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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

Let me first say that this has been a great meeting. I think that we all have the feeling that we have been discussing real questions here. We have put knowledge and proposals on the table in a very effective manner. When we planned this seminar we had to decide what format to give it, whether to hold a general discussion or deepen a specific issue. We decided that at this stage we needed to look together at the general issues and basic questions of our common theme, that is to say the future of work, employment and social protection. I feel very comfortable with the way that has been done. We have had an extremely high quality debate and many ideas for the future. That is exactly the type of product that we were looking for. So thank you so much for that.

I would also like to thank all of those who have made this event possible. Peter Auer from ILO and Christine Daniel from the Ministry of Employment and Solidarity were responsible for much of the design and planning of this Conference with support from Emmanuel Reynaud, Jean-Michel Servais and Gerry Rodgers of the ILO who are here with us, and Dominique Méda in the Ministry of Employment and Solidarity. A particular thanks to Marie-Thérèse Join-Lambert, who has been supporting this exercise throughout, as well as to Jean Lavergne, Jacques Maire, Didier Garnier and other colleagues from the Ministry. A big thanks to Françoise Weeks who along with Vanna Rougier and Carmen Ruppert have worked really intensively and effectively on the organization of this Conference. To Martine Aubry for her original enthusiasm for this idea and to Elizabeth Guigou for her continued commitment and support to it, and particularly for her personal participation at the beginning of the meeting. And of course to all of you who have participated in the meeting for the reasons that I have just given.

We now have to discuss with the Ministry of Employment and Solidarity how we continue, but there are already a number of practical proposals on the table, such as the creation of a website, which Elisabeth Guigou raised yesterday, an electronic network, and obviously the continuation on a regular basis of meetings of this type. Perhaps also other activities between meetings. It is not enough to have one conference after another, we need to think about what we are going to do with the ideas that are proposed, how we deepen the knowledge, how we generate wider debate and discussion on the policy proposals that are coming out. If any of you would like to send me a couple of pages on what you think should be the research agenda or to refine some of the policy proposals that you made, please feel welcome. That would help us a great deal with the follow-up.

Today we have launched a process that I think is going to be extremely important for the ILO. Elizabeth Guigou yesterday said we have to think about a "social Davos". It is true that there should be a place, in the framework of the ILO but not necessarily exclusively the ILO itself, where we convene the world to debate issues in the way we have been doing here. We will see what form it could take as we go along, but I believe we have to think about how we could move towards that.

Let me start by explaining why I thought it was important to organize a meeting of this type, concerned with issues of work and social protection in industrialized countries.

There are two different points here. The first concerns the ILO's action in countries at different levels of development. I represented Chile at the United Nations for a decade, and I realised that from New York some people saw the ILO essentially as an instrument within the international system for improving social standards in the developing countries, while industrialized countries would no longer need international monitoring of these standards. I think there is a danger here. We see around us the emergence of new phenomena, and they affect both rich and poor societies. The ILO has to maintain a capacity to be relevant to both the developing and the developed world, if it is to be able to tackle the social issues of today. So what we are doing here is of strategic significance to the ILO. It is a question of the global mandate and responsibility of this Organization and its capability to lead knowledge and understanding of the new phenomena which affect workers and their families worldwide.

The second point is that all of us here believe that it is important to reflect and think about these issues. That is absolutely essential. That is why you are honouring us with your presence here, and are willing to share and discuss your knowledge and your experiences. One of the major problems today in politics is that the ability to reflect and analyse seems to have shrunk. It is a question of time. The decision-making process takes up a great deal of space and time, and that competes with the time for reflection and thought. We all, when we have political responsibilities, tend to work on the basis of knowledge which we already have, but it is necessary to continuously renew that knowledge. That is not impossible, but it is difficult, even though there are a number of exceptional specialists in the political field who are able to do this. In the ILO, therefore, as elsewhere, we have to push for further thought and reflection; to be a little provocative sometimes; to stimulate and encourage people to think; to raise questions which are awkward, embarrassing questions; to say, well, take time and look at these ideas which have been accepted by everyone but do they really work? I think that this is one of the roles of the multilateral system, and the ILO within its sphere has an essential role to play. Even an organization such as the ILO, with its wealth of tripartite riches, will fail to keep up with the process of rapid change if it does not ask these questions - and that is the road to irrelevance. I hope and believe that in the ILO we can mobilize some of the leaders in thinking and reflection to help us continuously renew our knowledge in the key areas of our mandate.

