Format: Real

Duration: 14:43 mins.

Inter Press Service International Achievement Award
United Nations, New York, 29 October 1999

REMARKS BY JUAN SOMAVIA
Director-General
International Lobour Orgnization
(Edited transcript)

I think that struggle in life is very important, that nothing changes without struggle, and that when you have opted for wanting to do something to make the world better in whatever sphere it is, and all of us have chances of making the world better because around us there is always something that we can help influence. When we take the option of wanting this world to be better for people, you also take another option. You take the option of swimming against the current. You take the option of having a more difficult life, because structures defend themselves, because the status quo is there, because the effort to change has to be stronger than the effort at maintaining things as they are. That is why the word struggle for so many of us has such an important value. Nothing really worthwhile happens or stays in time unless there has been some level of struggle behind it. And things that people have gone on the streets, and lives that have been dedicated to that, and very often it was lived through in Latin America, tragedies accompany this.

I am now heading the International Labour Organisation. You can imagine how many lives of workers have been invested if you want to talk in the present world, in creating unions and organizing workers. Imagine the situation a hundred years ago, how much trouble has gone into that. So the manner in which Roberto presented I think is an expression of what I believe very profoundly. We all have to choose our own struggle. We all have to choose what is it and how and in which way we believe that we can make a difference. What I have seen throughout all of my life is that we have all the potential to do so. Of course, always you have to squat around cynics because cynics are the worse, they make you lose a lot of time. Never try to convince a cynic. It´s so easy, yes but this has already been tried, yes but there is nothing new in this idea, yes but look at the failure of other people who tried to organize to do this. The cynic will always tell you that things are not possible and they make you lose an enormous amount of time. When you are young, you get engaged and enraged and you try to convince them and to explain and to say that yes, it is possible. A little down the road you realize you have to go on, that you lose an enormous amount of energy. It´s not worthwhile investing that amount of energy. You need it for the struggle. But my conclusion is that squirting around cynicism, we all have the possibility of doing something in whatever space we are in. And that the question is not what are they going to do about it, it´s what can I do about it. And all of us have something that we can do in the immediate space within which we are operating. And particularly true if I am talking in this building, and what this institution does and the people around us.

I must say that I believe in causes. I think that causes are important in life. And I would just like to mention one cause to which I am profoundly committed and I believe that it is something that if we push forward, if we move it forward, it is something that will also be something very important for humanity today. I am talking about the worst forms of child labour in the world. And I use the word “the worst forms” because this is the convention that ILO has just approved. The issue of child labour in general is a very complex issue. Parents need to go to work, children should be able to go to school. That´s the normal thing. It doesn´t happen everywhere and it´s not the fault of the children. Sometimes they are faced with the need to contribute to income in a family. Of course, it shouldn´t happen but it happens. And we have to deal with it through development and through a number of other things, and not just stigmatize it. And yet we want it to be eliminated. You have 250 million children working in the world. It´s an incredible figure. What type of an economy do we have, with what type of moral compass that you have 250 million children working in the world. But it´s a complex issue. What we have done in ILO is to say, why don´t we concentrate on those forms of child labour that whatever the cultural tradition, whatever the development stage in which one is, no family in the world would like see their children under those situations, those morally abhorrent situation whether it is prostitution, or pornography, or drugs and crimes, child soldiers, or extremely hazardous, like demining or chemicals and other things. Why don´t we decide as a community that we will not accept those things to continue because there is no economic reasons for those types of activities to be able to continue. What happened is that the whole of the international community including employers and workers and this convention was approved by unanimity. It´s the first time that this has happened in ILO for a long time. Why do I mention this? Because I truly believe that this is a cause that I think that we have the option of embracing. It´s a morally abhorrent situation, these are things that truly should not exist in the world. They will disappear if we are capable of creating a global movement, if we are capable of creating so many people engaged in making it end that in the end it will not happen because as the Secretary-General has said, it will be preventive action that will impede children to go there. It´s so much that we will have to take them out, but that if we create sufficiently strong political, moral and operational and people in movement, it will begin to stop simply because people feel that they can no longer be engaging children in these types of work.

It´s not going to be easy. But in a world without causes, in a world that has lost the sense of causes, I think that the cause of eradicating the worst forms of child labour is something that we can at least give the chance of thinking about it, whether I want to be engaged in it or not, or thinking about whether it´s this something I would like to put some of my energy, some of my values, some of the vision of the type of future that I would like see, some of my responsibilities as an adult. We talk so much about solidarity among generations when you discuss pension systems, when you discuss the environment. There are a lot of areas. I sometimes think, isn´t this the first solidarity among generations, that this generation should eliminate the worst forms of child labour and really go out and do it? It´s doable. It can be stopped. But it depends completely on us and would just like to mention that I truly believe that if one was going to invest oneself this is an area that the world would like us to see ourselves do and eliminate.

