 Welcome everybody to this afternoon session on COVID-19 and the future of work. I'm very pleased to welcome four distinguished speakers on the panel in alphabetic order. My name is Nobuya Haraguchi from UNIDO. He heads the research and industrial policy advice division there. The UNIDO is United Nations Industrial Development Organization. I understand he's sitting in Vienna. Then we have Sanjita Porana from Bournemouth University, a professor of economics there in the trade and development specialist. We have François Lafond from the University of Oxford. He's the deputy director of the complexity economics program and lead researcher at the related institute for new economic thinking of the University of Oxford. And last but not least, Aurelio Parizzotto from ILO, a senior economist of the policy integration department of that institution, that common institution in Geneva. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic impacts upon many ways and the way that production is organized and the way in which consumption takes place. There has been a lot of reliance and that's what we do at the moment on remote work and an increased use of automation technologies in many sectors, allowing firms to maintain and increase production levels in the face of social distancing and strict lockdowns. On the consumption side, there has been an increased use of e-commerce. Yes, and well, there is a lot of expectation now how long this all goes on. And well, my guess is the pandemic will not leave us very fast, at least not in a very complete way. So the interesting thing is now how this big shock impacts on what we are doing and how we do it on the labor market and this human resources. And how long-lasting these impacts will be and how much these impacts support past trends which we have seen or even stop them. Now, what we do in this session is that we first ask all the panelists to present what they think is the most important issue from CSRI in a short statement. Then we, in a second part, we will exchange a few opinions on critical issues. And at the end, we invite the wider audience we have here for questions. Of course, I invite everybody already now to write in potential questions we should discuss in the chat at the right-hand side. Now, let me ask the general starting question to the panel. Where do you see COVID-19 as a major game changer for the future of work? What will run differently? And I ask this first to Mr. Haraguchi, what is your opinion on this? Thank you class for your introduction. As we know, the COVID-19 had severe economic and social impacts on the world. Projected decline in global GDP growth in 2020 is 6.6%. The deepest global recession in 70 years. Projected decline in global working hours is around 9%. And projected increase in global extreme poverty is around 15%. This is equivalent to 97 million more people living in extreme poverty due to the pandemic. But these aggregate numbers must significant differences in the impact across and within countries. The decline in economic activity, of course, closely correlates with the severity of the pandemic and stringency of countries' containment measures. But also, structural characteristics of countries such as size of domestic market, level of integration to the global economy, and composition of the economy have all made differences in the impact on industry and fund performances. While negative impacts will be seen as the economy's recover, some of the changes introduced during the COVID are likely to stay or will be even more prominent in the future. Before the onset of the pandemic, we have witnessed some megatrends such as digitalization, climate change, geographical shifting production location. The pandemic will not change these megatrends, but it is likely to accelerate the pace of these trends. At UNIDO, we conducted farm-level surveys in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We collected around 4,000 responses in total. For example, on average, 15 to 25% of farms introduced new technologies and equipment to automate their production during the pandemic. And 70 to 85% of them indicated that changes will stay in the future. Also, the volume of global investments for sustainability increased by 40% from 2019 to 2020. Manufacturing firms in developing countries expect the pandemic to accelerate the adoption of sustainably environmentally friendly technologies. In a sense, the pandemic imposed us to have a social and economic experiment, which revealed further existing divides, gaps, and inequalities. And let us learn what is possible for works under the megatrends of our time. This is the reason why the pandemic will accelerate megatrends. Thank you Klaus. Thank you. Now, Sanjita, what's your view on this? Thank you so much Klaus for having me on this panel and it's a great opportunity to discuss a little bit about what we have been doing the past few months since the pandemic hit. So with regards to the question you had about the impact on work, I think it's really very important to contextualize that COVID-19 has actually increased and reinforced the inequality dynamics. And basically, as you rightly mentioned, it's caused the digital transformation of production, commerce, and work to accelerate. Now, clearly, what has happened is it was alluded to that smaller firms have struggled, but the larger ones, which are the more advanced firms, they have actually increased the market share. And they have fortified the shift more towards an oligopolistic and a less competitive market structure, unfortunately. And this has only been possible because of increased automation and teleworking. What has happened is that this has tilted the labor market against low-skilled, low-wage workers. And this has also had a very negative impact on gender in terms of employment because now what we see is that the distribution has shifted. So the distribution of both capital and labor income has been unequal and the income has actually shifted from labor to capital. So this basically underlines that we cannot look at the impact of the employment impact of the pandemic without looking at the gender impact. Another important point I think which we need to highlight is that COVID-19 has had a profound impact on work, on where people work. It has basically altered fundamentally the understanding of what work is performed and how we perform it. So basically, businesses are looking now to retrain, re-skill their workforce because it's really very important to identify where the gaps lie in terms of skills. So let's stop here. I'll let the other panelists come in and I can discuss a little bit more about countries' specific differences. