You’d expect both left and right to agree that the best way for people to escape poverty – in the global south as much as in Britain – is to work their way out. Rhetorically, that’s certainly the case. But look at the detail of what the coalition-led DFID is doing, and the picture gets a bit blurry.
DFID’s reluctant secretary of state Justine Greening stresses the need for private sector solutions to global poverty. Yet engagement with DFID over the past three years hasn’t yielded much clarity about what their private sector growth strategy actually means. This encouraged Ivan Lewis to ask the TUC to work with people from the corporate sector on developing guidelines for an appropriate private sector role in development.
When it comes to good jobs, the picture is even worse. DFID have told us in the past that they’re not really sure they can even measure the job creation impact of their policies, and as for how good those jobs are, dream on.
They operate as if any job is a good job. That makes the jobs at the Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh – where over a thousand people died in April – good ones. We don’t think so.
What trade unions are calling for, especially in the context of what replaces the millennium development goals post-2015, is decent work. As well as its fairly obvious connotations, it’s more precisely described by the tripartite International Labour Organisation as comprising more and better jobs; social protection; rights at work; and social dialogue involving employers and unions.
The decent work agenda aims to provide sustainable employment, using skills to add value rather than just grubbing a subsistence from the ground. Social protection floors around the world would cost less than two per cent of developing countries’ GDP, delivering unemployment benefit, family support like the Brazilian borsa familia, minimum wages and pensions. Rights at work encompass the eradication of child and forced labour, health and safety, anti-discrimination laws, and freedom to join a trade union and bargain collectively over terms and conditions (including, of course, raising wages). And social dialogue means employers and unions working on these issues with governments, so that solutions are flexible, and inclusive rather than top-down.
The global trade union movement has designated 7 October every year as the World Day for Decent Work, and last year the TUC issued a scorecard on how DFID was doing. While it wasn’t a completely bleak picture (DFID is doing fairly good work on social protection, for example), but the overall score was a rather paltry 25 out of 56. DFID can do better than this…
You would think that, given the importance of work in overcoming global poverty, and given their own shortcomings, DFID would be keen to get the support of the International Labour Organisation. But one of the first things that the coalition-led DFID did was to scrap the UK’s discretionary funding for the ILO (the government still pays the mandatory subscription), on the basis that the ILO did not make a sufficient contribution to DFID’s development objectives. It’s a circular argument, using DFID’s weakness on decent work as a reason for not funding the one multilateral agency that might actually plug the gap!
Events have propelled DFID into restoring some of that funding. Trade union campaigns over factory disasters in Bangladesh like that at Rana Plaza have helped encourage DFID to put money into the ILO’s efforts to improve safety. And the work of organisations like Anti-Slavery International and unions in places like Nepal to highlight slave labour in the gulf states have persuaded DFID to fund ILO projects on the issue across southern Asia.
Decent work is something that everyone aspires to, and sometimes people point out that even in the UK we haven’t achieved it for everyone. But the same is true of abolishing hunger and child poverty. These are universal aspirations, and part of the progressive case for development is that it isn’t only about what happens in developing countries.
DFID should put decent work at the heart of its development strategy. Unions are ready to help make development work for all.
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Owen Tudor is head of EU and International Relations at the TUC
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