 Good afternoon. You're very welcome. My name is Kevin Callanan. I'm the General Secretary of the Force of Trade Union and also President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. Just a few preliminary remarks for this afternoon's session. Firstly, you're invited to submit your questions via the Q&A function in Zoom. When you do so, would you please identify yourself and your affiliation so that we can include that when posing the question? You're also encouraged to tweet if you're on Twitter and the handle is at IIEA. So I'm very pleased to welcome you to this Institute of International and European Affairs webinar. A little bit about Ireland and the ILO first of all. Ireland joined the ILO for the first time in 1923 and for the very first time became a titular or full member of the governing body in 2017. In fact, that term has just ended. I think as a country we should be proud of the fact that one of our civil servants, Edward Philan, was the first official of the ILO and indeed became Director General in 1941 and is credited with being the principal author of the 1944 Philadelphia Declaration. So we're absolutely delighted to be joined today by Guy Ryder, current Director General of the International Labour Organization, who's been generous enough to take time out of his busy schedule to speak to us. We're delighted indeed to welcome Guy back to the Institute, albeit virtually on this occasion after his previous address in 2015, resonated so strongly with our audience. Guy will provide an address on the topic of the future of work and will discuss how the world can ensure that workers are placed at the heart of the global recovery from the pandemic and at the heart of economic policy in the years ahead. During his address, Guy will argue that the pandemic is continuing to have tremendous impacts on employment and at a global level, labour market recovery is flatlining, with enduring damage to many groups and sectors. He'll argue that comprehensive global responses are needed to address the challenges we face. Guy will speak to us for about 15 minutes or so and then we will go to the Q&A with you, our audience. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you and we will come to them once Guy has finished his presentation. You can also participate in the discussion, as I said earlier on Twitter, using the handle at IIEA. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record, so I'll now formally introduce Guy and hand you over to him. Guy Ryder was first elected director general of the International Labour Organization in 2012 and started a second term in 2017. His vision is for an ILO that anticipates and responds effectively to 21st century realities, reaching the most vulnerable and remaining true to its social justice mandate. From 2006 to 2010 he was general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, having led the unification of the Democratic International Trade Union movement. He's a graduate of Cambridge University. Guy, over to you. Thank you very much indeed Kevin. Good afternoon to everybody and a big thank you to the Institute for providing the opportunity for us to have this conversation, which I believe to be an important conversation at this juncture. Kevin, you've recalled the history of the relationship between your country, between Ireland and the ILO. It's a very long, very important and highly valued relationship. I won't go into it right now. That could be the subject of a separate event, except to say over those last three years when Ireland took up its position as a teacher and a member of our governing body, surprisingly for the first time in history, I think that's led to a real intensification of our relationship and our cooperation. And for that, thanks to everybody in government, in the trade union movement and in the business community in Ireland who've made that happen. Now, fortuitously or otherwise, I suspect otherwise, the title of this conversation, which talks about the future of work and how to foster a human-centered recovery, encapsulates, if you like, the work of our organization, the focus of our work and the extraordinary challenges that we've faced in recent years. And I'm just going to immediately take you back to where I start this story, which is our centenary year of 2019. At that time, we decided, and I think it was a very good decision, that our centenary should be devoted to a really in-depth, a major exercise of reflection on the future of work in the broadest possible sense. What was happening in the world of work, the transformative changes taking place, and what those changes meant for the unchanging mandate of the ILO, which is a promotion of social justice and decent work. Now, in a nutshell, what did that future of work exercise do? What did it result in? It took a look at the, what we call the mega drivers of change at work. And I'm going to reel them off one by one. Technology, digitalization is obviously the first. The second climate change and what we have to do to arrest climate change. Thirdly, demography, demographic trends. You come from countries mostly worried about aging, that that's not the case across the world. There are burgeoning youth populations in other countries. The fourth driver of change, again, self-evidently, but increasingly uncertainly, is processes of globalization. And then a fifth driver of change came into the conversation, almost uninvited, but now appears to be perhaps one of the most important elements, and that is changing social preferences, changing expectations of working life. So if you can just hold those five drivers of change in your mind, I'll come back to them at the end of what I'm about to say in the light of the pandemic, which has occurred in the meantime. The future of work exercise culminated in the adoption of a centenary declaration for the future of work. It is, I think, developing into a seminal text for the activities of our organization. I expect that to be the case for some years. And what does that declaration say? It says, well, we need a new human-centered approach to the future of work, and we need to focus that agenda on investments in three areas, in people and their capacities. So think lifelong learning and skills. Think also adequate social protection for all. We need to invest in the institutions of work and the labor market, those institutions, laws, regulations, which in some cases we have allowed to atrophy and in some cases are falling behind the changes taking place in the world of work. And I mentioned