I. Introduction

The Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action of the World Summit for Social Development was adopted by Heads of State and Government in March 1995. Among commitments made, the third was to:

promoting the goal of full employment as a basic priority of our economic and social policies, and to enabling all men and women to attain secure and sustainable livelihoods through freely chosen productive employment and work. (The text of commitment 3 will be found at the end of this chapter.)

Signatories committed themselves to:

putting the creation of employment, the reduction of unemployment and the promotion of appropriately and adequately remunerated employment at the centre of strategies and policies of governments, with full respect for workers' rights and with the participation of employers, workers and their respective organizations, giving special attention to the problems of structural, long-term unemployment and underemployment of youth, women, people with disabilities, and all other disadvantaged groups and individuals.

Other obligations included enabling people to combine paid work with family responsibilities, the promotion of equal treatment of men and women, and taking concrete and effective measures against the exploitation of migrant workers. Signatories promised to exchange experiences on successful policies and programmes aimed at increasing employment and reducing unemployment and also to:

Pursue the goal of ensuring quality jobs, and safeguard the basic rights and interests of workers and to this end, freely promote respect for relevant International Labour Organization Conventions, including those on the prohibition of forced and child labour, the freedom of association, the right to organize and bargain collectively, and the principle of non-discrimination.

Commitment 3 was one of ten commitments, and the other nine commitments are also of relevance to the work of the ILO. In particular, commitment 2 is concerned with poverty eradication, a constant ILO concern; commitment 4 with social integration, in which work and employment play a vital role; commitment 5 with equality and equity between women and men; and commitment 8 with the need to incorporate social development goals in structural adjustment programmes. There are also commitments on the enabling environment for social development, on the particular needs of Africa and on implementation and reform. So the set of commitments as a whole provides a framework for overall social policy, to which ILO efforts and actions contribute, and reinforces a wide range of ILO actions.

Employment is the domain where the ILO's capabilities and concerns are clearly central to the Summit's goals. The ILO's mandate is specific in the employment field, and the Summit supported the ILO's actions in favour of employment promotion and encouraged their further development. The Summit reinforced the legitimate role of the social partners in an employment strategy and acknowledged the contribution of the ILO's normative approach to social policy by urging all countries to ratify and implement its core labour standards. Commitment 3 has therefore been the main reference point for ILO work in the follow-up to the Summit and is the primary subject of this report. Commitment 5 on equality and equity between women and men, it should be noted, covers issues which were also treated in the Beijing Conference, which is the subject of separate ILO follow-up activities.

Employment has been a major field of action of the ILO for many years. The Organization's principal normative instrument in this area is the Employment Policy Convention, 1964 (No. 122), which calls on member States to "declare and pursue as a major goal an active policy designed to promote full, productive and freely chosen employment". This means work for all who are available for and seeking work, that such work should be as productive as possible, and that there should be freedom of choice of employment and the fullest possible opportunity for each worker to qualify for, and to use her or his skills and endowments in, a job for which she or he is well suited, irrespective of race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin. In addition, representatives of the persons affected, and in particular representatives of employers and workers, are to be consulted concerning employment policies, so as to take fully into account their experience and views and secure their full cooperation in formulating and enlisting support for such policies.⁽¹⁾

This Convention now counts 90 ratifications, including countries from all continents representing a very wide range of economic and social conditions, thus making it a powerful instrument with widespread application. The Convention, which places employment policy firmly within the framework of economic growth and development, does not impose an obligation on the public authorities to provide jobs; their obligation is to select policies which can reasonably be expected to favour employment growth. For their policy choice they are of course accountable domestically. Countries ratifying the Convention are also accountable under the ILO's supervisory system.⁽²⁾

The Recommendation accompanying the Convention (Recommendation No. 169) was updated in 1984. This offers a number of indications as to the form and content of employment policy. But while the principles on which employment policy is founded remain as valid today as ever, policy design over the years has changed greatly. In the course of developing employment policies, the ILO has built up a substantial technical cooperation and technical advisory capability based on applied research. Support has been given to both comprehensive and sectoral national employment programmes, involving both ILO headquarters and multidisciplinary teams. Insights from this work are reflected in the body of this report.

Today's evolving global environment calls for the continuous renewal of the ILO's efforts. Employment policy needs to be set in an increasingly integrated world economy, where the opportunities facing enterprises constantly change, with implications for jobs. Through market liberalization globalization has opened up new opportunities for growth. However, if this growth strategy is to be sustainable there must be widespread participation in its benefits, so that social and economic progress reinforce each other. In this process employment, and more generally work, is the key variable. As the Director-General's Report to the 1999 session of the Conference put it, "the primary goal of the ILO today is to promote opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work, in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity". The essence of the goal lies in this link between work and the conditions under which it is performed. Indeed, the goal of promoting decent work allies the four strategic objectives of the ILO: achieving fundamental principles and rights at work; the creation of greater employment and income opportunities for women and men; extending social protection; and promoting social dialogue.

An emphasis on the quality of employment, in addition to its quantity, is at the core of a truly comprehensive employment strategy. Some aspects of job quality, as will be seen in the next chapter, reflect the provisions of ILO instruments and constitute rights at work. Others relate to individual fulfilment and advancement. In either case, in the right institutional environment, improved job quality need pose no threat to labour costs because it can deliver higher productivity as well as being an objective in its own right. Institutions and approaches have to be developed which make the social policy framework of employment promotion a productive factor, and which build wider social goals into economic policy. Employment policy, then, has to aim not only at job creation, but at promoting decent and productive work. In this context, the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work offers a potent instrument which will be a means of embedding democracy and equity in development. Social protection too, is an essential complement to employment creation, in order to tackle changing patterns of job and income insecurity. Social dialogue is a powerful mechanism for dealing with all these issues, and one which it is the ILO's vocation to promote. These objectives together provide an integrated framework, which is a necessary base for the design of all employment policy.

The other essential aspect of a comprehensive employment policy is universality. This means designing policies which encompass both women and men, taking into account how gender inequality is built into labour market functioning and even into the common view of what is considered productive work. It also means implementing effective employment policies for members of disadvantaged minorities and workers with disabilities, as well as for workers in small and informal enterprises, in homeworking and in casual jobs. The last are important because employment problems in many countries emerge less in open unemployment than in the low productivity of such forms of work.

These are the concerns which underlie the ILO's contribution to the follow-up of the Social Summit. The modalities which the ILO earlier adopted for its follow-up included:

(i) the preparation of regular reports on the world employment situation. These have taken the form of the World Employment Report, of which three have been published;

(ii) technical advisory services to help governments follow up on commitments made at Copenhagen and workers' and employers' organizations strengthen their contribution to the same goal. These services have to a large extent been delivered by the multidisciplinary teams and have taken a wide variety of forms;

(iii) country employment policy reviews and cooperation with governments and workers' and employers' organizations on all aspects of employment policy (see Chapter IV). In all, 14 such reviews have been undertaken or are under way. In a first round, within an inter-agency framework formed by the Task Force on Full Employment and Sustainable Livelihoods which was set up under the aegis of the United Nations Administrative Committee on Coordination, the ILO was responsible for reviews in Chile, Hungary and Nepal. A second round of employment reviews has pursued the same issues in more countries. These reviews have provided much of the background material for the present report.

The purpose of the International Consultation on Follow-up to the World Summit for Social Development is: (i) to contribute to an exchange of national experience; (ii) to take stock of what the ILO has done to assist its constituents; and (iii) to assess, in the light of prevailing international economic developments and their social consequences, whether the thrust of ILO activities and policy advice in the employment policy field, both nationally and internationally in conjunction with other agencies, is correct and adequate. This report is intended to help towards that discussion. The Consultation will also be instrumental in the preparation of the ILO's contribution to the special session of the General Assembly on implementation of the outcome of the World Summit for Social Development and further initiatives (Geneva, June 2000). In preparation for the International Consultation tripartite regional meetings have been held in the Asia and Pacific region, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa and for four countries within Western Europe.⁽³⁾

The structure of the present report is as follows: Chapter II reviews progress towards full employment globally and regionally and introduces an examination of employment quality; Chapter III discusses a framework for employment policies, largely again on a regional basis but also giving examples of how employment policies are perceived nationally; Chapter IV examines the policy advice which the ILO is giving its constituents on achieving full employment.

II. Global employment

1 Introduction

This chapter looks at the current world employment situation, at changes in the quantity of employment -- especially the World Social Summit in 1995 (noting what movement there has been towards full employment and how productive that employment is) -- and at employment quality. The last combines objective and subjective notions of job satisfaction, including income security, opportunities for advancement, equal opportunity and membership of representative participatory bodies. The chapter briefly reviews trends in world income distribution and how they are affected by the process of globalization. It also looks at the gender dimension in employment and at the problems of migrant workers.

