Summary: EU Presidency Statement - United Nations Commission for Social Development: Promoting full employment and decent work for all (11 February 2007: New York)
EU statement by Dr. Hermann Kues, Parliamentary State Secretary of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth regarding Agenda Item 3a (Promoting full employment and decent work for all) of the 45th Session of the Commission for Social Development, New York
Mr. Chairperson,
I have the honour of speaking on behalf of the European Union, which has two new Member States as of January 1 of this year.
The Candidate Country Croatia, the Countries of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidates Albania and Serbia and the EFTA country Iceland, member of the European Economic Area, as well as the Republic of Moldova align themselves with this declaration.
Let me congratulate you and the other members of the bureau in assuming the important duties as chairperson of this Commission. I would like to assure you of the full cooperation of the EU in this endeavour.
Mr. Chairperson,
All Member States of the EU seek to further improve living and working conditions in their countries and in the Union as a whole. The European Lisbon Strategy aims at creating more and better jobs and promote social inclusion. The EU working program therefore currently has a focus on promoting fair wages, protection against health risks at work, workers' rights to assert their interests and to participate, family-friendly working arrangements, last not least enough jobs. We believe that the
confidence and self - respect that people feel when they are able to work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity is vital to socially inclusive societies as well as for competitive economies.
The Decent Work Agenda has made great headway and received strong support globally and at the European level. One example is the EC Communication on Decent Work for all and the Conclusions on decent work for all recently adopted by the EU Council of Ministers. Another recent example is the European Consensus, a joint statement by the Council, the European Parliament and the EU Commission on a new EU Development Policy, of which the primary objective is the eradication of poverty and which
includes by a commitment to advance Policy Coherence for Development. Decent work is part of the new EU Development Policy.
The European Consensus is in line with the latest ILO and UN initiative for more coherence in the policies of international agencies. The ILO started talks which were joined by the UN, UNDP, the World Bank and regional development banks looking at their activities in this field with a view to more coherent objectives and actions. European and other countries sending their representatives to these institutions are invited to promote and support the decent work agenda at this level.
Interregional meetings of the EU with other regions of the world, last year with Latin -America and in the ASEM context, successfully integrated the decent work objectives into their dialogues and conclusions.
In Europe, nearly all EU Member States have ratified the eight Core Labour Conventions; the last missing ratifications are currently being processed. The EU continues to urge all ILO member states to ratify the core conventions. In today's globalised economy, international labor standards are an essential component in the international framework for ensuring that the growth of the global economy provides social and economic benefits for all.
Decent work is a tool that can be used in different countries. The EU is strongly committed to improving employment and working conditions following the ILO recommendations. National ownership is essential in this process. The value of tripartism and the importance of an active and appropriate involvement of social partners is an important element in setting priorities at the national level.
Building on the European Consensus, some EU Member States have also started programs providing guidance and counseling for building up social security systems with developing countries and for improving governance of these systems. One of the tools are Round Tables between these developing countries and selected EU Member States where all participating experts learn a lot from mutual exchange of views.
What are the challenges ahead? The list of challenges that Europe and the world are facing is long and many hold a serious risk that an inappropriate or late response could set in motion damaging downward economic, social and political spirals. Let me share with you six thematic reflections on future challenges which our discussions about decent work should include for strengthening the social development perspective.
Decent work and poverty reduction
During the last decade, eradicating poverty as an international policy objective used to be built on two major assumptions which need urgent revision. Firstly, strong economic growth automatically led to job creation. This is not the case. The world is not generating enough decent jobs to keep pace with a 40 million annual increase in the global labor force nor substantially reducing unemployment. Secondly, a decade ago we also believed that hard working women and men with a job could possibly
not be poor people. However, there are 1.4 billion of hard working people around the world for whom work is no way out of poverty as their wages are extremely low. We need to find better instruments for supporting and investing in and monitoring sustainable growth creating full employment and decent work.
One of the four core pillars that decent work is building on relates to social protection. Half of the world's population doesn't have access to any social protection at all. Building up comprehensive and flexible social protection systems that support poor people and a dynamic economy belongs to the most important instruments for complementing economic policies. These systems do not only support poverty reduction, but also offer valuable instruments for better anticipating and managing
economic and social change.
Decent Work and Youth Unemployment
The 2006 Millennium Development Goals report says that many young people face "grim job prospects". Registered youth unemployment has risen to 85, 7 million, close to half of the world's jobless people (192 million). Being young and female can be a double disadvantage.
The 93rd session of the International Labor Conference in 2005 adopted detailed conclusions on promoting pathways to decent work for the youth, which we highly welcome. They were based on a strong cooperation with the Secretary-General's Youth Employment Network (YEN). These conclusions are very much in line with the comprehensive approach of the European Youth Pact dating back to October 2004. This Youth Pact aimed to ensure that young people are taken into account across a range of European
policy areas such as jobs, social inclusion and housing. Last year, the European Youth Pact was included in the mid-term review of the Lisbon Strategy of the EU. The German EU - Presidency has put the European Youth Pact on the agenda of the next two meetings of the European Youth Ministers in 2007 asking them for reflections for a common framework of objectives for the next ten years. We will be pleased to come back with the results for enriching the debates in this Commission.