Then of course there is the question of linking the theoretical and the intellectual with the practical realities. In the ILO's Governing Body we hear the voices not only of governments but also of the representatives of employers and workers. So our system of governance already generates a debate which is anchored in the realities of firms and economies. There is a tremendous potential here for deepening exchange and reflection. This seminar was only a beginning, but it will I hope help us take advantage of this potential. In a day and a half we cannot solve the problems, but we have opened up certain possibilities and identified critical issues that need to be examined in depth.

Let me make some comments on the discussion over the last day and a half. We have all heard the syntheses of the four sessions, and they are truly very good so I don't need to repeat them. Instead I will just mention some of the issues that have come to my mind.

The first is something that comes out very clearly, which is the diversity of situations and the diversity of solutions. We heard about innovation on a whole array of issues as they came up. None of this is settled, but very clearly there is thinking and action going on in trying to deal with these questions. It brought the following sentiment to my mind: that the response to the "pensée unique" is not another "pensée unique"; rather that the response to analytical dogmatism is pluralism of thought. I think that we all understand that from an intellectual point of view we can no longer say that there is one unique solution. Unfortunately in the 1980s and a good part of the 1990s we lived in a world in which people thought there was one solution. This view has lost support, although it remains influential in the way policies are formulated. But in analytical and intellectual terms we have moved into a phase which recognizes the richness and creativity of alternative views, and the need to put the different interests that are present at the service of finding solutions.

But there are also worrying trends. Whatever conclusion you draw from the discussion we had, whether jobs are truly becoming more or less precarious, the fact is that uncertainty is growing. On that we are broadly in agreement. There is for some reason a sense of unease - I may have a sure job today but will I have it tomorrow? We have to deepen the understanding of that.

I think that people are not afraid of change, they are afraid of uncertainty. Most of you have talked about changes going on and how to respond to these situations. One of the sources of uncertainty is that people do not know where is the anchor. What are the reference points and values that are holding things together? People react wherever they are placed, and try to adapt to what is going on around them, but they ask themselves, where is the anchor in this process? I think that the political world, which sometimes has a knack to capture these things, has been finding ways of expressing this concern: Bill Clinton's formulation was "let us put a human face on the global economy". Jospin says "yes to the market economy but not to the market society". Blair talks about we have to marry modernity with social justice. In Germany they tried to see how to keep the social market model in a globalized world. George W. Bush is talking about compassionate conservatism. All of these formulations respond to the idea that the anchor is very important for people and that it is somehow linked to values and to the type of society we want to create... Of course in the last 20 years values looked like the "soft" issue; in many people's minds the real issue was the hard concrete decisions that you have to take on the basic element of transformation today, which is the economy.

I believe that because of these feelings of uncertainty the questions of the anchor and the underlying values are coming back. We are obliged to respond. We tend to say that economic changes are irreversible and the only possibility that we have is to adapt to them. I would say to that, yes and no. Yes, open economies are better than closed economies, yes open societies are better than closed societies, yes the information and communication technology revolution is irreversible. But policies can be changed, whether they are macroeconomic policies, trade policies, development policies, financial policies … Policies are not biological phenomena. They are made by people and institutions and they can be changed. You need a double adaptation. An adaptation of people and institutions to the reality of the changes but also an adaptation of the process of change to the needs of people. We need an adaptation from both ends. I think that many of the comments that were made in our meeting reflected that tension in one way or another.

We are trying in this new stage of the ILO to look at problems through the eyes of people. This is the reason that we came up with the "decent work" formulation, because it is built on the notion that you really have to go down to basics and ask people what they truly want. I saw this when I was working on the Social Summit. In preparing for the Summit I asked people and policy makers around the world what are the key social problems. Two answers came back at different levels and in different situations: the first was poverty and the second was social exclusion. And when I then asked, what is the solution?, inevitably in one way or the other the answer was "work".