Table 1. Rates of unemployment and growth in numbers unemployed by region

Table 2. Growth rates of employment and labour force (percentages)

Overall the employment situation has remained poor, worsening in fact in more countries than it has improved. The main recent regional trends in employment since the World Social Summit have been as follows. In the United States employment has continued to grow and unemployment to fall. In Western Europe the division seems to have sharpened between countries which have managed to reduce unemployment and create jobs and some larger continental countries which can do neither. A far stronger division applies in Central and Eastern Europe between those countries which have stabilized their economies and seen some growth return (where employment should expand gradually) and those where further falls in output and consumption are likely to be considerable, causing enormous hardship. In South Asia, particularly in India, some improvement in the employment situation has occurred, although this is difficult to document. In China it appears that the employment consequences of a policy choice that favours urban areas yet seeks to downsize employment in public enterprises are becoming more apparent and tense. Elsewhere in Asia, especially in those countries where unemployment rates often more than doubled between 1996 and 1998, the employment picture is dominated by the continuing economic problems of Japan and by the fallout from the Asian financial crisis. All this has not only reduced living standards in some of the strongest economies but has also called into question some firmly held beliefs on labour market functioning and social welfare which put the achievement of fast output growth before virtually all else. Employment in the Arab States as well as in many African countries can only worsen with the continuing weakness of so many commodity prices, itself, of course, exacerbated by the slow-down in demand for imports of raw materials especially in Asia. Terms of trade losses furthermore reduce real incomes far more than any loss of real output. Finally, Latin America seems to be in the grip of its own dynamics, with unsatisfactory labour market outcomes in terms of unemployment and "informalization" reflecting different approaches to labour legislation and the impact of market liberalization on production systems. Latin America has also been hard hit by the global crisis, with negative growth expected in 1999 compared to a 5 per cent rise in 1997.

These developments draw attention to certain trends in the world economy which appear to be leading to an increased concentration of world income and to the marginalization of some regions. They may also be leading to a greater inequality of national income distribution, especially of wage distribution, as is strongly suggested below in the section on Latin America and the Caribbean, and ceteris paribus to an increase in poverty. There is, however, mixed evidence of a worsening distribution at the national level throughout the world. These developments are also disappointing given the fact that there was some optimism in the days before the World Summit for Social Development. Over the past half decade there have been few surprises as far as employment and labour market outcomes in the various regions are concerned and more than a few disappointments. Labour market deregulation in Latin America, for example, has not boosted employment growth; intense, although relatively recent, concentration of political effort on the unemployment problem in Western Europe has yielded little result; structural adjustment in Africa does not seem to have boosted rural and urban small-scale activity; and policy and institutional changes in such countries as the Russian Federation and Ukraine have not been sustained, consistent or successful. Finally, and what did come as a surprise even to hardened observers, the Asian financial crisis caught both national governments and the international community unprepared.

Much attention has subsequently been given to the importance of preventing further crises. This raises a wide range of issues including better information sharing, especially on the financial assets, liabilities and obligations of governments and major enterprises, better world financial management and means to ensure a more appropriate policy response nationally and internationally if a crisis appears on the horizon. In general terms crisis prevention is associated with the implementation of better economic policies and the development of transparent and accountable governance. Specifically, and within the competence of the ILO, crisis prevention is linked to the proper functioning, in accordance with the ILO's normative framework, of social and labour institutions, and to the development of adequate measures of social protection.

2 World income distribution, globalization and poverty

The employment trends noted above are taking place against a background of an increasing concentration of world income and by and large are also contributing to it. Neoclassical economic theory predicts that returns to specific categories of labour in different parts of the globe would converge with time. Furthermore, poorer countries would attract more foreign savings from wealthier countries (which could not use all their savings effectively) and, without needing to invest in new research, would simply copy and catch up. However, innovative research and investment in new processes are in fact overwhelmingly generated by those countries which have already mastered the most sophisticated techniques, and there is no decline in the productivity of capital in the North. As a result the only suggestion of convergence in the world economy, outside the group of more advanced countries, has been in the fast growth of newly industrialized countries as they quickly transferred labour from agriculture to higher value added activities.

In the absence of significant convergence the distribution of world income has become increasingly polarized and unequal. The income share of the richest 20 per cent of the world population rose from 69 per cent to 83 per cent over the quarter century to 1990 (as measured by per capita GNP). Because of the large income gap between rich and poor countries, equal rates of per capita income growth will only increase these disparities in absolute terms. And with faster than average population growth in poor countries the share of the world's population living in rich countries must fall. Other forms of measurement might change these numbers but not the trend.

According to calculations published by UNCTAD in the Trade and Development Report, 1997, the poorest 20 per cent of the world's population, approximately 1 billion people, are overwhelmingly either in sub-Saharan Africa or in India and Bangladesh. In fact, of course, taking the distribution of income within a country into account, some of the world's poorest would come from virtually all regions. But sub-Saharan Africa shows exceptionally high levels of extreme poverty, followed by South Asia, before such countries as China and Indonesia.

What is the outlook for these international income disparities? In fact the position of the richer countries is likely to strengthen. First, the net effect of lower commodity prices will be to reduce relative incomes in many developing countries. Some commodity price falls have been exaggerated by falling demand in Asia; however, for crude oil, for example, the fall has been largely caused by increasing supply. Difficulties in diversifying away from commodity production in many developing countries is likely to make over-supply, at the prices seen in recent years, a long lasting phenomenon. Such difficulties were partly inherent in the earlier success of commodity exports and their effects on exchange rates, and partly reflected an inability and at times an unwillingness to take the social and political steps necessary to liberalize and modernize commodity-producing economies. Falling commodity prices mean an improvement in the terms of trade for net commodity importing countries. In Africa it is unfortunate that the benefits of relatively low prices for food and fuel imports have been outweighed by the disadvantage of lower commodity export prices. But it is not just commodity prices which are falling. The United States dollar price of manufactured goods in world trade is also falling, and this has fuelled fears of global deflation. This effect has recently been most strongly marked for manufactured exports from East Asia. Thus unit prices in dollars of exports from the Republic of Korea fell by 20 per cent from September 1997 to September 1998. In Thailand the fall has been less marked, by some 10 per cent (average 1998 over average 1996). These price falls remove the need for large exchange rate devaluation by the East Asian countries (and thus perhaps increase the likelihood of their foreign debt being repaid), but the consequences for wealthier countries in their terms of trade are the same. A further terms-of-trade loss will occur if competitive devaluations are not avoided.

Because of these factors, because the wealthier countries have high levels of capital, which they still add to, and because in certain economic activities they cannot be challenged, largely because of their accumulation of skills, the world income share of the wealthier countries may well continue to rise. This in principle makes it easier for the wealthier countries to be more generous towards the rest of the world, where a number of countries continue to rely on aid flows to meet their government expenditure and import needs. However, in some industrialized countries increased income disparities may lead to greater social spending at home and to fewer resources being available for transfer to poorer countries.

This broad brush approach to discussing global income shares disregards the often severe changes which are taking place within countries. Labour market deregulation and a weakening of employment protection, increased competition in goods markets resulting from trade liberalization leading to subcontracting and segmentation of the labour force between core and peripheral workers, an often rising share of capital incomes in the total and a falling share of capital taxes in government revenue all work towards a greater inequality of income distribution. However, their effects may be offset if employment generation is substantial. Globalization (and liberalization in general) is behind most of these phenomena. Increased trade flows and the transfer of new technologies often serve to put the low-skilled worker at a disadvantage and benefit the more skilled and educated. Finally, speculative capital movement in an environment of poorly regulated financial markets is a recipe for crisis-induced recession. The task of overcoming the negative elements in globalization, by appropriate labour market and training measures or by properly reforming the "international financial architecture" is daunting.

However, despite often increasing wage disparity nationally, there is no evidence of a global convergence of wage levels for any particular skill level (or for the unskilled), except possibly for the very highest skills where some geographical mobility is possible. In the absence of free movement of labour, this is not really surprising. Either democratic processes or legislated social protection and labour policy will set a limit to the divergence of wages by skill level within a single country. Wages of the unskilled in wealthier countries will not fall to their level in poorer countries. Nonetheless, high-income countries' wage earners feel threatened by the lower level of wages in competing middle-income countries, and also by the job insecurity which may result from such competition and the threat of enterprise relocation. Workers in the middle-income countries may likewise be wary of competition from the low-income countries in third country markets, especially if for them neither democracy nor social protection is well advanced at home. In a way these fears of wages being dragged down by competition are only real when capital is guided to investment locations solely by considerations of the extent to which lower real wages for adequately educated labour will lead to lower unit labour costs. And that is not the way that globalization works. Given the benefits to investors from close mutual association within localities with existing high levels of capital, and the beneficial effects on incomes and profits from operating within clusters of similar firms, such a situation can only appear very gradually. Most foreign direct investment goes from rich countries to rich countries. But it is fair to consider that features and considerations which may be reassuring for workers in advanced countries vis-à-vis those in middle-income countries may be less so for the latter in relation to poorer countries. For this and for other reasons it is not too soon for middle-income countries to look to their systems of income security. Thus, to quote A. Wood in a speculation on the future of world trade: "For example, ... growth of labour-intensive manufactured exports from South Asia will not [increase inequality in the North] since the North no longer competes in that market -- the increases in inequality will occur in other developing countries"⁽⁴⁾

