National employment strategies are needed for addressing the complex challenges in work in many countries
countries the lack of access to finance is a major hindrance to enterprise operation and growth, particularly for women. Policy options might encompass extending banking services to disadvantaged and marginalized groups (as in Ecuador), steering credit towards unserved, remote areas and targeted sectors (as in Argentina, Malaysia and the Republic of Korea) and lowering interest rates and providing credit guarantees and subsidized credit to small and medium-sized enterprises and export-oriented sectors. • Building a supportive macroeconomic framework. Some policy instruments to reduce volatility and create secure jobs include keeping the real exchange rate stable and competitive, managing capital accounts prudently, restructuring budgets towards job-creating sectors, building fiscal space for public spending, promoting an enabling business environment, ensuring high-quality infrastructure and adopting a regulatory framework that encourages competition, enhances efficiency and ensures transparency and accountability for business.
Seizing opportunities in the changing world of work requires policy actions to help people thrive in the new work environment. Individuals can flourish if they are equipped with skills, knowledge and competencies to harness new technologies and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Some of the policy actions here would require: • Heading off a race to the bottom. Given the realized and potential benefits that globalization brings to work, a race to the bottom —ever lower wages and worsening working conditions—is not the only outcome. Global attention to ensuring decent wages, maintaining workers’ safety and protecting their rights can pre-empt such a race and make business more sustainable in the long run, as can fair trade, because work conditions are becoming increasingly critical in consumers’ minds. • Providing workers with new skills and education. Higher and specific skills will be needed for science and engineering jobs and for many other jobs, as will be an aptitude for creativity, problem solving and lifelong learning.
Strategies for ensuring workers’ well-being must focus on rights, benefits, social protection and inequalities Guaranteeing the rights and benefits of workers is at the heart of strengthening the positive link between work and human development and weakening the negative connections. Policies could include: • Setting legislation and regulation. These should be on collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, protection of workers’ rights and worker safety. Steps to ratify and implement the eight International Labour Organization conventions on work and to put in place legal frameworks for enforcement are also needed (figure 9). • Ensuring that people with disabilities can work. Measures can induce employers to provide an appropriate working environment. States can make efforts to change norms and perceptions, enhance the capabilities of people with disabilities, ensure 18 | HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2015
workplace accessibility and access to appropriate technology and adopt affirmative action policies. • Making workers’ rights and safety a cross-border issue. Measures may include regulatory frameworks that extend to migrants, subregional remittance clearinghouses and more support to migrant source countries. These frameworks may constitute regional or subregional public goods. • Promoting collective action and trade unionism. Given globalization, the technological revolution and changes in labour markets, support is needed for emerging forms of collective action (such as the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India), innovative organizations for flexible workers (such as the Freelancers Union in the United States) and collective bargaining, including peaceful protests and demonstrations.