 I'm a managing director at the World Economic Forum, and my great pleasure to have with us a very illustrious panel who can tell us more about what that future outlook is for the world of work. To my immediate left, Martin Walsh, the U.S. Secretary of Labor, welcome. To his left, Gilbert Hongbo, Director General of the International Labor Organization. And to his left, Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture. And finally, at the far end of the panel, Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal. Welcome to all of you. We're excited that today marks exactly the third-year anniversary of the Reskilling Revolution initiative launched here in Davos in January 2020, with the goal to reach 1 billion people with better education, better skills, better learning, and better jobs by 2030. Three years into the initiative, today we're announcing that 350 million people have been reached, so just about over the point that we should be at, 30% of the way into the timeline, through the work of multiple governments, through the work of multiple businesses, and most importantly, through the work of several public-private collaborations in this space. We also launched earlier this week a report on the future of jobs. And of course, that's the topic for today. While there's plenty to worry about in terms of future disruptions, there's also a huge amount of opportunity. For example, one of the studies that came out says that there are 76 million jobs in social and green sectors alone in just 10 of the economies that were covered as part of this data. So plenty of opportunity, and at the same time, plenty to also worry about in terms of technological shifts, in terms of shifting supply chains, and in terms of the disruptions from the green transition. And that's some of what we will be discussing today. For the first set of comments, Secretary Walsh, over to you. Yeah, thank you very much, and thank you all. It's great to be on this panel, and thank you for being here with us today, and the folks that are watching from home and office is welcome. It's my first World Economic Forum visit, and I've had a great day talking to people and sharing the vision of the Biden-Harris administration particularly around a worker-centered economy. President Biden is focused on building an economy that works from the bottom up in the middle out. That means creating good jobs and creating pathways into the middle class. This approach is getting results. If your unemployment is at a 50-year low and we want to build in the United States, I should say, and we want to build on that success. So I was eager to come here and learn from companies and countries and other folks that are here today. Just to kind of sum up my job a little bit, the first session we had was reskilling the Reskilling Revolution Initiative, and it quite honestly falls in line with what we're doing in the United States and what we need to do coming out of a global pandemic. I think that we have a unique opportunity with the pandemic, with coming back and how do you build back stronger an economy that works for everyone, and part of that is reskilling and upskilling people. And we're doubling down in the United States on that. We spent $380 million last year alone on apprenticeships. We're spending money on job training, workforce development. And in the legislation that's been passed in the legislature this year, there's job training opportunities in all of that work, including construction and manufacturing after the fact. I also joined a session about attracting talent and how do we do this for workers that have been underrepresented for a long time? Are essential for growing our workforce and really focusing on communities of color, women in America, rural America, veterans, and in other parts of the globe in having these conversations today. And on my first panel, we had India represented there, Italy represented there, and really talk in the European Union represented there. And the challenges are a little different, but at the end of the day, the themes are all the same. How do we continue to move forward? And tomorrow I'm gonna talk about good jobs, the Good Jobs Initiative, highlighting the historic clean energy investments that the president is launching in the United States and how do we work around the globe with that? How do we continue to move forward and making sure that these are good jobs? So I can go more into it, I'll stop there and I'll turn it back to you and then we can go, I can go back into some of the stuff. This is more pointy questions. That's great, thank you so much. Gilbert, your perspective globally, how are some of these trends playing out and what do you think the greatest needs are? Thank you so much and welcome you all as well. I mean globally, a few days ago we, I know we have launched our, the World Economic and Social Outlook, WESO, we call it, on report and also a few weeks back our annual wage report. And I'm afraid that the news are not necessarily what we want to hear. At the global level the employment growth is slowing down and we project only 1% employment growth in 2023. At the same time we also expect productivity to go down in 2023 at the global level. You will not also be surprised that the current multiple crisis, including the war in Ukraine and other crisis leading to the inflationary situation, is putting a lot of pressure on the real wage, particularly for the low skilled workers that are really at risk of losing part of the purchasing power. Another dimension that is quite very of concern to ILO is the quality of job. One thing is to talk about the job creation in terms of quantity, but the quality of job is really, and what we have noticed, if globally, particularly in the global north, there is a recovery in terms of number of hour work compared to the last quarter in 2019, i.e., pre-COVID. We know that in the rest of the world, the initial recovery earlier in the year 2022 has been wiped off in the third and fourth quarter. So then the new hour work that has been created, the new job that we