3 Women in the global labour force

So far the discussion has concerned all workers, women and men. In fact the share of women in the global labour force is rising and is currently some 35-40 per cent of the total. Women's activity rates have often risen sharply while those of men are often falling slightly. As workers, women and men have a very wide range of identical concerns, but their circumstances and often their position in the labour force can differ widely and many labour market policies need an explicit recognition of this gender dimension. First of all, occupational segregation by sex is found worldwide. It takes two forms: horizontal segregation, i.e. the distribution of men and women across occupations (e.g. women as maids and men as truck drivers); and vertical segregation, i.e. men and women in the same occupation but with one sex more likely to be at a higher grade (e.g. women as production workers and men as production supervisors). In fact approximately one-half of all workers are in "gender-dominated" occupations, where at least 80 per cent of the workers are of the same sex. However, women are employed in a narrower range of occupations than men. Male-dominated, non-agricultural occupations are over seven times as numerous as female-dominated occupations. Among professional and technical occupations women often work as nurses and teachers; they also dominate in clerical and secretarial jobs and in very many service occupations. "Female" occupations tend to be considered less valuable, with lower pay, lower status and fewer advancement possibilities compared to "male" occupations. Female workers are much more likely than male to face competition at work from the other sex. They are also more likely to be employed in smaller rather than large enterprises.

The levels of occupational segregation by sex differ greatly across regions. Asia has the lowest average level and the Middle East and North Africa the highest. The level of sex segregation is also relatively high in other developing regions, while OECD member countries and Central and Eastern Europe display average levels. In Europe, differences in the sex segregation of occupations between market economy countries and former command economies have almost disappeared. In Asia the gender dimension seems to have a somewhat different character, and vertical segregation within occupations is more important than elsewhere. But women in Asia, and in other developing countries which have followed export-oriented industrial paths, are more likely to be production workers than women in other developing countries. To that extent occupational segregation worldwide is not related to socio-economic development, and differences between countries are primarily explained by regional factors. This strongly implies that social, cultural and historical factors are of paramount importance in determining the extent to which occupations are segmented in relation to the sex of the worker.

In the past two decades occupational segregation by sex has fallen somewhat. This is due more to the increased integration of men and women within occupations than to any shift in the occupational structure of employment. It seems that the expansion of established female-dominated occupations was insufficient to absorb all new female labour force participants, and thus many women have entered less traditional occupations. However, this did not occur in the larger East Asian countries and in most Middle Eastern and North African countries. Occupational segregation by sex has increased in China and remained unchanged in Japan.

In general terms women in the labour market are slightly more likely to be unemployed than men; but as workers the type and quality of jobs offered to them is different. In fact, many women occupy unskilled or semi-skilled jobs at the lower end of the production process, with little prospect of upgrading, and men have the better jobs. This even applies, in some countries, when women have on average the higher educational level. Women are less likely to receive further training that are men, partly because their job tenure is often interrupted by the needs of childcare. There is an urgent need for women to enter non-traditional occupations in greater numbers so as to broaden their limited and poor quality choice of occupations. The first step is to break down the very strong gender stereotypes which exist regarding the supposed capabilities, preferences and abilities of men and women, so that these cease to be reflected in the education and training systems.

Over time women have been increasing their share in administrative and managerial work, but the nature of women's career paths frequently blocks their progress to top positions (as discussed at the ILO's sectoral meeting held in 1997, "Breaking through the glass ceiling: Women in management"). At lower management levels women are typically placed in non-strategic sectors. Often these initial disadvantages are compounded by women being cut off from the networks, both formal and informal, which are so essential for advancement within enterprises. Such barriers explain why women are relatively more successful at creating their own small or medium-sized enterprises. However, women face more obstacles than men in entering or attempting to expand business.

4 Discrimination

Despite government efforts to eliminate discrimination and promote equal opportunity and treatment, practices resulting in the social exclusion, marginalization and even persecution of particular groups of people continue to be widespread. The root causes of discrimination, including fear, ignorance, intolerance, politics, greed and desire for domination continue to produce devastating consequences for individuals and society. The forms which discrimination takes, the grounds upon which it is practised and prohibited and its impact on society are constantly changing. Just when one form of discrimination appears to be eliminated another appears which excludes some groups of persons from participating fully in economic and social life. To highlight this problem the prohibition of discrimination has been included in the ILO Declaration of Principles and Rights at Work and its Follow-up as one of the fundamental principles and rights upon which all countries should build their societies and economies.

Within the fields of competence of the ILO, the Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention, 1958 (No. 111), provides the basis for tackling the issue. Convention No. 111 defines discrimination as any distinction, whether exclusion or preference, based on race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin (or any other ground so designated at the national level) which nullifies or impairs equality of opportunity or treatment in employment or occupation. This definition includes both direct and indirect discrimination and covers access to training, employment, occupation, and terms and conditions of employment. In addition to the grounds so far listed, other international labour standards provide for protection against discrimination based on trade union membership, nationality, disability, family responsibilities, pregnancy and age. At the national level there is a trend towards enlarging the grounds upon which discrimination in employment and occupation is prohibited. The most common emerging grounds include state of health (HIV/AIDS), sexual orientation, disability, family responsibilities, pregnancy, marital status and age.

Every society has some form of discrimination to combat. The vast array of laws, policies and institutions aimed at doing so attest to the widespread commitment to meet this challenge. Most countries have adopted legal provisions to protect against discrimination on at least some of the grounds listed above. Many have gone further and adopted guarantees of equal opportunity and treatment and established enforcement mechanisms, particularly for workers with a clear employment relationship in enterprises above a certain size. However, laws and policies alone are insufficient to address the full extent of the problems of discrimination, suggesting that a holistic approach to the issue is essential. Countries are constantly seeking ways to enhance the impact of their legislation by extending coverage to more workers, strengthening sanctions and remedies, adapting evidentiary rules, adopting affirmative action measures, launching public awareness programmes, training labour inspectors, and employers and workers themselves, and supporting education and skill development. Given the insidious nature of some forms of discrimination, and how hard it can be to detect and remedy, the use of corrective mechanisms is seen as a positive indicator of progress in combating discrimination. Correspondingly, the lack of knowledge of discrimination and the non-existence of complaints or corrective mechanisms are signs that discrimination in the country is going unchecked.

Discrimination is not only a feature of wage employment, since it can arise in access to occupations and in self-employment. Access to land and to credit can well be rationed by discriminatory means directly, or indirectly though the use of characteristics that have resulted from earlier discrimination (i.e. illiteracy following exclusion from education). Discrimination in pay can arise through differences in wage or salary rates, but it most often arises in the additional benefits, bonuses, allowances or non-monetary forms of compensation such as housing or food. The ILO's Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations has emphasized the relationship between education and employment and income-earning capacity in its statement that "universal education, compulsory and free of charge to the same level for everyone is one of the basic starting points for a policy to promote equality of opportunity and treatment in employment and occupation".⁽⁵⁾ In this respect, UNESCO data suggest that from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s this basic precondition was increasingly (although far from universally) being met in the developing world.

Discrimination on the ground of sex, in other words gender discrimination, is recognized to be the most widespread and pervasive form of discrimination as it cuts across all countries and groupings of people. While men may and do suffer from discriminatory treatment, women are generally its victims. The status of women in a society, the value placed on the multiple roles they play, and the extent to which they suffer occupational and employment discrimination are inextricably linked. Thus obstacles in the way of women's ownership of land or lack of recognition of their status as the head of household can impede their ability to generate income, start a business, or receive medical benefits for their dependent family members. As already noted, gender-based division of labour in society and gender-based occupational segregation are important factors contributing to women's inequality in the labour market. Female-dominated occupations remain less valued, less protected, less organized and more subject to forms of physical, sexual and economic exploitation than are male-dominated occupations.

Within the last few years there has been a marked increase in the adoption of national laws and jurisprudence requiring the payment of equal remuneration for work of equal value in conformity with the ILO's Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100). The concept of work of equal value (instead of the more limited concept of "equal work") as the point of comparison between jobs is intended to reach discrimination which may arise out of the existence of different occupational categories for men and women.

Women suffer from multiple forms of discrimination if they are a part of a racial, ethnic or religious minority or an indigenous community. The ILO Committee of Experts has remarked that discrimination linked to religion is the most sensitive aspect of that practised against women. Difficulties deriving from disability, marital status or age are often compounded by gender-based discrimination.

In recent years, concern over discrimination on the ground of political opinion has waned with the general dissolution of communist-controlled regimes and the move towards democracy in many countries. But other forms of discrimination based on race, national extraction or ethnicity appear to be on the rise. While not all minority groups suffer from discriminatory treatment, some are singled out and even become targets. These forms of discrimination are often so culturally driven and intractable that if left unresolved they can even lead to war, as has occurred in many recent instances. Regions where borders have been changed so that different nationalities became grouped within one country often offer the greatest potential for such forms of discrimination. The growing concern over acts of racial intolerance and hatred are evidenced by the number of laws being put on the books to punish them.

