Putting the world to work.

Approximately 30 per cent of the world labour force--more than 700 million people--are not productively employed; that is, they are either hunting vainly for jobs or are underemployed, working at tasks that do not allow them to make ends meet. More than 120 million of these people are officially registered as unemployed. The rest are underemployed: they are the working poor, labouring for long hours, but not earning enough to escape desperate poverty.

"In most parts of the world, employment is worse today than at any time since the end of the Second World War", concluded participants in the UN-sponsored Expert Meeting on the Expansion of Productive Employment (4-8 october 1993, Saltsjobaden, Sweden), convened as part of the preparatory process leading up to the 1995 Social Development Summit.

In the industrialized countries, 1 of every 10 people is unemployed, with the average unemployment rate estimated at 8.6 per cent. More specifically, the rates in Western Europe are almost 12 per cent, while in Eastern Europe, rates of over 15 per cent are common. Mounting fear of unemployment has led a number of major immigration countries to further restrict the flow of up to 35 million economically active migrants, about 1.3 per cent of the global workforce.

In developing countries, some 60 per cent of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihood and some 300 million people, most of them women, work in the so-called informal employment sector, with hand-to-mouth subsistence jobs and without any sort of social security, insurance, disability or retirement benefits. External debt nearly doubled over the past decade, reaching 1.4 trillion in 1992, resulting in a development standstill and increasing unemployment.

In sub-Saharan Africa, urban unemployment has soared to 20 per cent, while well over 50 per cent of the rural population is underemployed. More than 10 years of adjustment policies have slightly reduced unemployment in Latin America, but levels of poverty and underemployment are high and increasing. In Asia, aggressive export strategies have stimulated economic growth and reduced underemployment. However, the southern countries of the region remain home to one half of the estimated 1.3 billion people in the world who are living in absolute poverty.

"Levels of wage employment have not just stagnated in recent years: in most economies around the world, formal sector jobs have actually been lost", states the international Labour Organisation (ILO) in its annual World Labour Report, 1994. "At the same time, the labour supply has continued to expand in all regions." An average of over 43 million jobseekers, most of them in developing countries, are being added to the worldwide labour force annually, according to recent ILO estimates.

Basic link

Addressing the problem of unemployment is a basic link in the chain of social development, along with the other specific core issues to be addressed by the 1995 Summit. On the one hand, "possessing neither capital nor land, many of the more than 1 billion poor people in the world can rely only on their labour to earn a living", said the experts. "So full and productive employment is the most effective method of combating poverty."

On the other hand, "employment is an essential factor which influences integration", said Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in a speech before a special session of the International Labour Conference on 8 June 1994 in Geneva. "Conversely, unemployment is a form of exclusion that often brings with it the whole array of social handicaps."

In fact, "employment is the central element of development", it is stated in the final report of the UN expert meeting. "Productive employment provides people a place in society. People who are productively employed are people who are making a contribution to the economy and in return they receive an income that widens their opportunities and that of their families. The lack of productive employment marginalizes people, makes them dependent and denies them the possibility of planning their lives."

No single prescription

However, the experts concluded, there is no single prescription for achieving higher rates of productive employment. "Experience indicates that there are few easy methods of expanding employment and alleviating poverty, and that piecemeal efforts are generally insufficient". Moreover, "policies for the expansion of productive employment will have to be designed in the new context of globalism. The spread of marketization and liberalization throughout the world has resulted in the rapid development of a series of global markets. Financial and commodity markets have become international, as have the flows of technology and management information within transnational corporations."

Meeting the challenge

To meet the employment challenge, the experts proposed a number of mutually reinforcing policies to be pursued simultaneously in several areas, including: promotion of sustainable high growth of effective demand; achievement of macroeconomic stability with high levels of employment and distributive justice: development of policies and institutions that encourage efficient functioning of the labour market; and establishment of an overall system of incentives free of allocative distortions, thereby leading to higher productivity of resources.

In addition, the experts found that countries which have linked economic policies with human resource development and employment policies have had greater success in promoting employment. They envisaged "a cooperative strategy based on national responsibility buttressed by international solidarity", and called for all countries to commit to growth with macroeconomic stability, based on the efficient use of resources and labour policies that foster high and sustainable levels of productive employment.

"In neither the industrialized nor the developing countries should current levels of unemployment and underemployment be accepted as an unavoidable component of modern society", the experts stressed. "Societies have the knowledge and the means to overcome this problem."

RELATED ARTICLE: Enabling productive livelihoods: The proposals

The progress report emanating from the second preparatory session on the Summit Declaration suggests that Governments should commit to "enabling all people to earn livelihoods through freely chosen productive employment, self-employment and other forms of work" and commit to "retaining full employment as a general goal".

To those ends, the States should:

* Put the creation of employment at the centre of the strategies and policies of Governments, private enterprises, and international organizations;

* Promote labour-intensive investment and commit to appropriate outlays and technologies to make employment strategies productive and sustainable;

* Expand work opportunities and productivity by investing substantially in human resources, especially through the provision of education and health care, encouraging self-employment and small enterprises, and improving access to credit, information, training and infrastructure;

* Ensure that workers have the training facilities, skills and abilities needed to adapt to changing technologies and labour markets;

* Devote themselves to formulating macroeconomic policies that foster long-term sustainable economic growth, open markets, well distributed global investment and greater export opportunities for developing countries; and

* Devote themselves to the goal of ensuring quality jobs in full respect of ILO conventions.