created, are much more in the informal sector. So that for us is we know what the informal sector, what it imply in terms of lack of minimum social protection or protection schemes. Obviously, some of you may have a look at our reports. We have started developing a new index to really highlight what Secretary Walsh talked about this morning at the session. In terms of what we call the job gaps, not just about the unemployment, i.e., taking into account workers that have just, that have decided to quit the job market, or if you look at the unpaid care economy, for example, where we know 75% are women, and that couldn't really free themselves up to go back to the job market. All of that is a major concern for us. The last point that I would just make is to highlight that if you look at the youth bulge, which remain, if you look at the youth that are neither in employment, nor in education or training, they need, as we call them, and they remain at 23% for 2023. So it's quite, those are a little bit of the situation. Thank you very much. Very helpful to have that global outlook. Julie, on the spectrum of techno-optimism or techno-pessimism around jobs, your views. I think we're actually living in one of the best moments in history to actually be able to create systems that allow the lower skilled to have good jobs and to allow countries to be able to flip when they need to, and that's because the disruption we've gone through and the technology advancements have meant that to thrive in the next decade, companies and countries have to be able to access talent, they have to be able to be talent creators, and they gotta be able to unlock that talent, which often means being a more diverse place to be able to really unlock diverse talent. And it's that central piece that you have to be able to create talent. There are not enough skills in the world that we need, and that's why when you think about the US spending $380 million on apprenticeships, that is driven by the need to create talent where we have gaps. At Accenture in the US, we have 2,000 apprentices in professional services, unheard of. We started with five in 2015. And the key to being able to reskill at scale starts with technology. When the pandemic hit and there was this massive need for cloud skills, we retrained 100,000 people at Accenture in six months. We were able to do that because our people, we have a complete inventory of their skills. We could run AI algorithms against those skills and identify who could be re-skilled. Now, when you think about the challenges that we just heard from Gilbert and the secretary around the need for upskilling, technology is gonna be part of how we'll be able to identify what are the gaps, who could be re-skilled, what are adjacent skills. Then you think about how you do that re-skilling. So we have over 750,000 people at Accenture. I require as the CEO, with my entire C-suite, all of those individuals to take 11 assessments across technology, we call it TQ. So last year, about 680,000 had passed eight assessments. That I can do all around the globe because I use a technology platform. I'm able to then provide assessments and put automatically without lots of people, these individuals on which learning path they need in order to pass the assessment. And so this convergence of need with actual technology that will allow upskilling at scale and then good government, I think makes me extraordinarily optimistic. Thank you, Julie. Financial inclusion is obviously a huge part of the future of jobs. Dan, your views? Yeah, I think financial inclusion or financial health is something that we need to be thinking about, not just access to jobs or skills, because the single biggest competitive advantage that any company has is the strength of their workforce. Are they passionate about what they're doing? Are they dedicated to the company? And do they have a semblance of physical health, mental health, as well as financial health? And one of the things that we talk about all the time is how many people struggle to get by at the end of every month. And in the US, which is one of the world's most developed countries, almost two out of every three adults struggle to get by. They struggle in between paychecks to pay their bills. And I did a survey of PayPal employees because honestly, I thought we were a tech company, we pay at or above market rates. Our survey would come back and we reveal that we were paying extremely well. Our workers were very happy and I was gonna talk about that at an all employee meeting. What I found is that for our entry-level employees and all of our call center employees, that they were financially stressed as well. Two thirds of them also struggled to make ends meet. And it was a big aha moment where I realized that for many segments of the population, the market is not working for them. Even though you're paying at market wages, people are financially stressed. We did a measure of this. We basically surveyed how much net disposable income do our employees have after they pay their taxes and essential living expenses. And what we found is for that population, all they had was between four to 6% net disposable income. So they were obviously prepared for any emergency. They couldn't afford any unexpected expense. They were picking and choosing. Do they put food on the table or take healthcare benefits? And what we decided is that the single biggest investment we could do to maximize return for PayPal would be to invest our employees. And so we raised wages. We made every employee in PayPal an owner of the company. So everybody gets restricted stock and has a stake in the success of the company. And then we lowered the cost of healthcare benefits by over 65%. And then we wrapped all of that into a financial education program. This is the first time that our employees had had equity that they actually had savings. And what we found by doing that is now the NDI in the US, net disposable income in the US is 15% up from four to 6%. And internationally, we've reached 34% from four to 6%. And what that's led to is less