Typically, there are no clear lines as to what constitutes discrimination on grounds of race, national extraction, minorities or colour. These concepts may often merge. They may be based on how persons concerned consider their differences and the attitudes then resulting. Discrimination based on racial and national extraction may also include distinctions based on clan or tribe or any groups of peoples or populations defined by similar distinct characteristics such as language or cultural tradition. The situation of Gypsies (Roma) in Central and Eastern European countries exemplifies such a group that is often subject to discrimination in all aspects of their social and economic life. Discrimination against indigenous and tribal peoples has been of such an extreme and distinct nature that the ILO has adopted a specific Convention (No. 169) with the aim of recognizing and protecting their self-determination and identity.

Protection against discrimination based on religion covers the holding of a certain religious belief, belonging to a certain denomination as well as not holding a certain faith. In religion, discrimination derives more from intolerance toward persons of a particular faith (or none at all). Where religious considerations hold a large place in public and social life, and in particular where one religion is the state religion, care must be taken to ensure that this does not lead to negative consequences in employment, particularly in the public sector. The prohibition of religious discrimination must protect not only the belief but also its manifestation. Thus discriminatory action may include discouraging attendance at ceremonies, the denial of celebrations or prohibiting (or, conversely, requiring) the wearing of certain types of non-work-related clothing. In some countries just holding certain religious beliefs, again often linked to ethnic origin or ancestry, legitimizes forms of discrimination and restricts access to some levels of education. Ancestry is also an obvious feature of discrimination based on social origin, especially where caste systems still have economic implications and are associated with different jobs. Debt inheritance to be paid off by the bonded labour of the low caste is one ultimate evil of such a system.

Discrimination against disabled workers in access to work and training is also rife in some areas partly out of economic considerations. But a widespread and effective form of discrimination consists in the belief that segregation, for example in sheltered workshops, is a welfare-enhancing means of providing livelihoods to the disabled. Non-discrimination, however, requires the integration of people with disabilities into open employment and training. But changing peoples' attitudes, overcoming prejudices and discrimination so that persons with disabilities are not considered objects of welfare but persons with equal rights, is a long-term undertaking.

New forms of discrimination that will continue to pose challenges to policy-makers include the situation of older workers in industrialized countries where ageing populations confront stagnant levels of employment. Not only may employers show a preference for younger workers and ease older workers out of jobs, but government policy also often encourages this. In some developing countries, the HIV/AIDS pandemic poses daily challenges for those faced with discrimination on the ground of positive status or infection.

Discrimination on all the grounds discussed makes no sense on a business level. It has often been used in the past by employers as a way of rationing "good jobs" to those of a like kind without regard to the requirements of the job or merit. This restricts the labour pool for any position, so that the best person may not be chosen for the job. Ignoring the available human resources is irrational and likely to be self-defeating in a business context. Ignoring the human development of a part of the society is likely finally to be politically costly.

Given the far-reaching nature and effects of discrimination, a comprehensive approach is essential. Legislative initiatives need to be complemented by programmes leading to equal access and empowerment in the fields of education, skill development and employment. For women such programmes are needed to increase their negotiating power and to facilitate the sharing of work and family responsibilities. For minorities and other groups who are the victims of repression, hate crimes and intolerance, public campaigns of understanding based on respect for human dignity must provide the cornerstone for eradicating discrimination in employment and occupation.

5 Regional overview of employment

(i) Central and Eastern Europe

Central and Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming two subregions. Some Central European countries are OECD members and, more importantly, are lining up to join the European Union. This is not certain to create either prosperity or full employment, but it will result in a harmonization of many terms and conditions of employment and other features affecting job quality. Large parts of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), however, and above all the Russian Federation and Ukraine, are in currently unsustainable positions of considerable economic instability. Since 1995 the gap between these groups has widened. Employment performance in Central Europe is scarcely satisfactory, for example, unemployment is increasing in the Czech Republic, and completing the agenda of structural change in these countries may push employment down further. But the position of Eastern Europe, where output is stagnant at best and wage arrears are substantial, has shown no improvement since 1995.

What these countries had previously had in common were the institutions and mechanisms which found a job for everyone who wanted one and indeed put pressure on most of those in the relevant age groups to take a job. Wages were set low, so nearly all adults had to work, and the social security system was closely attached to employment. Enterprises were not pressured to take on workers but deliberately chose to do so because a larger workforce gave more power to managers. Women were educated for work, but in reality usually opted for it because one salary was not sufficient for a family; and later, with better education (on average better than that of men), most appreciated the job satisfaction and relative economic independence it brought. Childcare facilities were established but (despite original plans to "liberate" women from household chores) practically no other services were provided communally, and women had to work as well as look after the household and the children.

With the 1990s came some very severe changes. The transition process began with, in most countries, a substantial fall in output as economic and political factors interacted negatively. The USSR split up, COMECON collapsed, prices and foreign trade were liberalized, central planning was removed, and because of high levels of foreign debt some countries began the new era with policies of austerity. Price decontrol opened the way for inflation, often worsened by excessive monetary expansion. At the same time new opportunities opened up, in the services sector (which has usually expanded its employment share), in self-employment (which was next to zero in many countries under the old system) and in small-scale enterprises. The fall in output would have implied a fall in wage levels even if the distribution of income had remained steady. In fact it appears to have universally worsened. This is only partly because of a change in wage differentials rewarding human capital (in the CIS countries wage differentials remain in favour of commodity exporting sectors). It is also on the one side a result of a proliferation of profitable and semi-legal activities and on the other of a weakening position in the labour force position for many workers and their families. The level of social benefits has universally declined and households with children are often found disproportionately among the poor. In most countries labour force participation rates fell, especially for women and younger and older people. Employment declined, with some workers leaving the labour force and others becoming unemployed. Unemployment has risen from very low levels (if at all) at the end of the 1980s, as has the extent of second jobs.

Clearly, measured on the same terms as developed market economies the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been very far from full employment even in the period since 1995. Only the Czech Republic and Poland appear to have had real wage growth over a period of years (others have had wage growth irregularly or after a long drawn out decline in real wages); only Poland and Hungary appear to have had falling open unemployment. And where on the surface countries such as Ukraine have low unemployment rates, adding in short-time working, administrative leave, etc., the "real" unemployment rate becomes a multiple of the apparent one. Finally, newly recruited workers are often offered fixed-term and short-term contracts, the antithesis of the earlier "right to work".

On the positive side, many Central and Eastern European countries have gone far in building up systems of unemployment insurance and of active labour market policies. The unemployed may no longer have the right to a job but they have the right to temporary support and to be helped to find work. Of course, the "reality" of these rights varies. In some countries labour force surveys identify far more unemployed persons than ever register at the public employment service. But government efforts to help the unemployed, especially in Central Europe, in terms of the share of GDP expended per unemployed person, often compare well with those of some countries in Western Europe.

Wage arrears are a major and wholly unwelcome aspect of employment in such countries as the Russian Federation and Ukraine (and further afield in Kazakhstan, where they equalled 40 per cent of GDP in mid-1998, as well as in Bulgaria and even Croatia). Payment of wages due (especially in accordance with the Protection of Wages Convention, 1949 (No. 95), is part of any free employment relationship, and their withholding necessarily raises questions as to employment policy and workers' fundamental rights as a whole.

(ii) Asia

Before the World Social Summit, and indeed until recently, some Asian countries, mainly those in East and South-East Asia, were making steady progress towards full employment, although others were barely managing to maintain the status quo. In the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, China, employment growth consistently outpaced labour force growth and unemployment declined. Labour shortages arose and most of the countries hosted large numbers of overseas migrant workers (up to 20 per cent of the labour force in Malaysia and more in Singapore). The incidence of poverty fell to insignificant levels in the course of a decade. In Indonesia and the Philippines, however, employment growth failed to keep pace with labour force growth and unemployment tended to rise. Both countries became major exporters of labour -- perhaps 6 million are working abroad from the Philippines (of whom probably more than half are women) and over 2 million from Indonesia.

The generally positive trends in employment in Asia have more recently been tarnished. Thus, Japan is in recession after many years of healthy growth; its economy recorded less than 1 per cent growth in 1997 and is expected to have contracted by 2.5 per cent in 1998. Japan's unemployment rate has risen from 3.4 per cent in 1997 to 4.6 per cent in early 1999. There are currently some signs of decelerating output growth in China and Viet Nam, while India and Pakistan are also currently facing economic difficulties which will impinge on the labour market.