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much for your intervention. Now, Francois, what's your particular view? Hi. So thanks Klaus for the nice introduction and for the invitation. So I really liked how the question was phrased because it was about how our expectations about the future have been changed by COVID. And so I agree with Nobuya that there were those megatrends and they're here to stay. But the question is whether COVID has accelerated them or not. So I thought I would pick one of them in particular, which is the sustainability transition. And so I think there are two questions. The first is how do we expect the sustainability transition to affect the future of work? And the second is whether or not COVID has accelerated this transition. So what do we need the sustainability transition to achieve and what does it mean for labor markets? Well, it's a big challenge to take the UK as an example. A prominent recommendation is to reduce emissions by 60 percent between 2019 and 2035. So 60 percent in 16 years. And in the case of the UK, it cannot come just from low hanging fruits because most of the cold plants have been closed already. So it's really about changing large parts of the economy. So electricity generation for sure, but also transport, manufacturing, mining, construction, agriculture and the many jobs in supporting services that need to become greener. So green finance and circular economy training for executives and stuff like that. So where are those green jobs? It's difficult to define them. There's the sort of broad definition from ONET that is becoming popular. And it seems, if you take that, that green occupations are overrepresented in groups that are intensive in abstract tasks. So because business managers will need to upskill to become greener. And there's also a lot of green jobs in manual routine tasks. So construction, maintenance, mining, and there will be a need for upskilling there. So are these green jobs different? Apparently, yes, if you take within an occupation and you compare the green version and the less green version of basically the same occupation, you find that green jobs tend to be a bit more abstract and require more education and more experience. So basically the sustainability transition will imply the substantial transformation of the economy with new occupations, a lot of transition with training and upskilling. So we're waiting for that. Now the question is, did COVID accelerate this? If you take as the engine of this transition fiscal policy and you ask, okay, with all these huge budgets that have been spent and borrowed incidentally, are they green? Will they accelerate the sustainability transition? It was a massive opportunity. And the consensus is no, no it doesn't. So for instance, if you take the Global Recovery Observatory at Oxford, they estimate that the total spending is on 20 trillion, which is a quarter of world GDP. And out of that, 15% is about investment rather than rescue. And only 2.5% is green. So it's almost nothing. Just couple of quotes, there's a separate entity, Vivid Economics, and I quote also as a report saying, the announced stimulus to date will have a net negative environmental impact in 15 out of 20 economies because just doing a few green things if you also subsidize the dirty things just doesn't add up. Another source is the International Energy Agency, who also find 2% of total spending is for clean energy. But what they find is that in 2023, emissions will be at record levels. They will keep rising after that. And yes, they are 800 million tons lower than they would have been without the effort, but they're still 3,500 million tons above where they should be to reach the 1.52 degrees gold from the Paris Agreement. So basically what I would say is that the sustainability transition as we need it would be a game changer for labor markets. But so far it's not on track and it's not being accelerated by COVID, although I'm sure there are differences in developing countries and in specific firms and so on. Well, thank you very much, good points. We have to discuss them. Aulio, are you a little bit more optimistic than the others? Thank you, thank you Klaus. Thank you, thanks, you and Merit for organizing this session and for inviting us. I think this is a really important topic. But the question of green job has been a long standing flagship of the ILO. But I would like to start with a common sense observation and it is that the future of work is what we are able to make of it. Not determined by technology or by the market, but depends on the policy that we are capable of putting in place. So the concern I would like to raise, which was echoed by colleagues before, is that of deepening inequalities because of the pandemic. And in particular that those deepening inequalities can become entrenched and lead to polarized economic and labor market structure. And this can lead to sharp divides in politics in society. So fueling populism or economic nationalism. So in a nutshell, it would make it more difficult the task of shaping a better and more sustainable future of work. So of undertaking environmental responsible fiscal policy, for example. So I think this is particularly important for me. How is COVID-19 playing a role? I mean it was mentioned before. This clear evidence that those who are more vulnerable on the labor market has been more deeply affected. So unemployment, inactivities, poor working conditions, insecurity have increased for women, young workers, informal workers, migrants. But I think also for low skilled workers, so adult, white and workers that have experienced stagnant wages for about two decades in the past. So many have become detached from the labor market. It will take time to get them back. But I've also mentioned there's another dimension of increasing inequality, which is a cross country. So for the poor economies, the impact has been devastating because they did not have the fiscal resources for massive relief programs like in the advanced economy. So there are two levels of increasing inequalities. There's