GLOBALIZATION - LOOKING GLASS NEWS | |
Globally, Decent Work Still the Exception to the Rule |
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by Szamko Guerilla News Network Entered into the database on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 @ 10:14:21 MST |
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Summary: “Since 1995, an additional 34.4 million people have fallen into the category
of the unemployed, particularly in the developing South, Akram said. And nearly
half of all paid workers do not earn more than two dollars per day, while about
one-fifth earn less than a dollar a day, according to International Labour Organisation
(ILO) statistics.” “Policymakers have not yet adequately caught up with the fact that it
is not inflation which is the main problem today,” Diane Elson, co-director
of the Programme on Gender Equality and the Economy at Bard College in New York,
told IPS. “It is unemployment and the lack of decent work.” Amen to that, now lets see the UN listening to social movements who have been
arguing this for years, and doing something about it. [Posted By Szamko] __________________ By Lisa Söderlindh U.N. forum reports that neo-liberal era has been a
total failure for the poor, and urges change More than a decade after the U.N. World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen,
where leaders first voiced the need to put decent employment at the centre of
development, joblessness continues to rise, reaching new heights of nearly 192
million people in 2005. “The political declarations on employment creation as key to fighting
poverty have not been translated into actions,” said Janvier Désiré
Nkurunziza of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, at a development forum
convened by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). Despite international commitments made over the last decade and reaffirmed
at the 2005 U.N. World Summit, the need to put productive employment at the
forefront of economic and social policies, and to achieve not only the primary
Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of cutting poverty in half by 2015, but to
reach an array of internationally agreed development goals, remains sidestepped,
noted panelists at the DESA forum. Women are still excluded at all levels, with inequalities in education, training
and recruitment underlying persistent gender wage gaps throughout the world.
Over the last decade, unemployment among women increased by 13.2 million, reaching
77.9 million in 2004. “A coherent and coordinated approach to address the challenges of unemployment
and decent work is needed more than ever,” said Pakistan’s U.N.
ambassador, Munir Akram. The DESA forum was called to lay the groundwork for a high-level meeting of
the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council on full and productive employment
and decent work, to be held in July this year. Since 1995, an additional 34.4 million people have fallen into the category
of the unemployed, particularly in the developing South, Akram said. And nearly
half of all paid workers do not earn more than two dollars per day, while about
one-fifth earn less than a dollar a day, according to International Labour Organisation
(ILO) statistics. “Policymakers have not yet adequately caught up with the fact that it
is not inflation which is the main problem today,” Diane Elson, co-director
of the Programme on Gender Equality and the Economy at Bard College in New York,
told IPS. “It is unemployment and the lack of decent work.” Failing to revise economic and social policies accordingly, at both the national
and international levels, means a continuation of “wasted lives”,
argued Elson, pointing at the despair and misery emerging from not having a
decent job. While access to health and social services is considered one of the basic pillars
of decent work, and is universally accepted as a human right, “Eighty
percent of the world’s population lives in a state of social insecurity,”
said Michael Cichon, director of the ILO’s Social Security Department. “Social security for all should be accepted as a global responsibility,”
Cichon said. Experts at the panel noted that the neo-liberal model of globalisation has
fuelled economic growth in many countries, but as often as not, it has failed
to generate decent jobs or ease poverty and social insecurity. This political-economic philosophy focuses on promoting free markets and lifting
trade barriers, reducing the role of national governments in the economy, and
cutting public spending on social services. But looking at the result of the so-called Washington Consensus, the dominant
development strategy promoted by neo-liberals, “Out of the six developing
regions of the contemporary world, only in the East and South Asian regions
has there been some decent growth,” said Azizur Khan, a visiting professor
at Columbia University, citing World Bank figures. And while countries like India, China and Vietnam have performed well in terms
of gross domestic product (GDP), “they cannot under any kind of reasonable
logic be described as having pursued the policies prescribed by the Washington
Consensus”, and their distribution of income has been very unequal, he
went on. Using the example of India, Prabhat Patnaik, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru
University in New Delhi, said unemployment has risen sharply in recent years,
especially in rural areas. The annual job growth rate of 0.58 percent between
1993 and 1999 was far below rural population growth, he noted. Contributing to the worsened employment scenario “is the sharp cutback
in government expenditure in the countryside”, he went on, noting that
this is the flip side of the “neo-liberal coin”. Stressing the need for strengthened development strategies and economic policies,
Nkurunziza pointed out that Africa is the only region where poverty rates have
steadily increased over the last three decades, according to the ILO, with 46
percent of the total population still earning less than one dollar a day. “Africa’s high poverty rates are the result of past economic policies
that have neglected rural economies,” he said, particularly “the
incapacity to create a high number of decent jobs to cope with the increasing
numbers of the labour force”. The fact that 70 percent of poor Africans live in rural areas and 90 percent
depend on agriculture for their livelihoods “will need to be reflected
in development strategies”, said Nkurunziza. According to the outcome document of the DESA meeting, the rural poor should
be helped to secure rights to land and access to other resources, including
water and forest genetic resources. It calls for employment policies to be made central to poverty reduction strategy
papers, greater investments in education, including vocational training for
youth, wider access to credit and information technologies, and “phasing
trade reform carefully to ensure that labour markets are prepared at each step”. Today, “Most people agree that whatever growth the neo-liberal policies
have brought, it has excluded large number of people,” Patnaik told IPS. “But whereas there is a view that it can be rectified within the neo-liberal
paradigm, I don’t believe that is possible,” he added. Patnaik underscored that investment in social services and job security should
be seen as an effective tool rather than a fiscal burden, stressing the need
to modernise the rapidly growing informal sector and take into account gender
differences in employment and unemployment. |