By Vincente Silva, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK.
Global Social Policy, Volume 22, Issue 2, August 2022, Pages 341-358
The original article is here.
Abstract
In the late 2010s, the future of work gathered attention from the most influential actors in global social governance. The International Labour Organization (ILO), since 2015 and in the context of its Future of Work Initiative, aimed to position itself in the discussion by putting this issue at the centre of their activities for its centenary (2019). The normative and conceptual approach developed by the ILO in this initiative was named the ‘human-centred agenda’, aimed to align technological change with decent work and social justice. Although preliminary scholarly works have seen these efforts as a humanistic and pro-worker ‘countermovement’, a deeper analysis of the ideas and interests involved in the Future of Work Initiative reveals a different, more complex picture. This article studies the creation of the human-centred agenda led by the ILO secretariat and the Global Commission on the Future of Work, and how it was further negotiated and modified by the social partners in the making of the Centenary Declaration in 2019. In particular, it shows how business at the ILO and right-wing populist governments, in tandem, reoriented the human-centred agenda towards a pro-employer perspective, thus framing social and labour policy as a tool for adapting the workforce to technological change. It concludes with some reflections about the consequences of these developments for the ILO’s position in global governance.
Excerpt mentioning Samans role
The article has so far examined the ideas and interests expressed by the ILO secretariat and the tripartite constituents. In 2017, an additional voice was included to the mix: the creation of a ‘neutral’ commission with members external to the ILO to elaborate what would become the official discourse of the ILO Office and the Director-General on this topic. The plan was to take out the discussion on the future from the internal politics of the ILO, creating a space that mirrored the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalisation that met between 2002 and 2004. The Global Commission of 2017 was joined by high-level politicians from different regions, leading academics, as well as authorities from the labour movement and the world of business. Representatives from the Employers and Workers Groups of the ILO were ex-officio members, meaning that they could participate in its debates only if they were invited by the Co-Chairs. They were not to sign off the final report ‘in order to preserve the independence of the Commission’. In other words, the Commission was not considered an official tripartite instance to establish the ILO position on the future of labour – that role was going to be taken instead by the Centenary Declaration.
Since the Commission was not ‘an academic committee’, it received technical support from the secretariat’s researchers, who also drafted its final report, Work for a brighter future. The report’s central concept was the ‘human-centred agenda’. It was not an entirely novel idea, however. The World Economic Forum (WEF) had proposed in a white paper from 2017 – prepared by Richard Samans, who later participated in the ILO Global Commission – a ‘human-centred’ normative framework to rethink business models based on the principles of dignity, common good and stewardship (WEF, 2017). From an ideational view, the Global Commission’s agenda was instead inspired by the ‘capabilities approach’, which understands development as the increase of people’s economic and political freedom (Sen, 1999). The notion of capabilities implies that development strategies should be judged in view of their contribution to social justice and quality of life, considering questions like ‘what are people actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?’. (emphasis added)