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Wanted: Millions of decent
jobs
By Haider Rizvi
NEW YORK - When government leaders from
around the world gathered in Copenhagen in 1995,
they pledged to take decisive action to end
extreme poverty and bring about gender equality
for women in all walks of life. Ten years later,
with few concrete changes in the lives of the poor
and women, similar promises are being made at
another international meeting being held at the UN
headquarters in New York that concludes on Friday.
"We reaffirm the Copenhagen Declaration
and Program of Action," declared ministers from
nearly 40 countries last week after holding a
series of discussions on the outcome of the World
Summit on Social Development, organized by the
46-member UN Commission for Social Development. At
Copenhagen, more than 100 world leaders recognized
poverty elimination, full employment, gender
equality, universal access to education and
healthcare, and social integration as essential
steps to achieve meaningful social development.
While noting that some progress has been
made in ensuring gender equality, development
experts believe that most governments have failed
to match their words with deeds in terms of
eliminating poverty by ensuring employment. "The
issue of employment has been left out of the
international discourse," says Gloria Kan, a
senior official at the UN Department of Economic
and Social Affairs. "It has not been at the
forefront of international issues. It was
forgotten by the international community."
A report released by the International
Labor Organization (ILO) on Monday endorsed Kan's
observation. The report, "Global Employment Trends
2005", points out that last year there were more
than 184 million people in the world who had no
jobs at all. "The best way to get people out of
poverty is to provide jobs," says Aart-Jan de
Gues, minister for social affairs and employment
of the Netherlands, who led one of the round-table
discussions before the adoption of the
declaration. "Countries should develop national
action plan for employment."
But experts
caution that merely ensuring jobs does not mean
poverty will be eradicated. "Employment itself is
not an answer to poverty," says Lawrence Johnson,
who launched the ILO report. "The answer is
providing decent jobs." According to the ILO,
nearly half of the world's 2.8 billion workers do
not earn enough to lift themselves and their
families out of poverty. Johnson thinks that
achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
could be hard in the absence of policies ensuring
full employment, a view that has been set aside by
the proponents of free-market economic
globalization who argue that economic growth is
the main path to poverty alleviation.
The
MDGs include a 50% reduction in poverty and
hunger, universal primary education, reduction of
child mortality by two-thirds, cutbacks in
maternal mortality by three-quarters, promotion of
gender equality, and the reversal of the spread of
HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, all by 2015.
The declaration adopted last Friday says
"macro-economic policies should support employment
creation and the social impact and dimension of
globalization deserve further attention", a
reference to the growing concern that inequitable
globalization is driving the widening gap between
the world's rich and poor.
The Commission
on Social Development recognized that a decade
after Copenhagen, the world community has failed
to pay due attention to Africa and the least
developed countries, which continue to suffer from
massive poverty and illiteracy. UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a similar
observation in a statement last week. "The
situation 10 years after Copenhagen is mixed," he
said. "Many hopes and expectations [have been]
left unfulfilled, especially in Africa and the
least developed countries."
According to a
background paper circulated at the meeting,
unevenly distributed economic growth, high
unemployment, heavy external debt, trade barriers,
high income inequality and commodity dependency
are the main obstacles to poverty reduction. Annan
sees achieving the MDGs as different from the
comprehensive approach to social development
affirmed in Copenhagen since the centrality of
employment to economic and social development is
absent in the goals. But he thinks that the MDG
campaign has contributed to "better" multilateral
action and national policies because they involve
specific targets and a timeframe to achieve them.
However, he adds that the MDGs cannot be viewed as
a "substitute" for a comprehensive social
development agenda. "The world situation has not
improved not because of a lack of decision, but
because implementation still falls short of the
intended targets."
A summit due to take
place in New York in September is likely to
consider the recommendations of the Commission for
Social Development. But it is unclear how far that
will advance the agenda on development. "There's
no recipe, there's no magic formula," Ana Maria
Romero Lozada, Peru's social development minister,
said at a news conference last week. "If we don't
take responsibility as a whole, then we would be
discussing the same in the next 10 years."
(Inter Press
Service) |
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