- The International Labor Organization (ILO) hosted the Global forum for a human-centered recovery from 22-24 February. How do you assess the results of the Global Forum convened to discuss the international community’s response to the COVID-19 crisis?
- Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Let me begin by just explaining the idea of our forum. What we wanted to do was to bring together heads of government, heads of states, heads of international organizations. We had International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization and many others. And the representatives of the government’s employees in a conversation about how we are going to recover from that terrible crisis that COVID-19 has brought. COVID-19 has been a health crisis, but it’s became a global economic consensual crisis as well. Our estimate is the impact of COVID on jobs and on incomes has been four times more serious than what happened with the financial crisis of 2008 – 2009. So, we need to find a way forward from that, we know that global economy is beginning to grow again this year it’s about 4.5 %, but we need to look behind that aggregate figure to see what is really happening in people’s lives, in people’s working life in particular. And there that story is not so good. I’ll give you two reasons why, firstly, we see that the labor markets are stabilizing at levels of employment considerably below pre-pandemic levels. So, labor markets are not recovered to where they were pre-pandemic and that should be a source of great worry to us. Secondly, we are seeing frankly two speed recovery. The rich world is growing back quite quickly and bouncing back quite quickly. Why? Because they have physical resources to invest in recovery, that also because they are able to vaccinate more of their populations and this is a precondition for reopening their economies. So, the danger is two speed and incomplete recovery and one which to go to straight to other major themes of the forum. That is like to make inequality in the world worse than before and already inequality was very serious. So, our forum is intended to bring people together to discuss how to promote equal human centered recovery that would address these very serious problems. The point here is we need international policy coherence, we need to bring together health policy, labor policy, financial policy, trade policy and integrate them. Because if we try to deal with the recovery in isolated, silos as we say, we are unlikely to come up with the right solution, so our forum, I think is very important for bringing these people together. The objective was not to adopt a declaration, not to adopt conclusions, but to lay a platform to greater coherence and greater cooperation between these different parts of the policy spectrum to promote the type of recovery you want to see.
- What lies at the core of ILO’s efforts to improve the situation in the world of work as well as in the social field?
- We have many challenges. I mean it comes together in this human center of recovery. Perhaps I could point to one challenge, which is particularly important, which is question of social protection. We know that today in the world the majority of people do not have any social protection. Zero social protection. 53% of working people have no social protection and we seeing what the consequences of that is during the pandemic, when a crisis happens, when you lose your job or cannot work, you lose your income, if there’s no social protection you’re on your own and you’re in big trouble. So, we believe that one of the major challenges for the years ahead must be to not only increase levels of social protection both in coverage and in adequacy of social protection, the protection must be sufficient to protect people, we have to move to universal social protection. The human cost of the world in which less than half of the population has social protection is terrific and we’ve seen it. Perhaps I can just add to that because it’s closely related to the problem of informal employment. 60% or 6 out of 10 working people work in informality - no labor laws, and mostly no social protection. For many years the ILO has been arguing for formalizing informal employment. So that people are able to enjoy the basics of protection at work. And we made some progress,but now I worried that with the pandemic that progress has been reversed so we have to pay attention once more to formalizing informality at work.
- Considering the growing migration flows worldwide, what measures is the ILO taking to protect the migrant workers’ rights and their working conditions?
It’s a very good question. I know that in your country and neighboring countries this is a very important issue. Let me say to begin with,I think migration is,at least it can be, positive part of our societies and our global economy. It can be on 2 conditions. The first condition is that migration is not an obligation,but a choice. The first option must always be to try to create a decent job at home. So, the migration is not simply a strategy of those who have no better option. Unfortunately, many people,more or less obliged to migrate to have a decent life sometimes to escape conflict and repression. So,make migration a choice. Secondly, where migration does take place, it needs to take place, in conditions of respect for the right of the migrant and their families. That means as a basic principle here, that means applying to migrant workers the principle of equal treatment. There is no reason why migrants should be less favorably treatedat work, where a local work is. Unfortunately, that is not always the reality. We know that migrants issubjected to abusive treatment,discrimination. We know, in addition,and I regret that profoundly, often there is a stigma that is hostility towards migrants is also we need to combat. Now what are we doing about that? We are working hard with our member states to try to create, firstly, legal pathways for migration where migration is undertaken on a regular basis withproper documentation in an orderly way,then the protection of those people much more likelyto be effective. Where there is regular migration, clandestine migration, we know that it is often opens the doors to abuse. So, orderly regular migration applying the principle of nondiscrimination and equal treatment, we are working also to establish bilateral migration agreements between sending and receivingcountries and in this way, we believe the progress can be made. I mean the InternationalLabor Organization here in Geneva across the road is the Internationa lOrganization of Migration, our friends are working also in this area and we are working togetherto try to apply a global compact on safe orderly and regularmigration adopted by the UN 4 years ago. This is a blue print, a global blue print to make migrationa positive experience and a positive contribution to the global economy that it should be.
