GENEVA - More than 300 participants from some 90 countries, representing ministries of labour, national statistical offices and workers' and employers' organizations, met to discuss two new resolutions and other guidelines, and make recommendations for future ILO statistical activities.
"Statistics are key to the lives of people and the lifeblood of the ILO," said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia in his address to the Conference. "They help to provide a picture of what is happening in the world of work and lay the foundations for policymaking."
Mr. Somavia set out two major challenges for ILO statisticians: measuring "decent work" - the ILO's guiding agenda - and capacity-building to ensure that all countries have the resources to collect relevant and reliable labour statistics.
Highlights
The Conference adopted two new resolutions on:
- Consumer Price Indices (CPIs): The resolution to update guidelines on CPIs will impact the lives of workers and their families throughout the world. CPIs measure changes in the general level of prices of consumer goods and services, and the effect these have on the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living. They are used as an economic measure of price inflation, and for adjusting wages, compensation, benefits and contracts, as well as many other purposes.
- Household income and expenditure statistics (HIES): New guidelines on these statistics will help the analysis of a wide range of social, economic and other issues, and are used for a variety of purposes, including assessing the economic well-being of households and individuals. They contribute essential information to the study of poverty and social exclusion.
New guidelines were approved on:
- Major infrastructure works, in which highly labour-intensive investments have already resulted in the creation of numerous jobs
- Employment in the informal economy: The Conference endorsed guidelines which provide a statistical definition of informal employment and its components, to supplement the 15th ICLS resolution concerning statistics of employment in the informal sector (1993).
- Gender mainstreaming in labour statistics: The 17th ICLS strongly agreed on the need to gender mainstream all labour statistics to address the specific concerns and needs of women and men, and girls and boys, and enable a better understanding of the functioning of labour markets. It approved a checklist of good practices for this purpose.
The Conference supported the concept of measuring decent work, and discussed developing decent work indicators for countries worldwide. It was opposed to a composite decent work index for the purpose of ranking countries, but proposed that a comprehensive report on decent work indicators - based upon wide consultation and exchange with countries at different levels of development - be submitted to the next ICLS, and the ILO Governing Body.
The 17th ICLS also recommended that a draft resolution on child labour statistics be discussed by the 18th ICLS, including a precise international statistical definition of child labour. A strong plea was made by the Conference to revise the 9th ICLS Resolution on statistics of hours of work, to provide guidelines which apply to the self-employed and cover new topics, including annual hours of work and working time arrangements.
Also on the agenda of the 17th ICLS was the need to update the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88), as well as statistics on the employment situation of persons with disabilities, on social security and on social dialogue. Delegates considered other proposals for future statistical work of the ILO, including statistics on labour demand and the balance between labour demand, and supply, labour underutilization, international labour migration, vocational training, and wages and employment-related income. The Conference also recommended that gender issues should be considered as a core principle in all aspects of future ILO work on labour statistics. In addition, it recommended that the ILO should increase its capacity to provide technical assistance to countries as a way of strengthening their labour statistics systems.
A joint ILO-PARIS21 seminar on capacity-building for labour statistics, held during the Conference, emphasized the need to foster better coordination between all stakeholders at the national and international levels and to mobilize funds for data collection and analysis in a number of countries.