LABOUR: ILO Tackles Impacts of Globalisation

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jun 5 2000 (IPS) - Globalisation, the inequitable distribution of its benefits and its impacts around the world have dominated debate at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) conference, which opened this week in the Swiss capital.

As a starting point for the discussion, ILO director-general Juan Somavia said “the hard reality is that the benefits of globalisation are not reaching enough people.”

The global economy “is not creating enough jobs, especially not enough jobs or sustainable livelihoods that meet people’s aspirations for a decent life,” he added.

The ILO’s Working Party on the Social Dimension of Globalisation is dedicated to studying the challenges the new global economy will create for the 21st century.

With the same goal in mind, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) secretary-general Bill Jordan proposed that this group should be supplemented by an annual “Social Forum” to be attended by Ministers of labour and social security, members of academia and social thinkers and representatives of workers and employers.

The ICFTU leader observed that globalisation has meant that “the balance of power has been shifted significantly in favour of capital.”

“Labour and social groups are not only seeing their bargaining power eroded but their labour protection threatened – Venezuela is treading this dangerous path,” said Jordan.

Likewise, another workers’ central, the World Confederation of Labour (WCL), criticised the full frontal attack major employers around the world have launched against international labour regulations.

Willy Thys, WCL secretary-general, pointed out that this offensive has come up in all the ILO sessions, underway in Geneva through June 15.

Employers and certain governments are attempting to weaken the laws to the point of being ineffective, favouring the widespread exploitation of workers, he said.

Somavia warned that “unless we tackle the growing disenchantment with the present form of globalisation, the backlash will continue – the visible and vocal backlash on the streets and the silent backlash at home.”

Jordan referred to these protests as well, especially the demonstrations last December in the US city of Seattle, Washington, against the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the institution seen as champion of the neoliberal ideas driving the globalisation process.

The demonstrations, said the unionist, were “a final warning that unless the Bretton Woods Institutions (International Monetary Fund and World Bank) and WTO find a way of building a strong social dimension into trade liberalisation, a wider more damaging backlash will severely set back the process.”

The chairman of the ILO conference, Argentina’s Labour Minister Alberto Flamarique, also predicted that the process could deepen inequalities, as the protesters in Seattle, Davos (Switzerland) and Washington DC said they fear.

But in his opening speech last week, Flamarique had expressed hope that the changes brought about by globalisation could be used “to build a more just and equitable society.”

Portugal’s President Jorge Sampaio, the conference’s principal guest speaker, accepted that these transformations have created unprecedented opportunities for development, but “have worsened the situation of injustice” in many regions and throughout vast sectors of the population.

Sampaio rejected that “the imperatives of business competition can condemn us to choose – as if they were mutually exclusive possibilities – between economic efficiency and social justice.”

Somavia pointed out that “the information and communication revolution, the driving force behind the globalisation of production, is surely irreversible.”

But, he added, there is nothing inevitable about the policies that accompany globalisation, in the areas of macroeconomics, finance, trade and social development.

The Portuguese president, in turn, said he opposed “the speculative logic of he financial markets” and called for an international discussion on “the formulas for regulating and discouraging the notoriously speculative movement of capital.”

The WLC secretary accused employers and certain governments of sharing the WTO philosophy that attempts to impose its trade norms above other international laws, “thus reducing development to the realm of international trade alone.”

Jordan expressed the concern of the union movement about the attitude of the Myanmar (Burma) government in “collaborating with the widespread use of forced labour.” Unionists also call for establishing a Commission of Inquiry into the situation in Colombia, where 125 trade unionists have been killed since June 1998, he said.