If I have good work, decent work, quality work it is a pretty good step out of poverty and a pretty good step into social inclusion. Work is in the hearts and the minds of people. That is the reason why in the ILO, where we deal with workers' rights, with social protection and with social dialogue we have given high priority to employment - because you need work to make a reality of workers' rights.

Work is a source not only of income but also of dignity. It is a source of well-being for a family. We tend to forget that behind an unemployed person there is a very unhappy family - and then we must ask ourselves about the impact of inadequate work on domestic violence, children mixed up with drugs, etc. Ultimately, all these things are connected.

Work also affects the stability of local communities. It increasingly has to do with the credibility of democracy. Let me say here that we have a clearly different approach from the World Bank and the Fund. The Bank and the Fund have, correctly, I think, put poverty reduction at the top of their agenda today. Having organized the Social Summit I am very happy that they finally came around to it, so I will obviously not quarrel with that. But what is interesting if you look at their documents, nowhere do they say that the way you get out of poverty and social exclusion is through jobs. They talk of education, health, a number of very obvious things that are needed for development but the point is, you can be educated and unemployed and healthy and unemployed and even empowered and unemployed. In the end the bottom line of family life is, what is my relationship with the productive system? So work continues to be the key.

This is valid for the developed world too. We were told yesterday that there has not been much change in the proportion of precarious jobs, but 20-30 per cent of precarious jobs in a developed society is not something to be proud about. I was very struck when I saw a Belgian film called Rosetta, which is about a young girl in Brussels trying to get what she called a "travail normal", a normal job. She is harassed at work and a lot of things happen to her, but the point is that she is one of those that simply cannot get on the train. This is an important issue for societies that have reached the level of sophistication, knowledge, resources and capacities that the industrialized societies of today have reached.

I believe there is a decent work deficit in the world. We are saying that the decent work deficit in the world is made up of four gaps. There is the employment gap, 160 million unemployed in the world, over one billion including the underemployed. There is the workers' rights gap and all of the ILO documentation is there to prove it. It is the foundation of the Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. We have a social protection gap: something like 80 per cent of the working age population of the world does not have adequate social protection; and we have a social dialogue gap, not necessarily in the countries represented here but very much so in the world. Taking all of these gaps together we have a decent work deficit, and we have to think together what we can do about it.

In this seminar we are analysing the situation of the industrial and developed societies, but what you do to solve your problems has to be linked to how others are solving their problems. These are global issues.

One thing that also has struck me in the way we have been addressing these problems is that there is a tendency to say, look, if you do not have a decent job it is your fault, you are inadequate, you are not adapted, you are unfit, you are incompetent, it is your problem. Just look around and look at all the successful people around you, so what is wrong with you? I am caricaturing the position, but you can recognize the argument. I think that something quite extraordinary happened in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. We came back to the notion of personal responsibility, which somehow had been lost. We came back to the idea that in the end we do have a responsibility for our own reality and for our own life and it is up to us to be able to cope with many of the issues that we face. I think that up to a point this has been a positive evolution, but it can go too far, and some people end up arguing that institutions and policies are not that important, only individual responsibility counts. We have to reestablish the balance between the spaces of personal responsibilities and the spaces of institutional needs. I think we discussed this issue here very well.

I would just like to mention the question of the measurement of the quality of work. Very clearly we need to develop this idea together with the concept of social efficiency. We have plenty of statistics and indicators of economic efficiency, but what are the indicators of the social efficiency of a society? I believe that there is an obvious need to develop measurement methods and instruments that can help us to understand these issues much better.

Let me make a comment on the global economy, another on the idea of an "international social authority", and finally something on integrated thinking and values.

I have the feeling that we have to be cautious about simply declaring that we now operate in a global economy. The new economy has its bubbles but also its deflations, as we have seen happening recently. The old economy is still there, some of it linked to the new economy and some of it not. We have the informal economy which is growing worldwide, and new linkages are developing between the informal economy and the global economy. You have the stock market economy, apparently less linked today than in the past with traditional market valuations, and responding to other forms of logic; and you have the influential legal economy. Does this package as a whole amount to a global economy? I do not think so. I think that we have to be careful about concluding that because deregulation, privatization and lower taxes have increased capital mobility and stimulated trade and investment, the result is that we now have a global economy. We need a more sophisticated analysis.

