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Mr. J.P. Maître
Mr. J.P. Maître,
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ADDRESS OF MR. J.-P. MAÎTRE,
CONSEILLER D'ETAT OF THE CANTON OF GENEVA
Let me first, on behalf of the Geneva Government, wish you a warm welcome and fruitful activities in this Forum which we all think is an important event. It is indeed a very interesting initiative and when Mr. Hammar first informed me about it, I very spontaneously expressed our enthusiastic support for several reasons.
First, there is a long tradition of friendship and partnership between the ILO and Geneva. And we are particularly proud that the ILO, beyond and in addition to its activities, takes on initiatives to meet new challenges and find new solutions. Moreover, we are particularly happy that this initiative has been taken and that we are given a chance to talk about enterprises, the basic, essential ships which take the best crews safe into port.
I've been assigned the task of talking about Geneva and enterprises. This is a wide topic and I would not like to divert your attention by talking only about the Geneva economy. I simply wish to draw your attention to several experiments we are presently carrying out with Geneva employers' and also workers' organisations, using our own concept, which is that of our State and of partnership. Perhaps I should first draw a brief picture of our economy, which is characterised by its diversity. Indeed, in terms of employment, agriculture in the Canton of Geneva represents only 1.8 per cent of total employment but has a very important economic role, especially in country planning. Indeed, industry in Geneva represents approximately 20 per cent of total employment; over the past few decades we have witnessed a gradual shift of industry towards activities which are more service-oriented.
The services sector as such represents approximately 7 per cent of total employment in Geneva. And since, in Geneva, there are marked economic specificities in the banking, insurance, management of securities sectors, one could imagine that the economy of this international city is mainly oriented towards the banking sector.
I would like to tell you that if we are obviously very proud that the main actors of the Geneva economy are banks, financial institutions, and first-class international trade institutions which play a pilot role at the world level; the economy of this canton, of this republic, is quite diversified. One example may illustrate the latter. The first employer in Geneva in terms of number of workers is retail trade. And retail trade represents only 8 per cent of total employment. It is thus clear that this is a diversified economy and this is very important for us as, in conducting economic development along with employers' organisations, we try and achieve a traditional principle of old Swiss families, of housewives, i.e. that eggs should not be put into the same basket because if the basket were to fall, it would be a pity to break them all and that is why we seek to have an economy as diversified as possible.
In the dynamic activity sectors in Geneva, there are enterprises of all sizes, from large and prestigious multinationals to small and even micro-enterprises. They either have a global activity or a local activity which obviously depends on the global market. I will come back to this later. One can say that the economic situation of Geneva, and of Switzerland in general, is contrasted, i.e., that not only some activities sectors - and this is quite a general finding in many countries - perform better than others, but also that, within the same activity sector, there are large differences depending on the type of enterprise. Today, some industrial enterprises develop in a remarkable way, others face difficulties. In the services sector, some economic units/ sectors develop extremely rapidly and generate employment, while others are facing very serious problems. This is quite important as it is clear that whatever the type of enterprise, the type of activity, we always come back to this elementary idea that what is important in the end is the quality of management, i.e. the quality of the men and women who pilot these enterprises. We try to conduct our economy through applying the concept of partnership and I would like to provide some explanations. In Switzerland, we live in an economic system where the State taken as an entity, provides a framework and has an optimum but not exclusive role. In other words, as government representatives, we have no other ambition than to be partners in the economic life. Such partnership is built in both an informal and institutional way. Informal because we live in small communities, be it in Geneva or in Switzerland, and we try to turn to an advantage what could be a drawback in terms of size.
The fact that we have small communities leads us to favour proximity relationships. I would like to say here how happy we are to maintain such close and trustful relationships with workers' unions and employers' organisations. This is the advantage of such a small community. But we have also tried to institutionalize such partnership in different ways. First, at the employment level, we have established what we may call a supervisory council of the labour market which brings together trade unions, workers' organisations and state representatives. This council operates in a perfectly regular manner and tries to anticipate and to solve problems related to employment as well as the social aspects of unemployment, and problems related to foreign workers.
One of the characteristics of Geneva, which is also its wealth, is the high proportion of foreigners: 38 per cent of the population is of foreign origin. In my view, this is one of the main aspects of our Geneva identity, which makes our community a truly multicultural community. In terms of labour force, it may be surprising to note that Geneva is a small republic with geographical limits which do not correspond to its need for workers, and we hire a lot of French workers. In Geneva, one worker out of two is of foreign origin. This does not entail social problems, nor integration problems, because it is precisely this partnership culture that shows the people in our country that our diversity is our wealth.
Today we are experiencing - this phenomenon has been referred to by the Director General - the mechanisms of economic globalization. Our market is the planet. The world in which we live has become a large village and this is reflected in enterprises, in the life of workers, in the globalization of the economy and leads to quite new situations for which a certain number of enterprises were not prepared. One may desire globalization just as one may hate or deny it. This is probably a false issue since globalization is a fact and it is more reasonable to consider facts as they are, so that positive lessons can be drawn for the life of enterprises, for the sustainability of employment and the development of social security, etc.
Restructuring which is on-going today puts us in a situation which is also quite new. Such a situation requires that we urgently find new references which are not only ethical but also economic. Globalization leads to restructuring and this poses new problems: enterprise restructuring is often carried out using an approach which has become more financial than commercial or economic. We are experiencing a very strange situation where restructuring leads to an equation which, in some way, is rather sordid. Restructuring unfortunately implies layoffs and lay-offs imply increased value on the stock markets. In other words, we are faced with a completely new situation wherein financial markets react in a positive manner to a phenomenon which in itself is negative: joblessness. It is here that we must find new points of reference.
I would like to mention here that, from an economic viewpoint, the legitimacy of an enterprise lies obviously in the satisfaction of its stockholder but more fundamentally in the satisfaction of its clients. It is in this context that new solutions must be sought, not only at the ethical but also at the economic level. I am convinced that globalization is in itself fundamentally positive, as it open new horizons and will allow us to find, to seek at least, new networks between economic partners; it is the emergence of such networks that will dictate the general conditions of a dynamic economy.
Optimum conditions are needed for vocational training, personal development, career development, should not be considered as a stage beyond which nothing happens but as the beginning of an overall career development. Optimum conditions are needed not only in terms of training, but also in terms of taxation, so that taxation does not become an obstacle to enterprises but a stimulus for the creation of new activities, for the financing of new activities through employment generation.
Optimum conditions in terms of infrastructure development are also needed, so that it does not constitute an end in itself but a service to the economy, a tool which communities must put in the hands of enterprises.
These are the new networks which we should establish. To conclude, a forum such as this is important since it constitutes a ground for discussion, for brainstorming, for seeking solutions to create these networks in a globalization context where we urgently need new points of references at the ethical and economic levels.