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Agenda List of Participants Opening speech by Ms. Guigou Speech by Mr. Somavia Background Document Annecy Conference Papers ILO Press Release

Jill Rubery
Professor of Comparative Employment Systems
Manchester School of Management
UMIST, Sackville Street
P.O. Box 88
MANCHESTER M60 1QD
England

Employment, as I think has already been mentioned this morning, stands at the interface between the production and the social reproduction sphere and I think Eileen, by choosing her two examples of the internationalization of production on the one hand and the marginalization of care work on the other, has illustrated that interface.

I think it is the insecurities occurring on both sides of this interface that are creating the possibilities of a downward spiral in the degree of security in social and economic life. And it seemed to me from reading Eileen's paper that we are talking about a period in which there is a shifting of responsibilities or an avoidance of responsibilities in the employment sphere broadly defined, and I would like to illustrate that with respect to four areas.

First of all, with respect to employment generation, the internationalization of production has meant that national governments feel less able to take the responsibility or are less willing to take the responsibility for employment generation, and multinational companies are certainly not willing to take that burden from them.

We also have the situation in which the creation of global supply chains and the creation of contingent labour markets is shifting the responsibility from, if you like, the main employer, down the supply chain, to the weakest link in the supply chain. Often outsourcers and franchisees are quite rightly saying they do not have the market power to provide decent work.

Another area of shifting of responsibilities and avoidance is in this term "employability". The growth of flexible employment and contingent work is creating a responsibility on the individual to continually make themselves employable as technologies change, as employers close down and indeed as contracts come to an end.

And, finally, my fourth example of this shifting of responsibilities relates to care work and indeed income maintenance. Now societies have always taken different routes to how they provide income maintenance and provide for care, placing different emphasis on the role of the State, the role of employers and the role of the family, but we can see in all areas that the State is retrenching, welfare states are being cut back, employers are often offering only rights for good pension rights or health care only to a limited elite, and the family is becoming less able due to its own fragmentation and instability to provide care systems and income protection.

Now all this shifting and avoidance of responsibilities is taking place in a political context in which there is no real attempt, apart from today's meeting of course, to think about how we should reassign those responsibilities, how we should actually structure the world of work so as societies take responsibilities for maintaining employment, maintaining employability, providing care and income protection. And thus we have changes such as, for example, in gender relations which may be a force for good for the future, but which currently are being restructured, at least in some countries often the Anglo-Saxon countries in particular in an incoherent and really rather negative way. Women, as we have heard from Eileen, are being asked to take on a dual burden and care work has been marginalized. Men are often being required, when they are unemployed, to take jobs that were designed for second-income earners in a previous era of single breadwinners. In short they are being asked to take on women's marginalized contingent work.

Now all of those are very negative situations and I wanted to perhaps suggest some issues that would be important for the decent work agenda of the ILO arising from some of those comments.

If we turn first of all to the issue of labour standards and employment rights, it seems to me that some of the important issues are:

• how do we establish such rights and standards?
• how do we identify who is the main employer and who has responsibility in a world in which the real employer is becoming increasingly hidden through global supply chains, franchising, and outsourcing?

If we come to the area of employment opportunities, we have the problem of who has the right of access to employment. I would argue that the period of stable full employment that people refer to was actually a period of employment rationing. Access to employment was limited to men. That is no longer the case. We no longer have a consensus that such as system is appropriate but we have not moved forward to a new consensus about how to ration access to employment, a commodity which I think historically has always been in scarce supply. And I think we need to recognize that that is one of the reasons for the continuing debate about quantity over quality in employment, that we really do not know how to move forward in this area.

If I turn to the area of social protection it seems to me that to move forward on the care agenda, we have to include care and care work within the sphere of social protection, but we need to do this in a way that moves forward and does not attempt to reproduce the gender division of labour in the past.

We also need to move forward in providing social protection for contingent work. In the past, contingent work has been created on the basis that the people participating derive their source of income protection often from the family or from the State in some way, in the sense of pensioners or people on benefits or something. We now have to recognize that people are being forced into contingent work who want an independent source of income, to be independent adults or to make independent contributions to the family, so we need to move forward again in these areas.

Finally, with respect to social dialogue, we need, as I think is evident, wider representation within the social dialogue and we also need that social dialogue continues to consider broader ranges of rights moving beyond rights which derive out of employment in large organizations, perhaps towards citizenship rights. But while we need these new institutions, and we need new institutions that as I say move beyond rights established through continuous employment with large employers, we must not let large employers off the hook in contributing to an effective framework for decent work.

Similarly, we need new institutions to deal with the family and the welfare system, but we also need to avoid going back to the previous system of a gender division of labour between paid and unpaid work.

These issues all need to be taken into account in the decent work agenda but I am not certain we have too many answers as to how to move forward. I think Eileen is right that institutions do matter and we do have political choices. We need to address our attention to those choices.