the example of the gig economy of one example of where realities on the ground have possibly run ahead of the capacity of our institutions to deal with them. And the third area of investment is in the jobs of the future. And here, a lot of attention around green jobs already, and this is pre-pandemic, the care economy, infrastructure, and for much of the world, let's not forget the rural economy, making the rural economy a place where decent work is available, rather than a place to escape from. So that was the agenda we developed for the ILO in the moment of our centenary in 2019. And then COVID happened. COVID has turned the world upside down in ways that you're all aware of. Let me just give you perhaps a few of the numbers without overburdening you. What we saw in the course of 2020 was an extraordinary crash of labor markets around the world. Not easy to quantify that crash because with so many different interventions taking place in labor markets, furloughs, what on the continent, people called technical unemployment, short time working, et cetera, et cetera, we had to pick one metric to try to assess the damage brought by the pandemic to labor markets. And we measured through some quite innovative now casting techniques, the actual reduction in hours worked in the world. So you see this is not about unemployment and employment, it's about the amount of work that was actually done in the world and is being done today. And what did we see? Well, quite a dramatic fall off in work in the second quarter of 2020, a steep recovery in the third quarter, that recovery decelerated in the last quarter of 2020. But the bad news is, and you've prefigured this in your comments Kevin, is in 2021, this year, labor markets in terms of actual working activity are flatlining. We are not putting on more jobs or at least that's not translating into hours of work, even at a time that the global economy is growing between five and six percent. And we need to unpack that reality and see what it shows us about the current state of labor markets. And one thing it shows us very clearly is that there is taking place, what some including the Secretary General of the United Nations has referred to as a great divergence. What does that mean? It means that whilst the richest countries in the world, the advanced industrial economies, the OECD members, if you like, are growing back relatively quickly to pre-pandemic levels of production and areas of work. Nobody's actually got there, but they're getting there. The developing world and the emerging economies are doing exactly the opposite. They are either flatlining or they're actually going backwards in terms of work activity. So labor markets are not recovering in the way that the aggregate growth figures might lead us to believe. So that means I'll just leave you with these numbers that whilst in 2020 last year, the actual reduction in working time worked compared to pre-pandemic conditions was a loss of 8.8 percent. That figure is today 4.3 percent, so we're still 4.3 percent below pre-pandemic work activity. And that is the equivalent of a loss of 125 million full-time jobs in the world. So we're not on a road back to good health. And the trend, of course, is not in the right direction. None of this, none of this, taking into account the possible future evolution of the pandemic, which is all very much on the minds of us all at this point. None of this rather somber outlook is to deny that there has been an extraordinary level of government intervention and action to try to soften the blow of the pandemic. And we've seen that in in many countries, action to stimulate economic activity, action to support incomes of working people, to support enterprises, help them to survive, action to protect the health and safety of those who continue to go to work. And in addition, and it's something which I think we can take some encouragement from, an extensive use of social dialogue to try to work out the challenges posed by the pandemic. Now, that's what's happened. Where does that leave us today? Well, I've talked about this great divergence. The advanced economy is bouncing back with relative vigor, but the emerging and developing world not doing that. I think the first thing we have to do is to understand why that is the case, why that is happening. And I think the explanations are pretty easily to hand and pretty obvious. They have to do in the first instance with the uneven availability of let's call it fiscal fire power, the resources that some countries have been able to bring to the task of countering the effects of the pandemic. And others have not. The latest figures I've seen talk of $17 trillion, that's with a T, $17 trillion US dollars having been spent around the world in a pandemic response action, spent or promised I should add. That's an extraordinary sum of money. But what I think we do have to understand is how very concentrated that expenditure has been. This has been spent by the richest countries on the richest countries. These types of resources have not been available to the poorer countries, which today find themselves in great difficulty to such an extent that we are told today that up to 60, 60 countries today face imminent issues of debt stress or imminent debt crisis. There is a danger that the next crisis spawned by this pandemic will be a financial and debt crisis. And it's not clear to me that sufficient action has been taken to avert that. The second major factor explaining this great divergence is of course the uneven roll out of vaccinations. And if we are facing the prospect of a new variant coming back and hitting us right now, I think we should all reflect on the stark statistics that whilst we are running at vaccination rates, sometimes in the region of 80% in our own populations in Europe, the figure for Africa is 7%, with the obvious dangers as well as injustices attached to that situation. Now, I mentioned to you at the beginning these changes in the world of work, technology, climate, demography, globalization, changing social preferences. How does all that look today in the light of the experience of the pandemic? Well, the first one is technology. I think that if there is one area of agreement, if not consensus, it has been that the pandemic has seen resort to accelerated digitalization, introduction of remote working techniques, in a way which has perhaps not changed what was previously happening, but probably accelerated it. And there is a debate out there. Sometimes it's a debate which I think crowds out