Decent Work for All

By UN and ILO

The UN moves to strengthen global efforts to promote Decent Work for poverty reduction and sustainable development.

Faced with a growing "decent work" deficit that has seen an increase of more than 20 per cent in official unemployment in the past decade and the need to create at least 40 million new jobs over each of the next 10 years to prevent it rising still further, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) moved in July to strengthen global efforts to fight poverty and promote sustainable development.

In a wide-ranging agreement on the urgency of tackling what speakers at the ECOSOC meeting called a global jobs crisis, ministers reaffirmed that "opportunities for men and women to obtain productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and dignity are essential to ensuring the eradication of hunger and poverty, the improvement of the economic and social well-being for all, the achievement of sustained economic growth and sustainable development of all nations, and a fully inclusive and equitable globalization."

The Ministerial Declaration maps out a series of initiatives with governments and other institutions to consider the employment impact of policies and to ensure greater policy coherence, inviting "all relevant actors, including the Bretton Woods Institutions and other multilateral banks, to join our efforts" to implement the Declaration.

"This move presents an extraordinary opportunity to mainstream the goal of full and productive employment and decent work for all into the regular activities of all relevant UN organizations," said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. "This can set in motion a process of policy dialogue within the multilateral system - including the Bretton Woods Institutions - to stimulate the necessary policy convergence behind this global goal agreed to at the 2005 UN Summit."

(World of Work; no.57, September 2006)