- What occupations do you think will disappear or have already disappeared due to the pandemic? What new occupations or professions can emerge for migrant workers in the present context?
- I think that what we have to understand is that even before the pandemic arrived, the world of focus is changing and changing very, very quickly. We talk about transformative change in the world of work. And it’s always been a case, but perhaps in recent years we have seen change happening more quickly and more profoundly, than in the past particularly, not exclusively. Particularly, because of technological change and digitalization in the world of work. I think that pandemic has accelerated that change, created, is accelerated that change. So, we know, we seeing the creation of many jobs and many professions, which are related to digital skills, information technology and artificial intelligence. We talk a lot of about all of that. So that there is a some of the jobs of the future. But let me point to other areas where I think we are going to seemore jobs in the future. One is in the health and care economy. The pandemic is made us very aware of the importance of health care. But around the world there is a global shortage of health workers, health employees. Global shortage is partly because countriesnot investing enough in health services and broadly the promotion of care is important. All of our societiesconfronted with the challenges of providing adequate care for children, the older people. Now very often this is done on an unpaid basis privately at home often by women. And we believe that there a need to professionalize the care economy, to upgrade the jobs in care economy, to recognize the economic contribution of care. It will be by the way one very good way of improving the status of women in the labor market. That's another area. And the third area I want to mention is in respectto the green economy of the future in our broad aware of challenges of the climate change. I think we all understand today that climate change is created by human activity and the reality is that not all of human activity is work or work related, so we have to redesign work and labor markets as we move towards the climate neutrality and this means by definitionthat will not be a choice, it will be an obligation, we have to create green jobs in the future. They can be very diverse, they could be a construction, they could be a transport, they could be a specialized environmental science of the green economy of the future together with the care economy and the digital economy. It going to be I think the main determinants of the jobs of the future.
- More than 7 million migrant workers from the Central Asia are currently out of their home countries and not all of them are happy with their situation. Among others, more than a million migrants from Kyrgyzstan are now dispersed worldwide. How do you assess the migration situation in the Central Asia including Kyrgyzstan? Does the ILO have any plans to address their problems?
- I fully appreciate the insignificance of migration to the economies and societies of Kyrgyzstan and your neighboring republics, I think Tajikistan as well. We know very large number of citizens go to other countries to work and it takes back to my point that I previously made. This is good if it is a free choice made by the people, it’s less good if it is an obligation, because, there are no job opportunities at home. I suspect that given the magnitude of migration some of this could be regarded as forcedmigration and that is not good. It’s important as well to recognize that migration is vitally important in your society inyour economy. I think that the money sent back to your country by migrants, approaches something like 30% of the national income. This is not a detail, this is not a minority thing. This is very important thing. So, we want to make sure that where migration occupiesso important part in national economy, it’s undertaken in satisfactory conditions. And that brings me back to some of the things that I already said to you about equal treatment, fair treatment and legal regular pathways for migration. What are we doing to trying to help on over this: out of our office in Moscow which covers your country, we are working on migration systems firstly to make sure that migration is undertaken in full knowledge. I think the informing migrants of the realities, of their rightsis first step of ensuring fair treatment. We working on the capacity of different governments to monitor and to accompany migration process so that they are in a position to support the citizens to make the decision to migrate. And this is the other side of equation we need to and we are working with your country and neighboring republics to try to stimulate employment at home as well. So that migration is not an obligation. These are I am not going to hide it extremely important challenges, sometimes I think that the decisive challenges that countries like yours and we will do our best to meet expectations of our friends in Kyrgyzstan to revise the support that you want and you need.
- Thank you very much Mr. Ryder for your interesting interview.
Kabar News Agency
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