turnover. Our attrition is at lows. Our engagement scores with our employees are at all time high. Our net promoter scores in terms of satisfying customers at all time high, our training costs are actually lower because we have less attrition. And I feel that as CEOs, we need to at least measure how healthy our employees, because if they're financially stressed, then we are sub-optimizing how successful we can be as companies. And I think we can't look to just the public sector for that. We need to work with the public sector, but we have the obligation, and I think moral obligation to take care of our own employees. Thank you. Other views on that? Well, I would just say that, you know, and I think it's both the right thing to do and it's good business. So we've done work around, you know, this topic around, we call it being net better off. If your employees are net better off for working there, the impact on your profitability is significant. And one of the characteristics of being net better off is financial security, not paying market. That's different. It's actual financial security. And so, again, why I am optimistic is that when these things don't make business sense, they're very hard to be sustained. They become tied to CEOs to moments in time. And in fact, if you factor in financial security as part of your employee framework, it will help drive profit. Can I just just jump in there real quick? You know, do you want to see? No, please. You know, here in Dan and Julie, both talk about private sector. One of the things that we're focused on at the Department of Labor, when we talk about job training, workforce development, and apprenticeship, it's not a program made by us and we then tell the companies how to do it. It's about listening to the companies and what the needs are of the companies. And I really think that at this moment in time, whether it's a rescaling revolution or whatever it might be, it really is about working collectively with business to understand what business needs and how do we make those investments, whether it's in job training through states and cities, whether it's directly with companies, with apprenticeships. We've done more in apprenticeships. Well, I shouldn't say this. We've done a lot in apprenticeships. I don't know if we've done more than the past, but we've done a lot in apprenticeships. We've identified areas like cybersecurity and trucking and nursing, looking at teaching. And I do think we have an opportunity right now. And I think that billion number that you talked about this morning, three years ago, when you said it's not that far off. And I think we have a lot of industries that, you know, when you think about the workforce in America right now, the unemployment rate is 3.5%. The participation rate is 62%, not as high as we'd like it to be. Unemployment in the black community is 5.7%. There are plenty of workers in America that are under-working, under-worked right now, underpaid, if you will, or in the wrong industry. And there are people sitting in communities right now across America that would never think of being able to work for a tech company. Meanwhile, tech companies are looking for them to come in. They don't need the college degree. And if you put the right training programs like the building trades have out there, and it's sustainable while you pay while you work, we really can make a difference, it really can. And if you have employers that are treating their employees correctly and training them, then they're gonna stay, they're gonna keep those folks with the company. So I think there's a win-win here, and we had a lot of discussions today about it. And we can do it. And I think we can do it quickly. And I think that's something that I think is really important. I just wanted to compliment, I believe this is quite a very rich discussion. And I really appreciate what the CEO of PayPal and Julia were saying in the critical nature of having workers, employees that are not financially stressed. And one point that Ailo has been kind of pushing in this discussion is very difficult to just imagine, I was saying in my previous session, 214 million today of workers around the globe that are really considered as poor, meaning that they work the normal week, four-hour week, yet they are not able to even pay the bills at the end of the month. So sooner or later, it's going to be important for us to bring back to life, to the discussion, the real notion of an adequate wage, for an adequate living wage, to ensure that at the end of the day there is a decency of what every workers could live with, and that with the opportunities that Secretary Walsh was referring to. The second point for me is you have to look at that also when we look at that at the national level, maybe sometimes it's simpler, when you look at that at the international level, then you really have to look at the global supply chain. And how do we or could we ensure those principles that we are talking about are also spread across the global supply chains? That is another challenge that we have right now, at the same time where the global supply chain are also a civil lining for wealth and job creation on that. Thank you, very helpful. And in fact, part of the discussions that have happened over the course of the day have been about the future of globalization not really being based around wage arbitrage and competing on the basis of cheap labor, but really about skilled labor, skilled talent, living wages, and then being able to compete in that global economy. I do want to open it up to questions. We have a few minutes for questions. Please say your name and your organization and directly move on to your question. Hi, Faisal Islam, BBC News. Question from Mr Hungbom, one from Mr Walsh. The UK government has introduced minimum service level legislation against unions, that workers could be fired or unions could be sued if minimum service levels are not agreed and keep public services. They have cited the ILO as supporting these agreements. What's your reaction? Should we start with that? The UK