by Robin Thorpe
“Women and men without jobs or livelihoods really don’t care if their economies grow at 3, 5 or 10 per cent a year, if such growth leaves them behind and without protection. They do care whether their leaders and their societies promote policies to provide jobs and justice, bread and dignity, and freedom to voice their needs, their hopes and their dreams” -Juan Somavia
Juan Somavia was the Director-General of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) until 2012. The ILO was founded in 1919, in the wake of a destructive war, to pursue a vision based on the premise that universal, lasting peace can be established only if it is based on social justice. The ILO became the first specialized agency of the UN in 1946.
From the 5th to the 20th of June 2013 the ILO are holding the 102nd International Labour Conference in Geneva. On the agenda are several themes that have been prevalent in the UK media recently and have relevance to the lives of the UK population. These are;
- Sustainable development, decent work and green jobs
- Employment and social protection in the new demographic context
- Social Dialogue
OK so they don’t sound relevant in the bureaucratese in which they are written, however these issues could all have a profound impact on our quality of life. I shall attempt to decipher them for you.
The first of these deals with the two most significant challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century; achieving environmental sustainability and ensuring decent work for all. The ILO report on this topic states that “The shift to a sustainable, greener economy offers major opportunities for social development: (1) the creation of more jobs; (2) improvement in the quality of large numbers of jobs; and (3) social inclusion on a massive scale.”
The report goes onto to say that “an assessment of a broad range of green jobs in the United States, for example, concluded that they compare favourably with non-green jobs in similar sectors in terms of skill levels and wages. Research in China, Germany and Spain has also found the quality of new renewable energy jobs to be good.”
Major investment both in terms of policy and money will therefore only reap rewards; if we are to gain the most from this opportunity then we can’t simply play at building wind-farms.
Long-term policy commitments must be made to ensure that private investment is forthcoming, something not helped by last week’s UK parliamentary vote against a clean power target, which will also affect the motor manufacturing industry.
