Setting the G20 agenda
WorkerS of the world have been invited by the governments of G20 nations to form a Labour 20 (L20) engagement group to give their recommendations about what the G20 should do to make the world better for workers everywhere. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, India’s largest union for formal-sector workers, has been commissioned by the Indian Government to convene this group this year and give recommendations to the G20. It should not waste this opportunity.
Policy attention must be shifted to make work in the informal sector, much of which is done by women, more secure, more dignified and more valued.
Workers should not have high expectations from the formal agreements of the G20. The G20 may not be capable of following through its own pronouncements. The G20 was set up primarily to stabilise global financial systems. Though able to do that much, it is now breaking apart global financial systems, with the US-led G7 wanting to isolate Russia and China. India is leading the G20 this year. India’s agenda is to move the world towards Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — ‘One Earth, one Family, one Future’. India is asking the G7, which represents less than 10% of the world’s population, to focus on the needs of the remaining 90%, who are suffering from climate change, increasing inequalities among nations, precarity of jobs and incomes, and now suffering further with the US financial and trade sanctions.
India’s leadership provides the poorer 90% of the world’s citizens an opportunity to combine their voices to be heard by the wealthiest 10%. Insecurity of employment and inadequacy of social security have become problems in India, other developing countries, and even in G7 countries. The ease of capital to roam the world has been the thrust of global financial and trade policies since the 1990s, with the ‘ease of doing business’ becoming a measure of the quality of all countries’ economic policies. Meanwhile, the ease of labour to move between countries has become harder (witness the anti-migration measures adopted by the G7). Also, ‘ease of living’ of the majority of the world’s citizens, which some economists and civil society organisations have advocated, is even considered a ‘socialist’ idea interfering with the flow of ‘capitalism’.
Though not much will be achieved by only complying with the official process, which the conveners of the L20 must, India’s G20 moment can be an opportunity for the workers, women and youth of the world to unite their voices and be heard. They must be strategic about what they will use this opportunity for.
Firstly, large unions representing organised sector workers must step outside their own walls to include representatives of the unorganised sector, where 90% of India’s workers (and the majority in other developing countries too) earn and live, in a collective movement.
Secondly, the L20 must ally its agenda closely with the Women 20 (W20). The ILO has celebrated its centenary recently with a multi-year study of the Future of Work. Formal jobs in the formal sector are becoming fewer even in industrialised countries. With new technologies and new patterns of organisation, patterns of work are changing. They are becoming more informal, more intermittent, also allowing people to work from home, which many citizens prefer. Work such as caregiving, nursing, teaching, organic farming, and community work — the work that women have traditionally done, whether they are paid or not — will now form a larger part of the work societies need, whereas work in large establishments in the manufacturing and service sectors increasingly will be done by machines.
Women’s work is not valued in modern economies. Hence, the urge of economists to move women into the formal workforce to add to the GDP. The formal sector will not provide sufficient opportunities for youth in the future, whether women or men. Therefore, policy attention must be shifted to make work in the informal sector, much of which is done by women, more secure, more dignified and more valued.
The L20 and W20, along with Youth 20 (Y20), must make very few demands from policymakers everywhere, and that too in simple terms uncluttered with academic jargon. Their voices must not be lost in the static of statistics and long lists of wishes.
A clear demand must be to provide social security for all citizens, principally those in the informal sector, whether they are employed or not, because with the uncertainty of new employment patterns, many more citizens will not have secure employment in future.
The second call must be to value the kind of work women do outside large formal establishments. Such work must be given equal respect and provided equitable compensation with the work that men usually do. While formal sector employers must provide leave and support to their employees for family care, more of the work for pay in the economy in future should be designed around patterns of family and community life.
The third should be to enable workers to form associations and unions. They must have the means to be collectively heard, otherwise their scattered voices are drowned by demands for more freedom for business to do only business. The tide for capital and against labour must turn to bring more equity into economies. Otherwise, problems of precarity of incomes in farm and factory sectors, which have become hot political issues, will not be solved.
The paradigm of economic policies must change. In the current paradigm, families and communities are being deformed to make the economy more efficient. In the new paradigm, forms of economic enterprises must be reformed to strengthen family values and build social solidarity. In the prevalent paradigm, youth and women are mere fodder for the economic machine to create more wealth for investors and more GDP. In the new paradigm, the economy must be reformed to create a harmonious and happier society. In the present paradigm, nature provides resources to feed an economic machine. In the new paradigm, nature must be respected as the mother of all life.
