This track addresses the problem of how to make progress towards the decent work for all objective in the context of the current energy, food and climate crises that have emerged or reached a more critical stage in the immediate wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Turbulent times create both challenges and opportunities. The COVID-19 pandemic at one stage appeared to offer a real opportunity to bring about a change in the way we work, and how we value and protect those engaged in essential work. The pandemic also exposed significant gaps in social protection coverage, comprehensiveness and adequacy across all countries, and underlined the urgency of closing the gaps and to do so through integrated and mutually supportive public policy responses. The worldwide energy and food crises and looming economic recession have buried that dialogue as concerns now focus on the threats to living standards. The poorest countries have much lower resources on which to draw, but even in high-income countries the less well-off households often lack access to social protection, savings or other resources, such as family networks, to see them through the crisis. The growing diversity in work arrangements are providing new sources of economic insecurity.
These developments are putting new and extreme pressures on wage-setting and other aspects of labour protection and social security and support systems. The responses to these crises can vary: a cost-of-living crisis can induce new forms of protest and organization and solidarity-based responses to protect the vulnerable or it can lead to uneven and patchy responses that increase inequalities. These crises are occurring alongside the transitions to new forms of technology and to the new ways of producing, working and living required by the climate emergency. The prospects for decent work will also therefore depend on the extent to which these successive crises are accelerating or stalling these transitions and affecting support for displaced workforces, including training, unemployment and other forms of social protection as well as job creation programmes, which also has an impact on their work-life balance.
Track III invites papers to stimulate dialogue between academics, policymakers and practitioners from the different disciplines and will address the following questions:
How are wage-setting institutions (minimum wages, collective bargaining, public sector pay) and key social actors responding to the cost-of-living crisis?
To what extent have the energy and food crises and the associated changes in market conditions led to solidarity-based responses with respect to wage protection?
How have social protection systems responded to the unstable times and changing labour market systems to ensure adequate coverage and levels of benefits? How can social protection systems be used as one of the main tools aimed at contributing to formalizing labour markets?
How can we ensure sustainable interface between ensuring income security and work-life balance?
Are there new forms of protest and solidarity-based responses to protect the vulnerable workers, including platform workers? Can broader lessons be learned about organising platform workers from informal workers’ strategies?
What is the impact of the pandemic followed by the energy and food crises on employment and wages in countries around the world, and specifically on the most vulnerable groups including those in informal employment?
What policies are required to ensure that the work of frontline workers is “valued” and protected?
What is the extent of support for transitions to a greener and a digital world and has the support improved or deteriorated in the pandemic and following crises?
How is collective bargaining addressing new challenges, related to just transitions, economic insecurity and technological transformations of work?
Track coordinators: Gerhard Bosch, Jill Rubery, Kea Tijdens, Virginia Doellgast, Susan Hayter, Janine Berg, Jeong-Hee Lee, Kroum Markov
