White Paper

Co-chaired by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, the independent 27-member Commission includes leading global figures from business, trade unions, think tanks, government and non-governmental organizations. It was established by the International Labour Organization in 2017 as part of the ILO’s Future of Work Centenary Initiative. The Organization marks its centenary in 2019. Among the key issues considered by the Commission are new forms of work, the institutional ramifications of the changing nature of work, lifelong learning, greater inclusivity and gender equality, the measurement of work and human well-being, and the role of universal social protection in a stable and just future of work.

This study provides a first-ever account of global attitudes and perceptions of women and men regarding women and work based on the 2016 Gallup World Poll. The poll, which was conducted in 142 countries and territories, is representative of 98 per cent of the global population.

This ILO report quantifies job losses and job creation in the transition to a green economy, based on projections to 2030 founded on the agreed policy goal of limiting global warming to 2°C. More generally, it finds that the greening of economies can have a positive overall effect on growth and jobs. Positive employment outcomes will also probably apply in the 1.5°C scenario, as encouraged by the Paris Agreement. The report shows that environmental laws, regulations and policies that include labour issues offer a powerful means of integrating elements of the Decent Work Agenda with environmental objectives. This is true for social protection programmes, skills development programmes, macroeconomic policy and the legal framework. Though some degree of integration is observed in all these domains, it is not yet systematic and not yet universal. For example, while environmental legal frameworks can be effective in combining some elements of the Decent Work Agenda with environmental objectives, the respective provisions often focus on particular groups of workers (such as additional support for local communities, training in areas that are key for the transition, and the protection of workers in specific sectors). The transition affects all workers, however; the universality of rights and protection therefore remains important to ensure that the transition delivers inclusive growth and decent work.

The present report shows that achieving environmental sustainability can create jobs. The green economy will be a major source of job growth in the future of work. Taking action in the energy sector to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century can create around 24 million jobs, largely offsetting any job losses. Embracing the circular economy to reduce material extraction and waste generation will also result in net job gains.

The main challenge for the transition to the formal economy is finding the right policy mix that corresponds to the diversity of characteristics and drivers of informality. Reliable and relevant statistics are needed to better understand these complex aspects of informality and monitor progress towards formalization. In June 2015, the International Labour Conference adopted the Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recommendation (No. 204), the first international labour standard which focuses on the informal economy in its entirety. That same year, in September, the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which included the transition to formality in the targets for Sustainable Development Goal 8. These two instruments represent major milestones in the global approach to formalization, particularly by providing guidance on the process. The ILO has made the formalization of the informal economy one of its strategic outcomes and supports tripartite constituents in facilitating the transition to the formal economy at the national level. This report forms part of the ILO follow-up plan of action to support the implementation of Recommendation No. 204. It is all the more timely given that the United Nations General Assembly has recently approved the Global Indicator Framework to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals, including a specific global statistical indicator on informal employment (8.3.1). The report provides for the first time a statistical profile of the informal economy at the global level using a common set of operational criteria to measure informal employment and employment in the informal sector for more than 100 countries, including both developed and developing countries. Statistics on informal employment are disaggregated by sex, age, level of education, status in employment and other socio-economic characteristics.

This ILO flagship report provides a global overview on recent trends in social protection systems, including social protection floors. Based on new data, it offers a broad range of global, regional and country data on social protection coverage, benefits and public expenditures on social protection. The report follows a life-cycle approach, starting with social protection for children, followed by schemes for women and men in working age, including protection in case of maternity, unemployment, employment injury and disability, and those for older persons, including pensions. It also assesses progress towards universal coverage in health. It calls for greater attention towards the extension of coverage, adequate financing and strengthening national social protection systems, with a particular focus on achieving the SDGs.

The focus of this edition is primarily on formal private sector enterprises and the ways in which they respond to changing global and national contexts. In particular, the report assesses the linkages between various internal strategies to manage and organize human and financial resources – including capital structure, innovation, trade and global supply chains – and competitiveness and labour market outcomes at the enterprise level. In so doing, the report emphasizes the role of governments and social partners in fostering sustainable enterprises, notably by shaping supporting institutions and policies through effective social dialogue. Yet it highlights that decent and productive employment is fundamentally based on firms fostering equity in employment opportunities, workers’ protection and rights, and investing in workers as well as other important factors of production.

The Director-General set the scene for the two-day event based on the four centenary conversations.1 The first conversation, on work and society, raises a number of questions: What is the socializing function of work? How does the changing nature of work affect the coherence of our societies? How is work being diversified and undertaken in different settings and what are the economic consequences and the potential impact on our society? The second conversation focused on the nature and creation of jobs. This related to projections about the quantity and quality of employment to be created in the future around the world. Over the period until 2030, the priority was to consider how the international community could attain the commitment expressed in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to create full employment and decent work for all by 2030, which is also at the heart of the ILO’s mandate. The third conversation, concerning the organization of work and production, dealt with the question of how work appears today to be more diversified and issues relating to the employer– employee relationship. The question is whether this relationship will be the defining organizing feature of work in the future or whether we are entering new territory, where work is no longer mediated through a labour relationship but rather through a commercialized relationship. The emergence of platform economies, the diversification of contractual forms and the increasingly complex nature of fragmented global supply chains all raise major questions about how these relationships will develop. The fourth conversation dealt with the governance of work. The founders of the ILO were moved by considerations of humanity, social justice and the preservation of peace. These three principles should be kept firmly in view as we consider the future of work and how best to govern work in order to serve society. Finally, and more importantly, the Centenary Initiative is seeking to broadly canvass the views of key actors in the world of work. It is through human agency, and not simply through the forces of technology or globalization or any other external factors, that the future of work will be forged.

The objective of this report is to provide the members of the Global Commission on the Future of Work an organized synthesis of the reports of the national dialogues. With the aim of providing a coherent synthesis of the myriad topics raised in the national dialogues, the present report follows the structure of the four conversations. This report, together with the ILO’s Inception Report on the Future of Work that addresses the thematic issues from a more academic perspective, constitute the main documents that will inform the initial meeting of the Global Commission.