But the largest and most serious reversal of employment trends was caused by the Asian crisis of late 1997. Its effects are still very apparent in the worst affected countries. In Indonesia GDP fell by 15 per cent in 1998, and the ILO has estimated retrenchments at between 3.8 million and 5.4 million workers. Moreover, Indonesian migrant workers have been returning in large numbers, especially from Malaysia. Poverty incidence is thought to have doubled from the 11 per cent recorded in 1997. In Thailand, GDP declined by 8 per cent in 1998. The effects on employment were already evident by early 1998 and suggested a fall in total labour inputs by 7 to 8 per cent. The rate of open unemployment increased from 2.2 per cent to 4.8 per cent (February 1997-February 1998). Real wages fell by some 10 per cent from late 1997 to early 1998, although self-employment earnings may have fallen further. In both countries women and men appear to have been affected to a similar extent. In the Republic of Korea real wages of regular employees per day fell by 12 per cent from the average for 1997 to April 1999. In the same period, the unemployment rate for women rose from 2.3 per cent to 5.8 per cent and that for men from 2.8 to 8.1 per cent. Overall employment declined by around 5 per cent for both sexes, but the decline in the number of regular employees was greater for women (nearly 15 per cent) than for men (9 per cent). There is evidence of growing informalization of employment and of more workers, especially women, cramming into the already overstaffed retail sector. In the Philippines employment conditions have shown signs of a sharp deterioration and open unemployment may have reached 11 per cent at the end of 1998. The average real wage declined by 3 per cent during 1998.

South Asia was little affected by the Asian financial crisis, and since 1995 employment growth has largely kept pace with labour force growth. This has meant more self-employment and casual labour. Women's contribution to such work is often disguised by it being seen as an extension of household duties. Regular wage employment in the modern sector has tended to decline and some labour redundancy has appeared. The share of agriculture in total employment has declined only slowly. Open unemployment has been low, except in Sri Lanka, but underemployment has clearly been growing. The incidence of poverty, though declining, remains high. Migration of workers for overseas employment has emerged as an important feature in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The situation in China historically bore some resemblance to that in Central and Eastern Europe. Before 1978 jobseekers were assigned either to local communes in rural areas, or to work units. The matching was bureaucratic and mandatory, and usually permanent. Even when this system ended public authorities at all levels continued to exert pressure on enterprises to absorb workers, and only in the mid-1990s did managers acquire genuine power to dismiss surplus workers.

Since 1995, and in line with earlier trends of fast economic growth, real wages appear to have risen substantially, although wage differentials have increased as a means of rewarding human capital. Poverty has continued to fall, though in recent years the rate of decline has been far faster in urban than rural areas, reflecting an urban bias in investment. The rural-urban exodus has continued despite official discouragement and many rural migrants are employed as casual workers in urban enterprises on relatively unfavourable terms. The locus of new employment creation has shifted from township and village enterprises to the incipient private sector, and pressures arising from liberalization have resulted in a gradual commercialization of the demand for labour even within the state sector -- with obviously both positive elements (reversing inflexibility in labour use) and negative elements (growing insecurity). Women have been negatively affected by fewer services being provided collectively by enterprises. There is now more mobility, turnover and flexibility in wages and terms of employment and much greater scope for private business. But this goes hand in hand with far greater official support for urban than rural workers.

In West Asia open unemployment has apparently been increasing in the years since the World Social Summit. Certainly it appears that labour migration within the region (mainly male), which acted as a major safety value in the 1980s, had levelled off even before the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. Unemployment rates have been variously estimated for the mid- to late 1990s as 6 per cent in the Syrian Arab Republic, 12 per cent in Yemen, 17 per cent in Jordan, 33 per cent in Iraq and from 18 to 51 per cent in the West Bank and Gaza. In some countries it is possible that open unemployment is substituting for informal sector employment. In Islamic Republic of Iran in the early 1990s the unemployment rate was 11 per cent (down from 15 per cent in the mid-1980s), but that for women was more than three times as high as that for men. (Generally some two-thirds of the unemployed are aged between 15 and 24.)

In most of these countries the labour force situation of women is very different from that of men, although some of the differences that show up in the statistics may reflect prejudice in reporting rather than fact. In country after country in the Middle East, ILO data show that the share of women aged 25-54 who are "economically inactive" (i.e. neither employed nor unemployed -- but no doubt working hard in other ways) is in the 65-80 per cent range, compared to rates for men which never exceed 5 per cent. This is despite fairly marked falls in the degree of (adult) female illiteracy and growing convergence of male and female literacy rates. As a consequence the vast majority of men necessarily work in male-dominated occupations.

In many countries the authorities are unwilling to diversify, delegate and decentralize and for a number of reasons employment in the government sector is often substantial. Most countries have had a tradition of some government-provided support to the population at large, especially in the form of food subsidies. The oil-rich Gulf cooperation countries until recently guaranteed well-paid public sector employment to their nationals, but fiscal difficulties have ended that. Employment in public enterprises, however, has usually been protected, putting a brake on private sector development.

(iii) Africa

Compared to West Asia the countries of North Africa since the World Social Summit have been more actively restructuring their economies, diversifying and preparing for greater trade liberalization as well as allowing greater scope for private business activity. In Morocco this appears to have led to some growth in real wages. Little, however, is known about changes in poverty levels. In Egypt, in the first half of the 1990s, it is estimated that real per capita expenditure fell in the cities by 3 per cent and in the countryside by 10 per cent. Average income per income receiver apparently fell considerably more than this, suggesting that more household members had to work, at a lower average wage, in order to sustain per capita consumption. Nonetheless, in both these countries the distribution of income has apparently not worsened. ILO data bear out a fall in real wages in manufacturing in Egypt in recent years.

In Egypt the open unemployment rate has been steadily rising since the late 1970s and was estimated at 11 per cent in 1995 (with the rate for women double that of men). Elsewhere rates are reported as 18 per cent in Morocco (23 per cent for women, 16 per cent for men), 15 per cent in Tunisia, 16 per cent in North Sudan, 26 per cent in Algeria (similar for men and women).

As in West Asia the labour force situation of women is very different from that of men. In Morocco, for example, labour force participation rates for women are some 33 per cent of the rate for men in urban areas but only 18 per cent of the male rate in rural areas. Highly educated women, however, do figure strongly in the labour force. Thus, again in Morocco, nearly one-third of urban scientific and professional workers are women. It is the less educated women who have fewer opportunities (and, frequently, do not report themselves as unemployed).

The features of the Maghreb countries which have been described are not typical of Africa as a whole. Of course, the African continent demonstrates considerable heterogeneity, and generalizations concerning developments in a large number of separate countries since the World Social Summit must be dangerous. The general picture has been one of low economic growth from a low base and relatively high rate of population growth, from which high levels of poverty necessarily follow. Thus, for example, for 17 sub-Saharan African countries for which the ILO has recent data on the share of the population living on less than US$1 per day (at constant 1985 prices) the median figure is some 45 per cent. For North Africa the score is some 2 to 4 per cent. What wage data there are show generally falling wage levels, and stagnation in South Africa where paid employment has also been falling. (Women's wages are customarily some 60-70 per cent those of men.) Such indicators of poverty imply a particularly difficult time for women, who often have to supplement the family income in poor quality jobs, not least in order to earn the money to pay for their children's education which the State no longer properly provides. Women's labour force participation has risen, for example, by 7 percentage points in urban Kenya over ten years. Of course, the continent has its bright spots -- Botswana and Uganda are often cited, let alone Mauritius -- and there has been growth in Francophone West Africa following the CFA devaluation. Indeed, out of 48 sub-Saharan African countries 37 recorded positive economic growth in 1994-97. But experience suggests that growth is rarely sustained and it is certainly insufficient to shift the economic structure towards greater industrialization and job stability. Most countries show a very high share of the labour force in agriculture, in the 70-80 per cent range; some even show a fall in the share of the labour force in industry. However, urbanization is far advanced in a number of countries, including Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Since 1995 urban Africa has continued the earlier process of informalization with women predominating in the lowest productivity activities just as they do in most of peasant agriculture. But the dichotomy of formal and informal activities and labour markets is increasingly unable to do justice to the heterogeneity of employment relationships and inter-sectoral mobility. Regular wage employment in large enterprises has fallen, a process which generally began in the late 1980s. Public enterprise employment has fallen, often with privatization, but the public administration has sometimes been slow to cut its numbers. Unemployment is often very high but remains an urban phenomenon. National unemployment rates are often very low (reportedly as low as 0.5 per cent in the Central African Republic and Ghana). Urban unemployment is reported as high as 33 per cent in Mauritania (and in South Africa) but the rate is generally in the range of 10-20 per cent. In a few countries a tendency for open unemployment to fall in recent years has been observed, either because jobseekers are passing directly to the informal sector (where at least two-thirds will anyway find work) or because of spasmodic upturns in economic activity. As in many other regions over the past few years which have followed a path of deregulation, the use of temporary work contracts appears to be spreading quickly. In Mauritania and Mali the ratio of temporary to permanent workers is 2:3, in Senegal 1:4 and in Benin 1:2. Temporary workers are paid much less and, of course, are in a far more precarious position as regards job security than are other workers in the enterprise. This has contributed to lower urban incomes and to narrowing the rural-urban income gap. Meanwhile the informal sector, which has been providing an increasing share of urban incomes, has become more service-oriented, with greater female participation. However, it remains family based and in Niger, for example, less than 10 per cent of informal sector workers receive a wage. The share of small-scale enterprises employing wage labour is small and often falling (from 18 per cent of informal sector employment to respectively 13 per cent in Burkina Faso and 10 per cent in Mali in the years before 1995). Thus the fall in wage employment in Africa is not confined to the modern sector. The informal sector is obviously playing a necessary role in absorbing labour, but its capacity to improve working conditions, let alone to invest and expand, is very weak.

