Mar 25, 1998

LABOUR: SOMAVIA ELECTED TO BE NEXT ILO DIRECTOR-GENERAL

Geneva, 23 Mar (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- By a vote of 44-12, in a secret ballot, the 56-member tripartite Governing Body of the International Labour Organization Monday elected Mr. Juan Somavia of Chile to be the next Director-General of the ILO. 

This is the first time a developing country representative will be heading the top post at the 79-year old ILO. 

The Chilean diplomat and academic defeated Maria Nieves Roldan-Confesor from the Philippines. 

Though elected now, he will actually take over from the present incumbent, Michael Hansenne on 4 March 1999. Till then, and at least till the next Conference in June, Hansenne will be functioning. Somavia, was nominated by his government, after an initiative of the workers body, and got the endorsement of the governments of the Latin American and Caribbean region, as well as the United States government. 

But the voting by secret ballot showed the wide backing he got. 

After the election, in a statement, the Chilean minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Mr. Jorge Arrate Mac Niven, thanked the governing body for their support and noted that it was the first time that a "representative of the Southern hemisphere" would be heading the 79-year old body. 

An attorney by profession, the 59-year old Somavia is his country's permanent representative to the UN in New York since 1990. He is now the President of the ECOSOC, the second time he is at that post.  

The role he played at the Copenhagen UN social summit as chairman of the preparatory committee easily won him the support of the workers groups at the ILO, who took the initiative in his candidacy, with the Chilean government officially nominating him thereafter. 

In the runup to the Copenhagen summit, and at the summit itself, Somavia espoused the cause and concerns of workers and persuaded the governments of the South to address the issue of social dimensions of trade liberalization, even while making clear to the workers group that efforts to link the labour standards issue, WTO and trade sanctions, would not fly - either at Copenhagen or at the WTO. 

In the runup to the elections, while meeting individually and collectively various governments, workers and employers groups, Somavia has kept a low public profile.  

But he has made known his support for the Hansenne effort to get the ILO to issue a Declaration on workers rights, and has said that idea of the Declaration with its principles was essential, but that the details should be negotiated and settled within the tripartite body. 

Interestingly, by agreement of all sides, the election by the governing body was brought forward at the current meeting, ahead of the discussions on the content of a declaration and mechanisms for follow-up so that the controversies and divisions on details of the declaration and any followup would not muddy the election process.  

In informal conversations last week, Somavia said that the presence of the first director-general from a developing country would be reflected in that body's "sensitivity in looking towards Third World countries," and that his origin in the southern hemisphere would favour "the indispensable comprehension of the multicultural dimension."  

The ILO leadership needs to be constantly aware that "we live in a plural, differentiated world," where there is not necessarily a single solution to any given problem, he said, in explaining the need for rebuilding the tripartite consensus that governs the ILO. That means, he explained, that the three sectors should jointly define the five or six basic social guidelines and objectives.  

However, this is not an easy task in an era of neo-liberal economics and 'globalization' which, on the ground, has made the old dogmas of the common interests of workers, and that of employers, irrelevant.  

Critics of the ILO have noted that the old tripartite nature of the body -- of governments, labour and capital (employers) -- however valid in the immediate post-war years, have been shattered in the post-1980s and the neo-liberal era.

The present efforts for social agenda, as an add-on, to the IMF-Bank/WTO policies that promote the transnational actors, is seen by critics as efforts to apply band-aids to arterial haemorrhage.  

Previously, governments inside countries not only refereed between labour and capital, but also sought to protect and espouse the cause of the public and consumers. But with governments now espousing and embracing business and corporations, their referee role visavis labour has diminished, and the consumer counts even less.  

In the North, and under the neo-liberal economics that until recently organized labour (and academics) did not challenge on its fundamentals, the numbers in organized trade unions are a smaller and smaller part of the workers, and in most industrial societies a small minority.  

In the South, the gap is even higher with industrial labour a small minority, often better off than the workers in the growing informal sectors and in agriculture.  

Even the child labour issue -- which gets headlines in the North as exploitive labour used by employers (of the South or TNCs through sub-contracting) in competing clothing, carpet-making and other sectors -- is a small part of the wider problems of poverty and socio-economic paradigms of development in the South.  

It is this problem that both leadership of the international organized labour, and the ILO itself, have been unable to come to grips with. And this makes even the 'core labour standards' issue, as an economic element of trade liberalization or globalization, slightly arcane.  

When the core labour standards issue is promoted as a moral one of fundamental human rights, it has aroused questions about whether for the marginalised and impoverished majority in the South, there is not a need for these rights for workers to organise and collectively bargain, and civil rights, do not have to include such basic rights as right to food, shelter etc. 

When the socalled 'reform programs' pushed by the IMF, as now in Asia where Korean workers and their unions have had to agree to workers being sacked, and this increases the pool of unemployed, is ILO's advocacy of mere core labour standards or the socalled 'human face' adjustment the answer?  

The labour standards and social clause issue has come up, and has often been advanced by the US and others at the ILO (and the WTO), as a way of ensuring that the workers are able to benefit from trade liberalization and the economic growth in countries. 

And the international workers group, particularly the ICFTU etc, have also advanced these issues as one of universal 'moral' standards -- having been thwarted by leading industrial country governments, as much as developing world and employers, from pursuing the social clause link in trade accords.  

But it has not been explained, for example, how these "core standards" to be observed and promoted in the developing world through moral suasion, or enforced through a WTO social clause, would in fact ensure that the workers and middle classes in the US and the industrial north who are now getting a reduced share of the pie, even when their countries are clear winners of this globalization game, could benefit.  

How would these core standards be enforced or observed in the United States (which has not ratified these conventions) and where in many of the states the right to form unions includes the right not to, and employers can set up 'union-free' shops. 

How would the ILO standards and norms against prison or forced labour, and goods produced from that labour, for example, deal with the problem of the US free market model where there are 1.6 million inhabitants in prisons, which are now increasingly privatized, and with goods and services produced by the prisoners entering the domestic economy? 

Though some studies in the North purport to show that trade competition of imports of labour-intensive goods from the South are responsible for the rising unemployment of unskilled labour in the North, these do not for example, explain the "hollowing out of the middle classes", a term used by UNCTAD's Trade and Development last year over the globalization issue, and the enrichment of the 'rentier classes'.  

These are all questions that the ILO, has to address and tackle, but cannot so long as it is not ready to confront the IMF/WTO/Bank strategies of neo-liberalism. In the late 80s and early 90s, the ILO gingerly approached the IMF/Bank structural adjustment issue, but was quickly forced to rein back as a result of the US views.  

Will Somavia's election the ILO to tackle this central issue?  

With his long career as attorney, academic and researcher and expert on transnational corporations (in the 1970s and early 80s), and then as diplomat of Chile, Somavia may have some thoughts and specific ideas for solutions on these and other issues of 'globalization' - but at the moment he is keeping his own counsel.  

He however underlines the need for the organizations of workers and employers to reach beyond the organized sector and big corporations, and both reach out to and voice the views of others.