Gender Equality and female migration
A comparison between the years 1990 and 2004 shows that women represent an increasing share of the world's labor force - over a third in all regions except Southern and Western Asia and Northern Africa. However women remain at a disadvantage in retaining decent work in many aspects, in Europe as well as throughout the world. Reliable social, health and educational services are enabling a better work - life balance for working women and men. However, there is an international tendency of
reducing budgets for such services ignoring the negative effects on gender equality.
The share of female migrants reached nearly 49 per cent in 2000, in more developed regions female migration outnumbered male migration with a share of 50,8%. A decade ago, creating decent work for migrants used to concentrate on male persons explicitly or implicitly assuming that they were the overwhelming majority. Social policies in Europe and elsewhere in the world were therefore mostly concentrating on measures for housewives and children joining the migrant husband, often neglecting work
permission for these women as well as regular provision of access to school education for their children. The female migration perspective is bringing back to our agenda not only issues such as maternity protection, protection from sexual harassment at work, the continuing gender pay gap or provision of child care, improvement of the employment situation of migrant women and protection from trafficking in the informal economy as a human right's issue.
The European Union has declared the year 2007 the "European Year of Equal Opportunities for All". It is based on the Equality laws of 2000 which made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of racial or ethnic origin or because of someone's sexual orientation, religion, belief, disability, or age. We are also currently strengthening our efforts to find common frameworks agreed by all European Member States for improved, coherent and coordinated migration policies, which includes social and
gender equality perspectives.
However, despite progress made thanks to the equality laws Europe still faces some challenges. In an effort to address these challenges, last spring, the European Union adopted a Gender Equality Pact and a European Commission Roadmap on Equality between Women and Men which proposes future areas of action to address gender inequality. Six priority areas have been identified, which will be followed by key actions designed to bring the goals closer. Equal economic independence for women and men is
a key issue, addressing such challenges as the pay gap between men and women, women's greater risk of unemployment and discrimination against immigrant and ethnic minority women. The reconciliation of private and professional life aims at providing more flexible work arrangements and childcare facilities to encourage a greater work life balance. The Roadmap also aims at addressing women's under representation in decision making, eradicating all forms of gender based violence including
trafficking, eliminating gender-stereotypes through education and cultural programmes, and the promotion of gender equality in the EU's external and development policy. We are satisfied that this comprehensive document, which will form the basis of European policy, will help in overcoming the obstacles to achieving gender equality in the coming years.
We are very pleased that next month (March 2007) the UN General Assembly will reinforce the gender issue by holding its second informal thematic debate on the "promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women". Conclusions on gender equality and decent work elaborated in this Commission might be a useful contribution to those thematic debates.
Decent work and demographic change
Longevity is a new phenomenon, a potential and power for social development in developed as well as in less developed countries of the world, but also a challenge to policy makers. About 70 per cent of older people live in developing countries. Experts in Europe are still concentrating on the challenges of their own ageing population and have just started to take this change into account in their external cooperation initiatives. The percentage of people over 60 years who work is highest in
least (over 70%) and less developed regions (about 50%) of the world. These older people have to work because their life income has been insufficient and social security systems have not been built up yet or do not deliver sufficient services for all.
The European Union has set a target of including 50% of the 55 - 64 year old in the labor market. Germany and other European countries have started to create programs offering incentives and support for "active ageing" in the labor market. We will be pleased to exchange good practices and to get new insights into the policies for decent work for older people in developed and less developed countries.
"eInclusion" and "eAccessibility" for decent work
The 2006 Millennium Development Goals Report confirms that the digital divide is increasing. Less than 1 per cent of the population in the 50 least developed countries and only 7 per cent in developing regions were using internet at least once per year by the end of 2004, while over half of the population in developed regions had access to the Internet. A UN - commissioned audit confirmed recently that the world wide web accessibility was much lower than anticipated. It was published on 3
December 2006, the United Nations' International Day of Disabled Persons. We are grateful that the UN organized the first meeting of the Global Initiative for Inclusive Technologies in 2006.
In 2005 European Member States agreed about the eEurope 2005 roadmap. "eAccessibility" and "eInclusion" were ranging high among the objectives. More and better jobs have always been promised when generous private and public investment in the development of new technologies and new media was launched in the past. European Member States would like to invite this Commission to develop better principles for sharing the potential of new technologies for an inclusive development and decent work for
all.
Reliable indicators for decent work
For measuring progress in decent work we will need more relevant and reliable indicators as discussed at a European Decent Work conference in Brussels last December. The EU looks forward to the indicators being developed by the ILO which so far are still at a pilot stage. As access to decent work is much more difficult for women, it will be equally important to collect more sex - disaggregated data at national and international level.
The Commission for Social Development has an important task to sustain our commitment in binding together decent work and social development. Thus it will contribute to the efforts outlined in the ECOSOC ministerial declaration last July and the UN World Summit Outcome.
Thank you very much for your attention.
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