The second very general comment which I wanted to make has to do with how do we look at the problems. We are here at the United Nations. I am here because we had a meeting today of the ACC, the heads of the different agencies and UN programmes. I think that evidently in the world there is a generalized feeling that the global economy is not reaching enough people. That it has brought a number of good things with it. There is no doubt about it. I come from Latin America. We have 7,000 per cent rate of inflation in Latin America at one point or another. That´s a lot of inflation. It´s always the poor who suffer the most, when you have these gigantic budget deficits it´s always the weaker in society that when things are disorganized it´s always the weaker in society that winds up being affected. So putting some order into accounts and balancing the budget and those sorts of things, I think they were things that were needed. But the fact is that somehow it´s blocked, it´s not reaching enough people. I believe we have to do something about it. The Social Summit was doing something about it. But I think as we look towards the next century the most important thing is going to be to be able to deal with the problems by looking at them through the eyes of people. And we have not become accustomed to say that this is the manner in which we solve problems. To ask ourselves first and foremost, how is it that an individual looks at this? How is it that that individual in the family structure or whatever form of live that person has chosen, how is it this is lived in the community? How do people look at the problems of today and what are people expecting as forms of solution and ways of addressing these problems? We are of course here in a governmental institution and we are sitting here representing governments. So we have a tendency to speak of countries, of nations, of institutions, of structures. But in the end if we promote democracy in the world, if we promote development in the world, if we promote peace in the world, and education and health and everything that the UN is all about, it´s because it´s for people. It´s for the quality of life of people that all of this is being done. At least that was the intention when the United Nations was founded. And I think that we should not forget that. And very often you see the manner in which problems are analyzed and you say: “Why are people here?”

One of the things that for me, and this is particularly true in my new function, I feel very strongly that when we look at the whole issue of employment - and of course I believe that employment, income generating activities, sustainable livelihood, different forms of expressing the fact that employment is probably the first step out of poverty and that´s how you get out of poverty, you have to have some resources and income and forms of empowerment - that when you look at the whole issue and then you talk about unemployment you never make the link between unemployment and the life of a family and the fact that an unemployed person is a very unhappy family. It´s not just an economic statistic. It affects in the most incredible way a lot of other people. So the underemployed or unemployed of the world are not the figure which is getting to around a billion people. It´s those billion plus a number of other people that are affected by that situation.

And then on the other hand we talk about family values and we talk about horrible things that happened to the family and we don´t make the connection that an unemployed person is the equivalent to a very unhappy family of a human group living together. And this is because we cannot look at things through the yes of people because if we looked at unemployment through the eyes of people we would immediately take a snapshot of where the unemployed person passed the night. But we don´t. We just take the snapshot of what happened in the economic process, but not in the life process.

And I think that as we move along and as we try to understand this global socio-economic system that is being put together that is producing some much uncertainty for everybody, this question of looking at problems through the eyes of people is going to become more and more the key to successful policies. This is not just a question of saying, "Well, Somavia has a heart for this sort of things and that´s the way he sees it." I am absolutely convinced that if you don´t do it you get the wrong policies. And today I think we are just putting wrong policies in place because we haven´t yet been able to do that. And we have been able to do it in the system as a whole because we continue to have a sectoral system– I am here in the ACC, so I have little bit in front of eyes- we have a segmented system in which each of us does a sectoral analysis of an increasingly integrated problem. And we have not been able to express the whole.

But I won´t get going on that one because really that´s really a long issue. I want to end here by saying that this question of looking at problems through the eyes of people I think is going to become a main question. When I say this it means that you have to develop the methods, the instruments, the technology of doing that. It´s just not a sort of simple wish. If you decide that is important in the society, that trying to solve the problems of way people live them, you have to put together whole new methodologies of understanding of how you do economic policies, social policies and a number of other policies. The implications of this are rather major in terms of we get things right. But I believe that we will only get them right in time if we do that.

As you can see, two simple notions. Let´s choose the option of the struggle; let´s choose the option of swimming against the current. It´s much better than the other one; it´s much more satisfying than the other one. It responds much more to the more fundamental things that we all have, which is our value system and a value structure and the things that we believe in. And we are today working in an institution that has to do with the problems of the world that is this one of civil society, why don´t we all help to look at these problems through the eyes of people.

Thank you very much.