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.

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.

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 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.

Over the past several decades, there has been a growing diversification in working arrangements in G20 countries. This diversification reflects profound changes in the world of work, namely globalization and technological advances, including digitalization, that have facilitated the creation and dispersion of production networks across the globe. These transformations, coupled with the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics, the growth of the “platform economy” and subsequent casualization of labour markets, have raised questions about the future of work. In particular, they have also raised questions about how social protection systems, including social insurance and tax- financed mechanisms, can adapt to these changes. The diversification of employment arrangements, as exemplified through the decline of “standard employment” 1 , and the rise of “non-standard employment” (NSE), provides opportunities and challenges for the future world of work in general, and social protection in particular. While uniformity is neither desired nor necessary, this diversification has nonetheless brought challenges for the attainment of decent work, given that many labour laws and social security policies were to a large extent predicated on the standard employment relationship. The challenge is therefore to adapt labour and social protection policies so as to foster an inclusive labour market for the future. This paper sets out trends and provides insights on how to cope with challenges arising from the growing diversification of employment arrangements with respect to strengthening social protection, within a broader context of employment and social policies. It provides data and insight into some of the larger challenges that have accompanied this transformation and describes a range of policy responses

This portfolio of 21 policy guidance notes has been developed as part of the knowledge products of the Outcome 5 on the promotion of decent work in the rural economy. The guidance notes complement the existing ILO policy briefs on rural development that were published in 2011.8 The portfolio illustrates the ILO’s holistic approach to promoting decent work in the rural economy and brings together the broad range of instruments and tools developed by the ILO over the past years. The goal of the policy guidance notes is to offer guidance to policymakers, the social partners and development practitioners on ways to effectively address employment- and labour-related issues in the rural context. The portfolio should lead to concrete action to ensure that account is taken of the key role of decent work in paving the way for social and economic advancement in rural areas, and should ultimately enable the ILO and its constituents to assist countries in factoring decent work priorities into rural development plans and policies.

The World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2016 provides a global overview of recent trends in employment, unemployment and labour force participation as well as different dimensions of job quality such as vulnerable employment and working poverty. The report covers all countries in the world and describes patterns in the main regions and sectors. It also presents projections for the period 2015–17 for employment and unemployment. A key finding is that the expansion of the world economy has been too weak to close the significant employment and social gaps that have emerged since the beginning of the global crisis in 2008. Around 197 million people were unemployed in the world in 2015, and the projections are for a further increase in global unemployment by more than 3 million people over the next two years. Since 2007, more than 76 million jobs have been lost and this jobs gap is set to widen further mainly due to a continuous decline in the labour force in developed countries and rising unemployment in emerging economies.