

Looking ahead, we may feel overwhelmed by the task before us. There is the sheer magnitude of making decent work a reality for people everywhere. There is a sense that globalization is an implacable and inexorable process. There is the reality of poverty and of inadequate resources. I myself sometimes have a feeling of frustration when I observe so many humanitarian crises affecting workers and, for example, the continued killing of workers in Colombia.

I have pointed to some of the answers in my Report, but let us never underestimate our capabilities, represented by the governments and organizations present in this chamber. We have accompanied South Africa, Poland, Chile and many others in their struggle for freedom. Much of the enormous social progress of the twentieth century can be traced to the tireless work of the ILO and its constituents.

I must say that one of the things that worried me when you honoured me by electing me to be Director-General was that I did not have a historical linkage with the ILO, that I had worked on the issues and the subjects of development and social development, but that I had not been here sitting with you as you strove in this field. And I have to tell you that two years down the road, I could not feel prouder of being the Director-General of the ILO - precisely because of its 80-year history, precisely because of all that you and your predecessors have done to influence the course of human events on social issues. And when we hear about all of our limitations, which of course all institutions have, I say to myself "but after all, if you take a look at the labour legislation in the world, it is mostly inspired by ILO Conventions; if you take a look at the world, whenever social conflict is being managed in terms of problem solving, you see that the hand of an ILO mission is present; and when you see people thinking about social dialogue as one of the things that needs to be promoted and developed in the world of the twenty-first century, you realize that that was why the ILO was created in 1919".

So I must say that even though implementing the decent work agenda and reducing the decent work deficit appear difficult and complex, they constitute challenges that this institution has been able to address in the past. Imagine approving the first Convention at the beginning of the twentieth century; the reactions, the difficulties, the opposition that this institution had to fight when it tried to generate for the first time in history a global Convention in the area of work.

What we have to do is difficult. But this house has done difficult things before and we simply have to have the will and take the decision to reduce the decent work deficit and to play the role that we have to play in the international system in order to make this happen.

Together with our history we have an immense untapped potential - the support and cohesiveness of all of those who work in the world. By strengthening and extending our own national organizations - trade unions, employers' organizations and governments - we can lay the foundations for decent work in the emerging global economy.

By focusing our political will, we can make a significant start. And that is exactly what is now happening. For example, three countries from different regions, the United Republic of Tanzania, Nepal and El Salvador, are now launching time-bound programmes for the eradication of the worst forms of child labour. The public commitment is an essential part of this strategy in each country, and tomorrow a Special Session of the Conference will highlight that commitment, honoured by the visit of the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, His Excellency, Mr. Benjamin Mkapa who will address the Conference.

Our task then is clear. It is to help reduce the decent work deficit. This needs both determination and a change of attitude to overcome the obstacles in our way.

We have the accumulated capital of our own Organization. Over the years, we have created international structures for voice and cooperation which are unique in the international system today, which are deeply rooted in national societies.

Above all, the ILO is built on shared values. We care deeply about social justice, about rights and equity, about democratic representation and debate, about inclusion and fairness. We believe that a just society is the essential foundation of a civilized world. We are willing to put our energies into pursuing that goal. Workers, employers, governments and the Office share the commitment to action. And what gives us strength is the personal commitment of each one of us to our fellow human beings.

This brings to mind an experience I had when I was preparing the World Summit for Social Development. I used to make the point regularly that the crisis in social development was a reality in both the developing countries and in the developed ones; of course, the difficulties and the complexities in developing countries were much greater and more difficult to solve, but the social problems were everywhere.

I used to give the example, speaking in the United Nations, of Harlem just 100 blocks up from the United Nations Building in New York; and I used to say that: "we can visit Harlem and other places in which the social crisis is happening, even in the context of New York City" - and in that framework I was invited to a street in Harlem. The reason for inviting me to that street was that, in the course of the previous year, nine black youths had died, either because of a drugs overdose or because of violent confrontation, and the parents of that street had decided that they wanted to make it a clean street - a street where you could not have drugs or arms; and since I was in contact with some of the non-governmental organizations participating in the Summit they invited me to the street.

And I had the following experience. A small kid, 6-7 years old, came to me and I began talking and he asked: "why are you here?" And I replied "well I am here because I care", and then he said "well, why do you care?". Those words resonated throughout the whole process of preparing the Social Summit and I asked myself: "Is caring for an individual just an individual approach, or do we have to develop institutions and methods and instruments that make our societies care for those that need that care?". I think that if we take a look at what the International Labour Office is doing and we ask why we are doing everything that we are doing, I think that the answer is because we care - because we care institutionally, because this is an institution that has a mandate to care for workers, and for the life of workers. And the life of workers is the life of families, and the life of families is the life of a community, and the communities are a fundamental part of a region, and a region is fundamental to the stability of the nation; so yes, we are looking at the worker, but the manner in which we deal with the lives of workers is a very fundamental way in which a nation is going to solve the issues that we are all confronting today.

So let me finish by saying that all of these are precious assets at a time of uncertainty and overwhelming change. We have in our values a compass. We have in our structures, both national and international, a powerful engine; and we have in our shared attitudes and commonality of approach, the energy and determination necessary to drive this Organization forward and to help create a more inclusive society and a wider sharing of prosperity. If we care enough we are going to do it.

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