some perhaps not too good news. If we look at the recovery, which is ongoing, which is strong for GDP in some countries. But if we look at the labor market, the new jobs are not of great quality. Particularly in the many developing countries, we have evidence in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America. The new jobs are mainly in the informal economy. So formal sector jobs are hard to come, are difficult to come. If we look at advanced economy where there's been a really amazing supply side response, the major shift to automation, telework, artificial intelligence really helped the recovery very strongly. But on the labor market, many of the jobs like digital platform are actually of very poor quality. Young people are trapped in very unclear activities with very unclear contractual arrangements. A new model of work where it's not clear the boundaries between risk, responsibility and rewards. So this is a bit of concern I think in the sense. And then just another point, if we look at the shape of the economic recovery, although we have assets, they've been enjoying benefits from booming stock exchange market, increasing housing market, etc. This is a global economic crisis where the number of bankruptcy of firms and the volume of non-performing bank loss has actually decreased. So there's a two-track recovery. So the financial side is doing quite well. On the labor market side, it is not doing quite well. What can be done? I'm sure we're going to discuss about policy. So I don't want to enter into that. Just I would like to say that there's not a single, there's not a silver bullet. There's not a single solution. We had to think in terms of complex policy packages that are adapted to the political attitude and preferences of each country. Sorry for taking so long, but thank you for the occasion. No, no problem. I think thank you very much. Now we have a very broad picture, of course, many issues which have to be put into ideas to handle them in the panel. So let us go through what you said, what you all said in steps, hopefully. Let's start with the idea. What happens to, let's start, let's say, above global? What does this mean for globalization? Labor mobility and remote work. Will the remote work stay? Or if you have a chance, just we go back. And while looking back to history, looking at what happened after the Spanish flu at the beginning of the last century, a very globalized world stopped at a comfortable being of the world in my view. It's in particular migration at the time, as we all know. Little history repeat. I mean, what is your view on the panel? I mean, intervene as you want, and we don't have to answer, but if you want, please go ahead. We would like to respond to this issue. Yes, please go ahead, Nobuya. Thank you. Thank you for posing a very important question. I think on the production side, firms which are exposed to especially global value chains and foreign trade have been severely affected due to the value chain disruption and so on. So that might affect in the future in terms of how they will reorganize their production. Maybe we will have more visual global value chains or importance of domestic production and capabilities might increase. It's not still certain yet, but this is the only possibility. But what we started seeing is that diversification of supply sources. That is we have already witnessed. In order to secure sources during the time of the similar crisis, in order to continue the production. And that is what is happening right now in industries. Thank you. Anybody else interested in that topic? Yes, so just to say something about remote work. So I don't know whether it will stay, but first of all, it's maybe a third of the jobs depending on the countries of course, but it's hardly the majority. That said, if some of the work from home can stay, it does have a few channels through which it can have beneficial environmental effects. Just because people don't travel, offices might not need to be hit. And some firms are starting to limit international travel. But who is it? You're right. It's one side. We have to see that not all jobs can be easily done from home or from far away. But also, I mean, since I'm in this business for longer, two decades ago, if you went to computer events, fairies and future congresses and whatever everybody was speaking about the next very soon, we would all stay with our laptop somewhere. We were not working in a specific office, but from home on the street or anywhere else. And for decades after, I guess, when I have seen it and I have observed it, nothing really happened, at least not very strong. So the question is, is it really different? And given we will come back to that issue, we are not investing really in the future at the moment. We are not restructuring. This is our next issue in a way. Yes, it's not. There's no restructuring going on in a significant way. Why would all this change? Is anybody else? I mean, maybe also with the next issue, will we fall back? And what is about quality of work, digitalization and automation? Will this go on faster or is it just moving on slower as far as it was? Or what is your opinion on that? Oh, maybe just one quick comment on the structural change, on the acceleration of the structural change. I think it was already mentioned by Nubuya, but there are quite a number of survey of enterprises of employers. The World Economic Forum has carried out quite a number, where there really is a strong interest and strong investment by employers in the new technologies, in the new way of working. And if I also think of some survey of workers about, do they prefer to work at home or in the office, that also gives me that impression that there is some propensity, some preference for more digitalized form of work. We have some concern because so far the platformization of work has been associated with not very satisfactory working conditions. So this is something that has really tackled in terms of policy. I just wanted to make one comment to mention the question of migration. I think that the drivers there are the sharp difference in demographic growth across countries, which are really quite important. So migration, mobility across borders may decline, may be more difficult, may be subject to health and passport control, but they already control, but the pressure will be there. We're doing