Government, employer and worker delegates from ILO’s 187 member states are participating in the event and discussing wide range of issues confronting the world of work, including - a just transition towards sustainable and inclusive economies, quality apprenticeships, and labour protection. A high-level World of Work Summit on Social justice for all will take place on June 14 and 15.

ILO Director-General Gilbert F Houngbo has called for making social justice a priority issues on the global agenda in the opening session of the Conference, in addition to presenting his report titled “Advancing Social Justice” which presents a grim scenario prevailing in the world of work.

World has reached at a critical juncture, the report said. Concerns have been growing in recent decades over rising economic inequality within many countries and the widening disparity between the inordinate wealth accumulated by the riches one per cent of the population and the income of the rest.

COVID-19 sent shockwaves reversing gains in living standards and exposing weaknesses in every society’s social and economic policies. The situation is now compounded by a damaging combination of debt, high food and energy prices, extreme weather events and geopolitical tensions and conflict, inflicting suffering on millions of people and threatening to exacerbate poverty, exclusion and inequality.

Injustice persists. At the end of 2022, 685 million people were estimated to be living in extreme poverty, the majority of whom were in sub-Saharan Africa and in fragile and conflict-affected economies. These people are unable to secure sufficient resources to meet their basic needs for safe drinking water, food and sanitation, health and shelter. Such deprivation is an affront to human dignity.

It is often interrelated with other injustices, including child and forced labour. Global estimates indicate that160 million children were engaged in child labour in 2020, while close to 50 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021. The increases since 2016 in the absolute number of people in child labour by over 8 million and modern slavery by 2.7 million are the antithesis of social justice.

Linked to these injustices, the report says, is the fact that millions of people engage in unsafe or unhealthy work each day in order to earn a living. An estimated 2 million workers die as a result of occupational accidents and diseases each year, and hundreds of millions of workers are injured at work. The resulting human tragedy combined with the loss of economic output and productivity constitute multiple layers of injustice.

Regrettably, most intra-state conflicts are linked to exclusion and discrimination involving minorities. Furthermore, globally, more than one in five persons in employment have experienced violence and harassment at work, whether physical, psychological or sexual, during their working life. For the majority of these victims, this is a recurrent experience. Young women are twice as likely as young men to have faced sexual violence and harassment at work, and migrant women are almost twice as likely as non-migrant women to report sexual violence and harassment.

Labour market insecurity is widespread. Globally, an estimated 207 million people were unemployed in 2022. The inability to access opportunities for employment has significant implications for the prospects of young people to successfully navigate school-to-work transitions. More than one in five young people (aged 15–24 years) are not in education, employment or training.

Even when employment is attained, the reality is that the majority of the world’s employed population – more than 60 per cent – works in the informal economy. These workers are twice as likely to live in poverty than those in the formal economy. Insufficiently recognized in law and often unprotected in practice, these workers face much higher risks when it comes to external shocks and economic cycles. A disproportionate share of these workers are women, who are more likely to work in the most vulnerable jobs, as unpaid contributing family workers, domestic workers, platform workers or home-based workers hired on a piece-rate basis.

The vulnerable nature of some of the new labour market opportunities is apparent in the rise in insecure forms of work. Casual work is widespread in developing countries and is rising in importance in high-income countries, often in the form of on-call work arrangements where workers are called in to work and remunerated only when needed. The intermittent and short hours that characterize this type of work are usually involuntary and frequently associated with time-related underemployment. This intersects with informality when minimum working hours thresholds preclude access to social security benefits. In 2019, an estimated 165 million working people, a large share of whom were in low-income countries, were seeking more paid hours.

Increased climate-related risks and extreme events have further eroded economic security. Climate change endangers jobs, livelihoods and enterprises, and has disparate effects in different parts of the world. Low- and middle-income countries suffer (and will continue to endure) greater climate change impacts than higher income countries, in terms of temperature volatility, exposure to tropical and waterborne diseases, and exposure to rising sea levels, among many other factors. As climate change worsens, a larger number of individuals will be forced to leave their homes and become part of the growing number of “climate refugees”.

This heightened economic insecurity is compounded by policy agendas that have left more than4 billion people excluded from any form of social protection. They have no access to healthcare and sickness benefits, no support that might assist them to feed, clothe and care for their children, and no access to income in their old age, during periods of unemployment or in the event of the death of the main income earner.

While the level of social protection coverage varies by country and region, four groups consistently figure among the most excluded and vulnerable: workers in the informal economy; migrant workers, including those forcibly displaced; young people; and women. Among workers in the informal economy, most are neither affiliated with contributory schemes, nor included by narrowly targeted social assistance schemes, which deem them “too rich’’ (or “not poor enough”)to qualify – and they therefore fall into the so-called ‘‘missing middle’’.

Related to labour market insecurity is the question of inequality, which is high and rising. The high levels of inequality that characterize our economies and societies manifest in a variety of ways, including in income, in opportunities for labour market participation and in access to basic services such as healthcare and education.

Income inequality has increased in a majority of countries. At the same time, in high-income countries, average real wage growth has lagged behind average labour productivity growth. These trends imply that workers are, on average, receiving a smaller share of economic growth. Growing wage inequality – with large gains for the top of the distribution and stagnating wages for workers at the bottom – has been a key factor driving increases in income inequality in recent decades. In developing countries, informal work with low earnings and a high incidence of poverty remains one of the main reasons for often high levels of inequality.

In this connection, discriminatory practices continue to exclude women and marginalized groups from labour market opportunities, resulting in inequality of treatment and outcomes. The disproportionate amount of time invested by women in unpaid care work underlies lower female labour force participation rates, alongside higher job search discouragement. The jobs gap – which measures all persons who would like to work but do not have a job – is higher for women and has remained relatively constant for nearly two decades. When it comes to paid employment, globally women earn approximately 20 per cent less than men. Pay gaps are even wider when gender intersects with other grounds of discrimination, such as race, disability and migrant status.

These vertical and horizontal inequalities are reflected in differentiated access to quality public services, including education and healthcare. Under-investment in public services has incentivized private solutions, the supply of which has expanded exponentially, with the public provision lagging behind. As a result, those who can afford private services are often less willing to pay the taxes necessary to ensure the provision of public services and other public goods. This creates a dual system which reinforces inequality. In the case of healthcare services, dominant private-sector provision, without adequate regulation and appropriate social health protection, often goes hand-in-hand with high out-of-pocket expenditure on health, which is the case in many low and middle-income countries.

The report has further warned that the crises are compounding by multiple overlapping crises, social contracts unravelling, and policies are failing to keep everyone afloat. Disaffection and loss of trust in national governance is rising, and increasing polarization within societies is undermining solidarity. We are failing to put the values on human dignity and social justice at the centre of the world of work. (IPA Service)