GENEVA (ILO News) - Launching an appeal to the 88 th International Labour Conference to strengthen maternity protection for women workers, Mr. Juan Somavia used his plenary address to the delegates to highlight "the need for a successful outcome to the revision of the ILO Standard on Maternity Protection". He said that this issue provides "a perfect example of how gender equality is at the heart of decent work".
"I want to get to the core of this debate - the human being concerned - the woman who would like to be able to bear a child safely and to nurture her child for some time after its birth without fear of losing her job, income or career."
He said that the response to a woman in that situation "cannot be just a business or a market decision. It is a societal decision. It is about family stability and family values and it is about how we share the responsibilities and costs".
He pointed out that "the revision of this Convention has raised legitimate concerns that the final result may be to lower the standards set half a century ago, which many countries have since gone beyond, rather than to modernize them".
He insisted that this cannot happen: "I firmly hope that the instruments you adopt will be as strong as necessary to provide effective maternity protection in the reality of today's societies as a key component of decent work."
Citing a greater sense of purpose and heightened potential for effective action, Mr. Juan Somavia called upon delegates to ensure that the ILO "is at the forefront of forging a global coalition for decent work".
He said that there was a need for strengthened tripartism, involving governments, workers and employers, but also a need for "new enterprises, new cooperatives, new initiatives, new international agreements and new global networks that respond to unmet human needs. To maximize not just profit but also social impact".
He noted that the concept of decent work expresses the overall goal of the ILO in ordinary, everyday language and that it corresponds to reasonable expectations of workers in the global economy: "What people are asking for," said Mr. Somavia, "is work on which they can educate their children, build a stable family life and security, including a pension."
He called "decent work an ambitious goal, but people have a right to be ambitious about themselves and their families". Given the diversity of circumstances and aspirations, decent work cannot take the form of "a one-size fits all solution".
"On the contrary, it is a way of treating, in a coherent and dynamic way, the diverse aspirations and goals of different individuals, different cultures, different societies," the ILO Director-General insisted.
"The question is how to make it real. We all understand that the possibilities for decent work evolve with social and economic progress, and the goals can and should rise over time."
The current approach, with increasingly informal and precarious work growing worldwide "is not working". Taking issue with the widespread downgrading in wages and working conditions caused by informalization, Somavia insisted "I believe that you have to build the wider aspirations of people into their work right from the start. If you don't, you end up with child labour, with discrimination, highly dangerous jobs, intolerable practices of all sorts and outright exploitation."
In an effort to combat these ills, "the decent work vision is the compass that will guide us all. We know it will take time to achieve decent work for everyone. It needs to be the responsibility of society as a whole".
He said that the next major challenge for the decent work agenda "is to make it operational at the national level by building on the social floor established by the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work ". Challenging delegates to promulgate the Declaration, he suggested: "Couldn't we post the message of the Declaration in every workplace of the world?"
On the adoption of the Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour , adopted by the ILC last year, Mr. Somavia called attention to "an intensive campaign by the Office which has resulted in an unprecedented number of ratifications of this key Convention". He said that he expected more than 30 countries to have ratified the instrument by the conference ending and said further ratifications were in the pipeline.
He declared the elimination of the worst forms of child labour "a moral obligation" and said that "the next step is to work with countries who want to set a time based programme for elimination of the worst forms of child labour". He pledged the full cooperation of the ILO with all countries willing to make that commitment.
On the topic of globalization, Mr. Somavia said that "the hard reality is that the benefits of globalization are not reaching enough people. We know that the global economy is not creating enough jobs, and especially not enough jobs or sustainable livelihoods that meet people's aspirations for a decent life".
He said "unless we tackle the growing disenchantment with the present form of globalization, the backlash will continue - the visible and vocal backlash on the streets and the silent backlash in the home".
While insisting that "the information and communication revolution that is the driving force behind the globalization of production is surely irreversible," Mr. Somavia insisted that "there is nothing inevitable about the policies which accompany globalization: macroeconomic, financial, trade, social development policies".
He said that the criterion for success of the global economy "is not only growth or financial returns, but whether the global economy has been meeting peoples needs".
He said it was the responsibility of the ILO and the multilateral system "to get to grips with the social aspects of globalization in a way that they have not managed so far".
"More socially sensitive policies are required," he insisted, "but also a more integrated approach by the multilateral system whose organizations need to stop behaving like independent actors and start playing as a team kicking toward the same goal."
In an appeal to the assembled delegations from most of the ILO's 175 member States, Mr. Somavia called on them to "continue to invest in finding solutions true to our values that are relevant to the modern world and the common interests of our constituents".
"By prioritizing the task of making decent work operation at the country level, I am committing the ILO to working with such countries in the concerted effort required to take decent work out of the Conference halls of Geneva to the fields and factories and offices of your countries," he told the delegates.