some work on the LDC. So the 49 poorest countries in the world. So by 2050, one out of four of the young people between 15 to 24 will be born in an LDC. We will be born in a poor country. So there will be going in a situation where the opportunities you have locally are really not very promising. So I think this is something we should take into account. I think you're right, the demographic differences. Let's say it takes a continent of Africa versus Asia and Europe. Then one can easily see there is such a huge difference in growth of population where Europe and Asia may be excluding India, losing jobs, losing people whereas in Africa, people are searching for jobs. It certainly will be so strong that there will be, I agree with you, massive migration flows, which cannot be stopped even with the new experiences of border control and other countries. Closing the borders like we have seen in the pandemic was not a realistic picture, but obviously somehow, not really, but somehow we can do it for a shorter period in some ways. Now, the issue of inequality has been mentioned a few times between you on the panel. Is there just the old inequality or is there something like a new inequality coming from the challenges initiated by COVID-19? So those who are able to work from home are allowed or able and can do it from the job and others who are not, such as an example or those who have not access to technologies. Because on the other side, the new technology is also a chance for developing countries to bring the capacities in through the Internet and the work there. What do you think about the situation? Is there a new inequality? Yes or no? Sanjita, what's your opinion? You spoke about gender, yes? Yes, gender inequality. We know how it is and we don't like it. So the question is, of course, the burden is in the pandemic. The burden for females was much larger for many reasons, yes? But the list is clear. Yes, thank you. Yes, so let me develop the inequality in terms of gender actually. So if you look at numbers, we see that women actually make 39% of global employment. That's how much they are employed in the workforce. But actually, when it came to job losses, 54% job losses were of women. So clearly, we see that despite women making only 39% of the global employment, 54% actually lost. So what is this telling me? This is telling me that women have been employed both in formal and informal sector. And the losses are going to be really high for women because what the pandemic has actually highlighted is that the burden of unpaid care has actually increased on women. And what has also happened is that women have been disproportionately paid because they were employed primarily in service sectors. And those were the ones which actually got paid. Now, we see that employment is actually really women's employment is nose diving compared to male employment. So one can see very interesting contrasts. Let me give you two examples. One of the US and the other of India. So in the US, we see that women actually make a 46% of workers before COVID-19. Now, when we factor in industry mix effects, we see that women actually made up for 43% of job losses. But if now, if we look at India, very interesting to see that in India, women only make up just one-fifth of the total workforce. But what has happened is as a result of the industry mix shift, we find that 23% of overall job losses have happened when we look from the gender lens. So clearly we see that women have been disproportionately impacted negatively as a result of COVID and the inequality has increased not only in terms of incomes, but also in terms of gender inequality. Yeah, I agree with what Sanjita said. Yes, we looked at our farm-level data and in both the farmland workers and temporary workers, women were laid off. This is the same for both advanced countries, developing countries across different regions. This is what happened. And this is not only a short period of impact because if you lose a job to shoulder the household work and paid household work and so on, then you interrupt your career. And that will have the wrong implications on women's success in their careers. Thank you. More on this inequality is an important issue. If not, we have another running out of time soon but we have another important issue, policy issues. I mean, we have heard from and we cannot see a big impact of the measures taken currently. That's often what if you're a longer observer of what governments do in crisis is they have the right projects available which make a long-term impact. So it's more kind of a Keynesian program to bring people into work. I'm not saying that's bad, but I'm just saying that it's not possible to use the crisis for change because the projects that are driving change are not on the table. But the other possibility is to train people, education, skilling, retraining. But also in crisis, you don't think that you think that people have time in which they could reach pain, but they don't do it. Where are the problems on these issues? I mean, what is Edo's saying about all this? Francis, I think, wants to intervene, please. Oh, okay. Thank you. Thank you, Edo. No, I mean, in those sort of recovery packages, trackers, they've developed taxonomies to understand what's in them and what's grain. If I list some of these categories, I think it helps to see what's there and what could be the jobs of tomorrow. So basically, you will have energy, so renewable production, but also energy efficiency in buildings. So buildings and construction, transport, so electric vehicle productions, and the cycle path and things like that. Natural capital, parks. I mean, we can think mental health during the lockdown and people are reconnecting with parks and so on, and research and development. And what I find interesting is that maybe 10 or 20 years or 30 years ago, you could say, okay, the tech is not here, so the projects are not ready. But now a lot of the technologies are ready to be deployed. Renewable power generation is cheap. Electric cars, okay, you still have problems, but the main problem is to develop the infrastructure. So a lot of these grain policies that have been put on the table are actually close to shovel ready to connect to what you were saying, class. Now, probably not all of them, and that's part of the reason it's too small, but nevertheless, there are some