(iv) Latin America and the Caribbean

At the end of the twentieth century, Latin America and the Caribbean is overwhelmingly urban; very few countries have a majority of their population in rural areas and for the region as a whole close to 80 per cent of the workforce is urban. Furthermore, the majority of workers in a majority of the countries are employees, not self-employed. Earlier trends in the sectoral composition of employment have extended into the 1990s and goods-producing sectors have continued to lose their employment share, especially agriculture and manufacturing. By 1997 average labour productivity in agriculture in the region was almost equal to that of services, the one rising the other falling; meanwhile labour productivity in industry has grown very rapidly, widening the gap between it and the average for the economy.

Female participation rates have continued to rise significantly; between 1980 and 1995 the rate (defined as the labour force of all ages divided by the population aged 15-64) rose from 35 per cent to 44.5 per cent as the share of women in the total labour force rose from 27 per cent to 33 per cent. (The corresponding male participation rate moved down very slightly.) Female rates tend to be positively associated with education, with single status (especially if household head), and with small family size for those who are married. Participation has tended to increase over time for women in each family status and educational category. Rates for married women appear to have been rising particularly sharply, all apparently reflecting a process of ameliorating social change.

A recent phenomenon in the region is that the incidence of unemployment tends to be high in the lowest income quintile of urban families; except for Mexico with its very low rates overall, the figure ranges from 17 per cent in Brazil to over 40 per cent in Venezuela, dropping usually to 1-3 per cent in the top quintile. Other concerns which have been emphasized increasingly in recent years are youth unemployment and the unemployment of less educated workers. Older workers are increasingly subject to open unemployment in periods of recession.

As elsewhere there is a trend towards temporary and part-time work although the precise magnitude is not clear. It is widely believed that the rapid growth of temporary work was earlier partly in response to rigid job security legislation, which made it hard to dismiss permanent workers. Later, legislative changes of the early 1990s presumably facilitated some of this increase but much had already occurred de facto. In practice there has been a widespread tendency for labour legislation to be ignored or bypassed. The result has been an increasing proportion of workers throughout the economy without formal labour contracts or legislated protection. This is noticeable in Argentina and Brazil, for example.

For decades Latin America has suffered an increase in income inequality which has often coincided with recessions and with economic reforms. Where reform coincided with recession, recovery typically did not bring inequality back to its pre-recession level. The main approach to explaining inequality has emphasized the wide gap between the wages of skilled and less skilled (or less educated) workers. But while real wages have since 1995 tended to creep up from their 1991 low, this has come with a substantial increase in the gap between white- and blue-collar workers, most notably in Peru (by more than 30 per cent), Colombia and Mexico. This can coincide with an increasing gender wage gap. Careful research has tended to conclude that it is demand shifts that most directly underlie the changing wage differentials, partly because changes in the supply of skills are only gradual. Perhaps the intensification of trade, which is an increasing feature of the post-1995 period, has tended to widen earnings differentials by level of education by raising the demand for skilled labour: or else the availability of more capital goods imports increases the returns to skilled labour. Furthermore the growing dominance of large firms in the production of manufactured exports implies less employment creation than would otherwise be expected. Since earnings differences associated with firm size are often large, an accentuation of this tendency constitutes a real risk that wage differentials will rise further.

The size of the informal sector is a measure of the failure of the economy to generate reasonably remunerative jobs. ILO figures show its share rising from 52 per cent in 1990 to 57 per cent in 1996, implying that it has accounted for a large majority of net new jobs. In almost all countries paid employment grew fastest in the micro-enterprise sector, which by the ILO definition is part of the informal sector. This is the sector where labour conditions are most in need of upgrading and protection. On the other hand the need for a more disaggregated approach to understanding the dynamics of this sector is apparent. It does not appear to mean the same thing or to have the same structure in Latin America as in Africa.

The Caribbean countries present a diverse picture, although unemployment is usually in double digits despite a tendency to fall in the years since the World Social Summit. Emphasis in these countries has been placed far less on the behaviour of the informal sector and more on choosing the most appropriate macroeconomic policy framework to suit their very open economic structure. Some countries (Jamaica, Haiti) are facing a considerable problem of inflation and are attempting to tackle it partly by a fixed nominal exchange rate. But this has been associated with an appreciated real exchange rate and negligible employment and output growth. The Dominican Republic in contrast has had strong export and output growth and a falling real exchange rate combined with low rates of price inflation. Export growth has, however, been linked with poor labour conditions. Trinidad and Tobago is in a fairly similar macroeconomic situation. In Barbados output growth has been falling and consumer prices are near stable, helped by an exchange rate anchor and a negotiated approach to wage and price determination (see Chapter III). A fall in unemployment in a context of low output growth, as seems to have occurred in Jamaica, usually indicates a shift to a greater share of informal activities and lower wages.

(v) Western Europe and North America

A major feature of the labour market in Western Europe, which has become more marked since the World Social Summit, is the inability of a number of countries to create new jobs at all despite high levels of unemployment. This applies particularly to the larger continental European countries, since there has been some employment growth in a number of the smaller countries. Indeed, the increase has been very large in Ireland, Netherlands and Norway. Some of these increases were rebounding after a period of job loss; others (Ireland, Netherlands) were not, and the poor outcomes in France and Italy have in fact continued past trends. Country behaviour is thus increasingly divergent, casting doubt on the existence of any single "European model" to set against a "United States" model. These data hide some massive shifts for particular sex and age groups. Thus, the share of men aged 25-54 who are employed fell over the longer period 1985-97 by 12 percentage points in Spain and Sweden and by 5-7 percentage points in Austria, France, Germany and Italy. (The corresponding rate for low-skilled men is usually only about 85 per cent of the average.) Employment rates for men aged 55-64 fell in many countries by a good 10 percentage points. For women aged 25-54 rates rose by 4-7 percentage points in France, Germany and Italy, by a massive 23 percentage points in Ireland, 18 in the Netherlands, 13 in Spain and 10 in the United Kingdom. Male-female wage gaps are generally smallest in the Scandinavian countries, despite a degree of occupational segregation which results in a relatively large number of women working in female-dominated occupations.

Since 1995 unemployment rates have remained extremely high in Spain, and are bunched around 12 per cent in Belgium, Finland, France, Germany and Italy. Elsewhere there has been some convergence to a 5-7 per cent range. But high rates in a number of large countries are keeping the European average up. That men became less likely to be employed does not mean that they became unemployed; many are no longer in the labour force. Nor is the fact that many more women were seeking jobs responsible for high rates of unemployment. As the World Employment Report 1998-99 pointed out, in the European countries where unemployment rose the activity rate (employed plus unemployed as a share of total population) hardly rose over a long period, as the employment rate fell.

The large number of people who stay unemployed for a long period of time is a matter of serious concern. As will be seen below, the European Commission has made this the subject of one of its Employment Guidelines. The rate of long-term (12 months plus) unemployment to the total labour force ranged in 1997 from over 11 per cent in Spain to below 1 per cent in Norway. Generally it was in the 2.5 to 5 per cent range. Only in the group of countries with relatively fast employment growth have rates of long-term employment fallen. Rates have risen in countries with sluggish employment growth. The level of the rate of long-term unemployment and its behaviour partly reflects country experience in "churning" through labour market programmes and substituting short periods of unemployment (albeit perhaps for more people) for the contrary.

It can be pointed out that even within Western Europe, a fairly homogenous region, employment numbers do not tell the full employment story. A relatively low rate of employment growth may well have the beneficial effect of not distorting the distribution of wages and incomes. However, low rates of employment growth will be unlikely to help the position of the most disadvantaged groups.

The European experience is easily contrasted with that of North America. Both the United States and Canada (and indeed Australia) have had rates of employment growth faster than that of the labour force, although unemployment remains somewhat higher in Canada (and in Australia) than in the United States, where unemployment is down to 4.3 per cent. Furthermore the United States employment rate for men is higher than that of any EU country except Denmark, and for women higher than any except Denmark and Sweden. All this is a priori evidence that the United States is closer to full employment than many European countries, although the pick-up in labour demand in several of the latter in the years after the World Social Summit was very strong. The World Employment Report 1998-99 explained how the United States economy has been creating both relatively well-paid and relatively low-paid jobs (and few jobs in the middle-income category). In that way the distribution of wages must in some measure become more unequal. The wage inequality, however, is largely related to relative education and training levels and not to any growing division by gender or ethnic group. The real average wage for production workers nonetheless was for a long time stagnant (and in 1997 only regained its level of 1989). And, of course, because of the high level of employment growth combined with sustained but not always spectacular output growth, labour productivity growth has been low.