I think we have to understand better these different production systems within our societies. A question that was raised towards the end, which I think is extremely important, is, what is a modern enterprise? In this new economy, what is a modern enterprise that combines the flexibility and security that we talked about, what are the industrial relations formats within this modern enterprise? What is the role of dialogue in that environment and how do you organize for that dialogue? Can an enterprise be made to work as a community? I believe that organization is crucial, as was said here both from the side of the trade union movement and from the point of view of the employer. How do we invent together forms of social dialogue oriented towards the future that are not necessarily locked into traditional and historical forms of confrontation between capital and labour?

I think that trade unions have a particular challenge. Many of the things that Amy Dean told us were very interesting. How the trade union movement of the United States is moving to be more community-linked, more connected to working families, going beyond the contact with the worker into service functions and trying to respond to other preoccupations that a worker may have, such as gender inequality, environmental issues or others. These things are beginning to be dealt with in creative ways. Moving towards a modern enterprise and away from the confrontational process also implies, I believe, the capacity to facilitate the organization of work so as to open space for dialogue, and that dialogue then contributes to stability within an enterprise. If you do not have a voice in the enterprise then you may well go out in the street. So giving voice is the best way of ensuring stability.

Let me comment on the idea of the "international social authority", which I found extremely interesting, in the very piercing presentation that Alain Supiot gave us. This falls into the area of global governance and legitimacy.

I observe that there exist international institutions whose decisions have legitimacy. When the International Court of Justice decides something, it is agreed, and nobody goes out onto the street and says, no, how is it possible. There are also international organizations which are of a technical nature, for instance the International Meteorological Organization. They set agreed global standards which have global legitimacy. We have had these bodies for a long time. The work of the European Commission was cited, and there is also the example of the dispute settlement procedure of WTO.

Other organizations have influence based on power. The UN Security Council has the legal authority to take action. The International Financial Institutions have economic power, insofar as they control flows of certain resources. You have also private economic power - the people that grade the bonds of countries have an extraordinary power. When you pass from B+ to B- that means a lot of interest rates go up right away. It is a de facto market power that exists today and that is real.

In that context, where does the ILO fit in? I think that we fit into the legitimacy sphere rather than the power sphere. When our Conventions are ratified by governments they become a binding obligation and that sets in motion procedures and mechanisms in terms of national legislation and enforcement. The legitimacy of that function is not questioned. As a result the ILO has had a rather important influence in its 80 years of existence.

As far as the "international social authority" is concerned, let me say that I think that many of the elements are already in place in the existing ILO mechanisms. First, the ILO's Committee of Experts receives governmental reports on ratified Conventions and gives its opinion on the conformity of actions in each country. This is an independent body doing objective technical, legal work. A jurisprudence has been built up over the years.

Second, the ILO has a Committee on Freedom of Association. The President of the Committee on Freedom of Association is here with us, Professor Rood. This is a complaints-based procedure. The Committee gives an opinion, in fact it adjudicates a dispute in the legal sense. The reports of the Committee go to the Governing Body of the ILO for approval.

Third, we have Commissions of Inquiry. These are used sparingly - they have been used in the past in South Africa and in Poland, for example. Their recommendations have normally remained within the ILO, although that does not make them less influential. In one recent case, that of forced labour in Myanmar, article 33 of the ILO Constitution was used. That permits the Conference to authorize certain measures to be taken if the recommendations of a Commission of Inquiry have not been put into effect.

Within the ILO, there is a review now under way of the whole standard setting system with its supervisory machinery. We hope that this will lead to tripartite agreement on how to move forward, in terms of making the process more efficient and effective, as well as developing technical cooperation to solve problems. We cannot maintain an exclusively legal perspective, and in fact we are going beyond that. There is now a global consensus that there are a set of fundamental, core labour standards - that was affirmed in the Social Summit and embodied in the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Those principles and rights cover child labour, non-discrimination, forced labour, the right to organize, freedom of association and collective bargaining. They are universal, and valid for all workers at all levels of development.