proposals out there. Yeah, if I may, I would like to add to the list submitted by Francoise because I think what is particularly important in my view is in the recovery program that actually our ambition just for a few, you know, quite advanced rich countries for many other, for reasons of lack of fiscal space and many other reasons, our ambition is really not there so far. But for the countries we embark really on, you know, strong recovery packages, the sector that are targeted and should be targeted are also sector like the care economy, broadly defined like the health sector, the education sectors, but also the social protection system in terms of, you know, overcoming the gaps that have been very clear because of the COVID pandemic. This is quite important because this sector creates jobs and are part of the response to the inequality we were discussing before, so that they provide some countervailing, you know, force against the inequality trends that we have been discussing. So I think it will be important that, you know, we don't forget those sectors. I think the Biden administration and the large part that the support to childcare and other social services plays is a quite good example of this new approach. So this is building a sustainable future of war and then in concrete terms. Well, thank you to the previous speakers. You've touched on very important issues. I think we have to remember that governments and businesses have to work in partnership because only when they work in partnership, this is going to build a strong and interconnected ecosystem which has to be committed to upscaling because now upscaling and reskilling is what has to be brought onto the table and that cannot be done just by governments. We have to make sure that there is strong partnership between education providers, between businesses and with the government. And I think there is going to be a lot of need to think about innovation and content in terms of delivery, in terms of financing, in terms of actually developing public-private partnerships. Thank you. We cannot hear you, Klaus. Yes, your voice is breaking a bit. You might need to refresh your tap. That might help. There were two questions or three questions or comments in the Q&A. Maybe, if Klaus, you will find out if you can manage the audio. At the same time, the presenters could take a look at those. Okay, Kathy, if I may, there's one question on the status of the largest employer and the increased reliance on new technologies in the public sectors. Let me just sort of respond briefly that actually, this e-government, if you can call that, is one of the positive in part of digitalization and new technology for developing countries. Because they're quite example. India has been really gung-o on these issues, but other countries from Bangladesh, to many other countries, Togo, Senegal, a number of African countries, of course, Rwanda and others, really introduce new information technology in the way in which public policy is implemented. With some benefits in terms of increased accountability, transparency, also as well as increased delivery. So, there's some opportunities there that we should be looked at and they are quite important. So, can you hear me? I'm back. It seems that I had some technical problems. Sanjita, thank you very much. Sanjita, please, yes, please go. Yes, so I think it's really, as you rightly alluded to, organizations actually now will have to coach their managers and leaders how to manage remote working, because there is a major shift that has happened in transparency, in trust and dynamic work patterns. So, I think, again, going back, this has to be some kind of a partnership for us for the world to come out of the hole that we've got into at the moment. Thank you. Nubuya, you have something to say? Yes, thank you, Glas. As for digitalization for low-income countries, especially, it is important for them to invest in basic infrastructure, digital infrastructure, because without broadband, it's very hard to do remote work and develop the advanced technology production. So, it is important to have first basic infrastructure and also training, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. And as for sustainability, as Francois said, yes, we are probably making more efforts recent years, but that will not be enough. Yes, during the pandemic, we saw around 8% CO2 decline, but in order to reach policy agreement, we have to reduce 8% every year until 2050. So, this is a massive worldwide project, and we have to further accelerate to meet this goal. And we witnessed that policy, actually, we talked about policy. Policy formulation process suffered during the pandemic, especially developing countries' government. They had fewer interactions with stakeholders, and they had to do more desk work and so on. So, we have to have more inclusive, participatory policy formulation process by interacting with all the government stakeholders and making sure interministerial coordination. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Do we have exhausted the questions from the audience? Maybe Aurelia, yes. You will have sent more or less the last word. Oh, no, sorry. Just one, again on the digital opportunity, where we're doing some work and I think it's particularly important for low-income countries is on the informal sector. So, there are tools that can have the progressive transition to formalization. And we, for example, electronic recording of transaction in Mexico, payroll platform for small micro-businesses in Peru, domestic work registration in Uruguay, health insurance application in Ghana, digital labor inspections in Argentina, et cetera, et cetera. There's quite a lot of kind of grassroots pilot initiative and experimentation that could really provide some push to the process of formalization. I think it's important to keep that in mind. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think our task was impossible, an impossible challenge to deal with this very important question in 45 minutes. But we have seen a number of very interesting insights. I thank very much all the wonderful speakers and thank you for the interactions and cooperation. And of course, we have to thank all the people listening to us. It's a large crowd as I see. And thank you very much. And enjoy the rest of this wonderful conference. Thank you. Thank you so much.