Much of the increase in employment in Europe in recent years has been part time; in 1997 nearly 18 per cent of all EU employees were working part time and nearly one-quarter of them would have preferred full-time work. Part-time workers are predominantly women, over 80 per cent. (Temporary work, full time or part time, accounted for some 12 per cent, of which some 40 per cent was involuntary.) In many countries in both North America and Western Europe when total employment grew average hours also grew, and vice versa, reinforcing the cyclical nature of employment growth. But this finding is too crude to determine whether there is a trade-off between hours and jobs and thus scope to reduce hours and raise employment. In the post-1995 period some countries (Denmark) have attempted to limit hours worked either by discouraging overtime or moving to a shorter working week (as France is currently doing). In Norway hours worked have also fallen sharply. Where faster growth removes workers from involuntary short-time working, then the increase in average hours is no doubt to be welcomed even if there is a general preference in society for a shorter working week (see Chapter III).

The wide coverage of the social security systems of Europe and North America brings a dimension to labour market functioning which is absent in the developing regions. It should be noted that since the World Social Summit increased attention has been paid to "activating" social security benefits and encouraging job search by welfare recipients. "Welfare to work" is a slogan which has sometimes justified using strong measures to encourage the reintegration of some groups into the labour force.

6 Migrant workers

Migrant workers are a real, if not a regional issue. They are therefore considered separately. The ILO estimated in 1995 that between 80 and 97 million people were residing, legally or illegally, in a country other than their own. This number, however, includes both migrant workers and their families, so that probably between 2 and 3 per cent of the world's labour force are migrants. Where migrant workers are accepted for permanent settlement their locally born children may or may not be or become citizens of their country of residence. Even where they are citizens they may face discrimination for reasons of race, ethnic origin and ancestry, as already discussed. Since the World Social Summit flows of migrant workers have been subject to sharp reversals in Asia, where first they expanded and then, after the crisis, were reversed. But flows of migration have remained common from Central and Eastern Europe, within the Arab States and indeed from outside the Arabic-speaking world -- especially to a number of Gulf States. There are migrating labour flows in Africa and from Latin America and the Caribbean to North America, none of them easy to quantify.

Many countries in transition as well as developing countries are smarting from the loss of their scientists and similarly skilled labour through migration, but are powerless to prevent it. Attempts to block their mobility have never really been successful. On the other hand, migration and remittances have played an important role in the growth of some countries, and policy-makers in several low- and middle-income countries have promoted labour emigration. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that remittances from migrants worldwide amounted to $70 billion in 1995, an amount just next to the value of the trade in oil.

Migration processes are seldom orderly. A great deal of international migration is illegal (perhaps one-third of the total or maybe nearly 1 per cent of the world's labour force). In good times some countries with a perceived labour shortage in some market segments may turn a blind eye to illegal migration, but reverse their attitude later. In many countries legislation provides for sanctions against employers who hire undocumented workers, but enforcement varies greatly. Attempts have also been made to establish some control through amnesties, but these have often been difficult to implement. Many undocumented migrants in fact entered the host country legally but overstayed their visa or violated its terms -- usually by working.

Illegal migration is almost certain to take place in abusive conditions so far as pay, safety and health, the remittances of earnings and most aspects of working relations are concerned. Clandestine jobseekers may still feel that work under such conditions is acceptable and some employers may find it profitable to employ them. Offering work under abusive conditions is obviously illegal, and all countries have an obligation to detect and suppress it. Although clandestine workers guilty of illegal entry no doubt feel they have no rights, ILO instruments suggest that even illegal workers have a right of access to labour tribunals to protest against their working conditions and, for example, to compensation for employment injury. That said, they often face a risk of deportation before their case is heard. Illegal status, however, cannot deprive workers of the pay they should have received; nor, clearly, does deportation after an illegal entry (or working contrary to whatever original permission was given) deprive workers of rights to social security they have accumulated earlier.

Since the World Social Summit there has been no relaxation in the rising demand for unskilled female migrant labour to take up housekeeping tasks or to work as low-wage workers in labour-intensive industries, or in socially undesirable jobs including the sex industry. Migration by young women workers has been increasing in recent years, most notably from South-East Asia to Central and Eastern Europe, and is causing concern. The women are in occupations and sectors vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by employers and others. Poor wages and working conditions, and sometimes physical abuse, characterize many domestic service occupations. This has led the major countries of origin to institute a strict supervision of recruitment and on occasion to prevent recruitment for jobs which are likely to be a cover for sexual exploitation. These countries then do their best to follow up on employment conditions in the host country.

Although for the individual migrant temporary migration often ends up being longer than originally intended, policies of receiving States usually insist on the migrants' return home. Much labour migration in Asia and North Africa has been characterized as the circulation of labour. Labour market policies to promote the reintegration of migrants upon return are few and far between. Migrants commonly face difficulty in finding employment corresponding to the skills they have acquired abroad. Their potential input to the development of their country is thus diminished, if not lost.

In most industrialized, migrant-receiving countries the discrimination migrants face perpetuates their marginalization. Discrimination in the world of work is widespread and persistent. Roughly one of every three job applicants of migrant origin has been found to be excluded from application procedures on discriminatory grounds. A vicious circle of discrimination, joblessness and poverty, low educational attainment and worsening stigmatization characterizes the situation of many migrants.

An ILO General Survey concerning ILO instruments on migration for employment (Convention No. 97 and Recommendation No. 86, and Convention No. 143 and Recommendation No. 151) found only few grounds for concern in the treatment of legal migrant workers. These may be non-citizens hired for a specific job or by a specific employer and their period of residence may be time bound. Conversely, they may be tied to a specific job for a period of two or more years and afterwards be free to seek other work. Taking account of these restrictions on the activities which migrant workers may engage in, there seems to be no general problem of their treatment being out of line with that of citizens. Restrictions on their selection for trade union posts are an exception. Apart from these restrictions two other points need to be made. The first is that migrant workers who are permitted to settle and are not recruited for a specific job are likely to end up doing the jobs which nationals do not want, and for which they may be overqualified. These will be low paid, and as non-citizens they may have difficulty in being trained and selected for other jobs. Female migrants may experience particular difficulties. Secondly, even migrants accepted for a predetermined period have rights to equal treatment and equal opportunities and should enjoy rights to freedom of association. But, generally speaking, many of the rights afforded to migrant workers are only recognized after a given residence period, which migrant workers on time-bound jobs cannot fill.

Whether or not the benefits of international migration outweigh its costs has been a matter of lengthy debate. Clearly orderly migration, when jobs are available at a reasonable wage, is beneficial to employers and the migrants individually. When this somewhat hazy condition is not fulfilled, migrant workers are likely to be resented and exploited. Nonetheless they may add an innovative and creative element to the domestic labour force. The issue of measuring the loss to developing countries from the migration of their highly educated workers is, however, very difficult to resolve.

7 Job quality

The Report of the Director-General to the 1999 International Labour Conference, Decent work, noted that the ILO's goal was more than the creation of jobs; it was the creation of jobs of acceptable quality. It was noted that quality of work had many meanings, touching on different forms of work and conditions of work as well as feelings of value and satisfaction. Much of the ILO's contribution to the development of global social policy has lain in negotiating the parameters of acceptable and fair workplace relationships. At the core of the ILO's efforts in this area lies a solid consensus grouping the minimum acceptable global principles and rights. These have found expression in the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and include freedom of association and the right to organize and collective bargaining, freedom from forced labour, freedom from child labour, and equal opportunities -- equal remuneration for men and women for work of equal value and the elimination of discrimination in work-related fields, which include training, advancement and remuneration. The major failure of so many economic systems is that they deny women quality jobs by under-paying and under-promoting them relative to men has already been noted.

Job quality has many dimensions, including safety and health in the workplace, the quality of the working environment, the scope for creativity and personal development in work, the degree of protection against risks and contingencies, the stability and security of the employment relationship itself and the income it provides, and the extent of legal protection and recourse in case of abuse. This section does not attempt to cover all of these dimensions, but instead looks at the economic and legal aspects of three particularly important aspects of the quality of employment: income security (taken to refer to a mixture of job security and right to compensatory payments in the event of job loss); opportunities for developing and using skills; and exercising the right to membership of participatory organizations. The latter is not only an indication of the quality of the employment situation itself, but also a key measure for bringing about an improvement in the objective conditions of work. To anticipate the discussion that follows, it is evident that for a very large number of workers "job quality" is something which still needs to be fought for. How they can be assisted in this will be discussed in a later chapter.

This section does not proceed by region since the issues are by and large not regionally specific. There is also a risk of setting up unfair regional comparisons on issues which cannot be easily or properly measured. However, there are certain universal labour standards in respect of which global statements are quite legitimate.