other relevant issues about whether we are going to see, if not a generalization of remote working, then a step change in the use of remote working in the coming years. And I think we have to think very carefully about what this means or might mean. The signals are mixed, are they not? If you look across the Atlantic at the United States, we hear some companies household names saying, no, there will be no office to come back to. We prefer you people to work at home, get used to it. That's how it's going to be. And at the same time, we hear other equally well known companies saying they want everybody back tomorrow, vaccinated and back in the office. I cannot draw from these rather contrasting experiences any very firm or definitive conclusions about where this process of digitalization is going to lead us in terms of working practices in the future, except to make the one very obvious point. What we had to do during the pandemic is a matter of choice and preference and negotiation in a post pandemic scenario. There's a difference. On climate change, I think nothing has really changed because of the pandemic. I think what is more important perhaps is what we've seen take place or not take place in Glasgow at COP26. I at least have seen the clear recognition that unless we take full and due account of the economic, social, labor market outcomes and results from action against climate change, that action is liable not to meet with public support, despite its obvious necessity. And we're going to run into very serious obstacles and bringing the notion of just transition and the financing of just transition into the center of climate change debate. But it's happening. It's happening belatedly, but it's happening in ways which I think we should welcome and which challenges all in the world of work, be it businesses, trade unions or governments to take the necessary action. Demography, well, I think we are going to have to come back to the notion that international mobility of labor is a part of the future of work. Migrants have been amongst the populations most severely affected during the pandemic. We have failed and failed quite badly as an international community to govern migration effectively. I simply think that in terms of demography, current patterns will continue, human mobility is going to be one of the responses to it. And we have to step up to its management. Globalization. Now there was a time when we wouldn't talk about whether there would be globalization or a deepening and accelerating globalization. It was something for a period of three decades that we took for granted. It was the background music to everything that we tried to do. Today, for distinctive reasons, some of them connected to COVID-19, some not. I think the future path of globalization is in question. Part of that has to do with geopolitics, trade conflicts. I'm sitting in Geneva, which should be greeting 4000 delegates to the WTO conference at the moment. It's not happening, but clearly one of the motors of globalization is in question and perhaps more directly COVID related. We have to, I think, observe with some caution the behavior and possible re-engineering of global supply chains in the months and years ahead. There is a lot of talk in the light of the blockages now taking place about whether what we are witness to right now is simply like starting your car on a cold morning. It sort of splutters into action. Global supply chains are simply getting back into action or whether we are witness to a rather large-scale re-engineering of global supply chains on the basis of calculations of resilience by companies or by governments, considerations of strategic autonomy. There's all sorts of issues going on there and I think the jury is out upon them. What I want to say about that is this has major implications for global development prospects, not just our countries but those countries which are seeking to insert themselves into global supply chains as a part of their development processes. Lastly, this whole question of social preferences. This is a question which I think we do need to turn our minds to. Has the experience of COVID actually affected the way we view the world of work and what we expect from the world of work? There are some anecdotal reasons to believe that it has changed the way we are thinking about the world of work. Most obviously perhaps we've come to value essential workers in new ways and recognize that perhaps there are those who through their work play an essential role in our societies, a role which is not sufficiently rewarded in the terms and conditions that they receive. That question of valuation of essential work. But there's also a phrase which appeals to me which comes from the United States human resource industry. They talk about COVID clarity that stepping back from the world of work, having things turned upside down for us, has made people step back from their work and think about how it fits into what they want in new ways. Again, I find this anecdotal rather than scientific reference to the great resignation. People just not wanting to go back to the jobs as they previously did. You can understand it for some. If you had a pretty lousy job with low pay and tough conditions and perhaps you went somewhere else, well, you're going to go somewhere else. But I think it's more complicated than that. I think it is a COVID has provided an opportunity for a sort of perspective on the way we organize work, we organize work-life balance that is going to be with us for some time. And in that respect, I do think COVID-19, it's almost indecent to suggest it, does give us a moment of opportunity to think what is wrong with the way we've organized labor markets in the past and a chance to put that right. And that shines very, very well to turn full circle and to close with the notion of a human-centered recovery from this pandemic. We can change the settings. The last 20 months has shown us that things can be organized and done differently. I think the question is whether we have the wherewithal to construct a new normal, to use the cliche, is it actually a better normal, which coincides much better, not only with the ILO's historic mandate to social justice, but taps into some of the frustrations and demands that people have had perhaps implicitly rather than explicitly about that, what they want from their work and what they want for their lives. So I'll leave it at that, Kevin. And I hope that's perhaps been helpful in starting a conversation. Thanks for listening to me.