These issues extend to the private sector, because they impinge on enterprise policy, providing ground rules for socially sensitive restructuring, for instance. Core labour standards need to be build into management principles. We get a lot of requests for ILO cooperation on standards issues from individual companies, and now we have a Global Compact that the UN Secretary-General has launched, but this is just the beginning. You need to take account of public opinion, as consumers are increasingly concerned with how goods are produced, which makes that an important issue for the image of a company. Private standard setting and self-regulation are expanding, and that should be seen as a positive development. But at the same time it has the danger that people pick and choose parts of the ILO agenda, selecting elements of standards that may or may not coincide with the ILO position overall.

Our debate shows that we need to think about those issues. But I do want to mention what I see as a factor which limits how far we can go. When you empower the WTO to adjudicate on a trade dispute, for instance, you are intervening in a State to State relation. It affects the economy and it affects private actors but it is a State to State relationship. But a global authority on social issues seems to imply some authority to intervene in internal matters. That's an idea that would certainly provoke negative reactions from both developed and developing countries. I can perfectly well see many countries saying, hold on, let me deal with my internal problems. I do not want an outside body interfering in how we settle our social disputes, because these are important national issues with political ramifications.

As far as the ILO is concerned, then, we have a legitimacy in general and case law capacity in terms of specific conflicts or specific ways of implementing our conventions. We will continue to build on that.

Let me end up with two things which I think are important.

First, we deal with a set of economic and social values and goals which need to be considered together. In people's lives, the political and the economic and the social are very tightly and closely linked. We do not compartmentalize things in the family. But when it comes to policies, we find it very difficult to develop integrated policies which correspond to the realities of daily life. I think that this represents a major challenge.

We need much more integrated thinking. In one of my previous incarnations I was head of a research institute, so I know how difficult that is. But I believe that on the types of issues we are discussing here, without much more integrated thinking it is going to be extremely difficult to find the solutions. It all hinges on the mix, on the balance, on the relative importance of one policy against another and the ways they are combined. And yet we continue to have a sectorial analysis of an increasingly integrated problem. Governments are organized that way, the international system is organized that way.

I just want to leave that question on the table. We are trying to move towards a more integrated approach in the ILO and it is difficult. We have established four strategic objectives: rights at work; social protection; employment; and social dialogue. Those are the four key areas of our activities, and together they make up what I have called the objective of decent work. It is a marriage between the historical agenda of the ILO in relation to rights at work and social protection on the one hand, and a growth and development agenda involving jobs and enterprises on the other, with social dialogue, which is at the heart of the ILO, as the way these things are brought together. But as we move into these four strategic areas we see that the ILO does not yet operate in a truly integrated way. Each of the strategic objectives is linked and interrelated with the others. We have to answer questions such as how does the right to work affect social protection? How does employment affect other aspects of decent work? We have expertise in each of the four areas but much less expertise in the interaction between them. We have to develop this interactive expertise if we want to make the decent work agenda a cohesive and a comprehensive agenda. So we need to explore interaction, identify bridges between the each of these strategic objectives. It is necessary to reflect further to see how far we should go and with what methods. This is a theme to which this type of meeting can contribute.

The final point that I want to make is that in the end this is about values, values in a realistic, practical concept adapted to the modern world. Without values to guide us towards the type of society we want to build together it is really easy to go astray. I think that the issue of values is not just a nebulous thing for those who have certain beliefs. It has a very practical product, which is bringing down the uncertainty of people. You do that not only in concrete ways but also by acting on the perceptions of people. Today it is clear, and it came out in our discussion, that subjective uncertainty affects people more than you would expect from objective insecurities. The uncertainty goes far beyond what the data tell us, and I think, and that is my perception, that it is linked to values. The fact is that the issues we have been discussing here are in the heart of politics and society and in the heart of family life.

I think that we have had a very successful meeting. We have to now sit down with our colleagues from the Ministry of Solidarity and Employment and see how we will continue. But thank you so much for an extremely enriching debate. Thanks a lot.