(i) Income security

Income insecurity for most workers has three elements: business conditions, security of tenure and mechanisms for income compensation. For very many farmers and self-employed persons, especially in the informal sector, there is no security of tenure, only different conditions governing their use of and control over income-generating assets. And their only means of compensation for lost income is to draw on their own savings or to diversify the sources of family income. Achieving some stability or steady improvement in business conditions is then the major means of improving the welfare of such workers and their families. The recent economic history of Latin America, for example, clearly shows that when the economy catches cold the informal sector gets pneumonia. More workers seek to make their living there and a major share of its market (sales to regular wage workers) disappears. Farmers are also likely to suffer from a lack of demand, although in their case different processes may be at work. Governments therefore have above all an obligation to run economies in ways which avoid major disruption.

Legislative action, leaving aside governments' overall role in promoting equitable patterns of growth, can affect both workers' security of tenure and the nature of income compensation. While some forms of legislating for protection against dismissal may only reduce recruitment, in the right environment such job protection has many beneficial effects. It serves to reduce turnover, increase workers' commitment to the enterprise and encourage skill acquisition. Legislation can set a number of hurdles or make a number of suggestions for alternatives to dismissal which should first be reviewed when business worsens. The Termination of Employment Convention, 1982 (No. 158), stipulates that when termination is contemplated for economic reasons workers' representatives should have an opportunity to consult on measures to minimize the terminations and mitigate their adverse effects on the workers concerned. In terms of the social plans adopted in many larger European enterprises, measures can include investigating the possibilities of transfer within the enterprise, temporary (and usually subsidized) short-time working, retraining and assistance in entering self-employment. But these measures can only be effective where institutions and practices have been built up and where the prospect for the business is not immediate bankruptcy.

In many countries, in addition to the need for appropriate legislation for job protection and fair rules on dismissal, there is also scope for legislation to adopt a more sophisticated approach to systems of income compensation. Many developing countries have long had systems of compulsory savings for workers, albeit usually not for those in very small enterprises. However, schemes of the provident fund type are more intended to provide an alternative to a retirement pension than income support in the event of unemployment. If they are drawn on prematurely they are no longer effective as a source of retirement income. The next likely step is usually the introduction of unemployment insurance. This becomes feasible where the likelihood of unemployment is in normal times quite low. That was precisely the situation in many East Asian countries before the Asian financial crisis, where long-term worker commitment to the enterprise was strong and unemployment low. The corollary, of course, is that many workers for those reasons saw little need to finance the horizontal redistribution of income between workers implied by introducing unemployment benefits on the insurance principle.

The Asian crisis came after a decade or two in which the sources of income in workers' households had become less diversified and greater specialization had gone hand in hand with higher incomes. To that extent the need for income compensation systems had indeed gradually increased, unnoticed. But Asian workers were considered fortunate to have had that opportunity. Many workers throughout the world are finding themselves with an increasingly loose relation to a final employing enterprise. Some are effectively subcontracted as a means of spreading the enterprise workload or avoiding contractual obligations. Others, even in wealthier countries, have a relationship no different from casual workers hoping for a day's labour. Temporary jobs have indeed risen in many countries and, corresponding to a declining share of employment in large enterprises and even in public administration, the share of poorly paid self-employment and employment in small and medium-sized enterprises and in "micro-enterprises" has risen. No doubt it is exaggerated to paint a picture of working conditions, income security, etc., as being ipso facto lower in the informal sector than in the formal sector. Workers, although more often men than women, do move from the formal sector to the informal. Open unemployment and total deprivation of income are far more likely for formal sector workers in times of recession, as data from East Asia are showing. On the one hand, all this merely underlines that greater attention needs to be paid to achieving improved income security, including security in employment relationships and the application of effective levels of minimum wages, and better income compensation in the event of job loss everywhere. On the other, it calls attention to the need for social assistance programmes to help especially the dependants of the self-employed who have no employment relationship and no claim to a minimum wage. These are complex and technical issues involving questions of achieving labour market flexibility hand in hand with the benefits of job security and of priority in funding social programmes, and call for hard thinking everywhere.

(ii) Opportunities for skill upgrading

An essential element of job quality concerns fulfilment at work. Partly this requires some control over the working environment and working decisions, and this in turn may be linked to membership of a participatory organization. But having the opportunity to master new techniques and use new technologies and contribute fruitfully within new forms of work organization is also important. For this to happen training and retraining are crucial. Furthermore, systems of work organization with a predominance of skilled workers are likely to be less hierarchical and revolve more around teamwork. Similar considerations apply to the self-employed, whose livelihood may well depend not only on mastering new techniques but also on accumulating or borrowing money to purchase new equipment and on tapping into available sources of information. Of course many of the self-employed do not have these possibilities and the ILO has been active in many pilot projects and programmes to give them such opportunities.

Wage workers rarely have the chance to take and follow through an individual decision on skill enhancement, let alone to change the method of work organization. Generally, indeed, it is likely to be the employer who takes such decisions, and a common suspicion is that in this respect employment quality is widely suboptional, lower than would be both socially and indeed privately desirable, because "market failure" leads to under-investment in training. This argument revolves around the means by which the benefits of training are shared between the worker and employer and the latter's unwillingness to pay for training when the worker immediately moves on. The argument is complicated because it implicitly assumes certain forms of labour market functioning and those assumptions may not be accurate. However, it has validity under most institutional systems, except apparently where apprenticeship is widely used, skill certification is common and wage differentials are established through collective bargaining. Nevertheless, as discussed in the World Employment Report 1998-99, the development of a "training culture" and the appropriate certification of skill levels should encourage employers to pay more attention to training their workforce while widespread skill certification can be expected to contribute also to overcoming discrimination in recruitment.

An additional reason for under-investment in training is a belief that the "low road" to global competitiveness, followed by keeping wages down through, for example, subcontracting or creating job insecurity through threats of enterprise relocation, is more profitable than a "high road" of high productivity and wages. This is somewhat of a false dichotomy since at any time enterprises compete in the same market but operate along a wide spectrum of technology and labour productivity levels. Nonetheless, a fear is often expressed that the introduction of new technologies fragments the labour market into high- and low-quality segments. In the low-quality segment skill requirements are least and work routines are the most constrained. But the costs to employers of choosing a path which leads to such segmentation need to be recognized. These include lack of commitment, often manifest in high labour turnover, and poor reliability of service to customers or poor quality of output. Furthermore, workers whose acquired skills are not regularly tested in their work, especially women returning to a type of work needing less than their earlier level of competence, are both personally frustrated and a wasted social investment.

There is no simple means of raising job quality, in the sense of worker fulfilment and contribution to better work practices, across the board. Training strategies and the encouragement of good practice and the use of teamwork in work organization are important, as is a sound basic education, on the one hand, and a thorough respect for human and democratic rights, on the other.

(iii) Workers' and employers' organizations

The conditions under which groups of wage workers, self-employed peasants or artisans, or indeed employers can join together to further and defend their collective interests have an enormous bearing on welfare at work. Actually, de jure and de facto freedom of association enables workers to join forces to negotiate their working and living conditions as a collective body; such regrouping has traditionally been considered as an essential means of establishing an equilibrium in the relationship between workers and employers. Theoretically, organizations ensure that all workers have a say in their working life. When grouped together in federations or confederations at a higher and broader level, organizations can be a powerful voice for changing basic aspects and beliefs of civil society. Actively discouraging such organizations, and their combination into higher level federations, putting constraints on their operation or robbing them of independence by assimilating them to a totalitarian power structure are all means of reducing the quality of work.

Yet there still exist nowadays in some countries extreme situations where organizations are totally prohibited, under a penalty of imprisonment or expulsion. However, more often, labour legislation draws distinctions between, and excludes from its scope, specific groups of workers: for those workers not able to establish organizations within the purview of the law, this situation is tantamount to a ban. Such exclusion gives rise to a particular concern where it relates to workers coming from the poorest and most under-privileged segments of the population. Limitations on the establishment of organizations may also stem from conditions relating to nationality, sex, opinion or political affiliation. For instance, restrictions based on nationality can seriously limit migrant workers from playing an active role in the defence of their interests, especially in sectors where they are the main source of labour. Non-national workers are therefore in a very precarious position if any of their activities in furtherance of association displease the authorities.

In other countries, the right to organize is not contested but workers and employers cannot establish organizations of their own choosing because of restrictions imposed: these can range from containment, where organizations operate only within a restricted environment and cannot freely organize further, to the prohibition of legitimate means by which organizations exert pressure in furtherance of their members' interests, such as the right to strike.

A number of countries impose rules on the establishment of workers' organizations that are related, among other things, to the formalities to be observed when an organization is created or to issues of membership, recognition or representativeness of the organizations. Although the right to establish organizations does not imply absolute freedom, requirements are sometimes so stringent or complex that they amount to forbidding workers or employers from organizing freely or to giving the authorities discretionary power to refuse the establishment of organizations. It is true that excessive proliferation of trade unions may weaken the trade union movement and ultimately prejudice the interests of workers; however, the right balance needs to be struck between the establishment of strong organizations able to develop a long-term commitment to employment, on the one hand, and the free will of the workers and employers to establish organizations of their own choosing without previous authorization, on the other.

Another related topic concerns the conflict between trade union monopoly and trade union diversity. In fact, there is a fundamental difference be