is one of our, obviously, our founding member and we are working very, very closely with all our member states, including the United Kingdom, but I'm not aware of any bilateral discussion on this matter. What for us is quite very critical, not only in the UK but across the world. You know, in a situation of economic downturn, we are very worried that workers may have to accept situations so they don't get themselves out of job. They may have to accept situations that is below par on that. Fundamentally our position, ILO does not have the, necessarily is not trying to interfere in a national level discussion, but we really want to stress the importance of social dialogue amongst the three parties to really have a sustainable way forward. Any other questions? Okay, well then I will ask a question. Julie, you had mentioned sort of being able to do some of this at scale and Dan, you had also mentioned that. How do we take this beyond companies like PayPal and Accenture? What are the right kinds of incentives? And it's an open question to all of you. I'll start. First of all, Julie and I actually together are working to drive this idea of financial health across a wide range of CEOs. We have actually an initiative that we're working with Just Capital to go and do that to at least encourage CEOs to get a sense or measure the degree of financial health that their workers are experiencing. And then every company can approach it individually from that because every company is different. I also think there is a immense opportunity as we come out of COVID and where we work and how we work is being redefined. I mean, I think that opens up job markets that previously were difficult to access if we're a Silicon Valley company, if everything is in Silicon Valley, it's hard to find jobs in West Virginia or around the world. But now we, since we were not working just at the office, we can open up that aperture. I think the other thing that people are often worried about are things like AI replacing people, over the last 100 years, we've had one technology after another come about always with forecasts of doom going on. The advent of the telephone was gonna be the end of all manners because you could just call somebody without first writing them a note that you were coming over. And I do think that things like AI may actually open up opportunity for people who have different skills to do things like basic coding because AI will be able to do things like basic coding. It may need human interface to take a look at it, et cetera, but the skills will be different. And I do think that there's a big opportunity for us to think about where we work, how we work, and how we use AI to really open the aperture up and not be so afraid of it but figure out how do we work with it. I would start where Secretary Walsh was with respect to the importance of public and private collaboration. At the end of the day, jobs are local. A person lives someplace and they fill a need. And when you bring together the public sector, both government and schools, as well as the not-for-profits, with the private sector, and you get alignment about basic principles, you can do amazing things. For example, skills are the new currency. We need to be aligned around that. The educational system needs to be aligned. Companies need to understand that this idea of being talent creators and the need to be able to do that. And once you begin to speak that same language, you can look at curriculum, you can look at gaps, you can have expectations of roles and that. And so really focusing and remembering that jobs are local and the collaboration and the needed collaboration I think is absolutely critical. And then bringing innovation. I mean, much of what's happening in the US, for example, around apprenticeships, we learned from Europe and then we innovated in professional services, moving beyond a lot of the traditional places, to say how can we fill technology gaps? At Accenture, 48% of our jobs in the US do not require a four-year degree. We're a tech company in professional services. So that kind of innovation came from a lot of collaboration. How do you talk to schools? How do you really think about what they have? So I do believe that the secret is making sure that we are doing the collaboration, speaking the same language, and then bringing innovation. Thank you. Did you wanna come in with another question? Please. Sorry, Faisal again, BBC News. First Secretary Walsh, just trying to get you on the record, really. There's been a big speech by Ursula van der Leyen of the European Commission about a response from Europe to your government's Inflation Reduction Act and the perception that it's having an effect on jobs in Europe, tempting industries across to America. That's the point of it. Do you have a response on behalf of the administration to fears in Europe that this is an act of green protectionism? I don't have a technical response, but certainly I've had some conversations today that I will be having more dialogue with the White House. Before I go back, I'll be making a call to them. I actually put a call to them earlier today to talk about some of the concerns I heard today and the fears. But I know that the United States is a very good working relationship with, I think, the two countries. Well, one was Germany today. I heard a lot of concerns. There's a good relationship with Germany and certainly we want to keep a strong relationship with our allies. But you don't mean it to take jobs from Europe? No, that wasn't the intention, I don't believe, behind it. I think that, you know, I think there's some senators here as well talking about it. And again, I don't want to get ahead of the White House, so I want to just, you know, make sure that the answer is what is accurate. I don't want to get too far ahead of that. But it has come up a couple of times today. I thought you were going to ask me about the other question. Which one is that? The one you asked before. I'll ask you about that, then. Does America back minimum service levels? No, I don't. No, again, I don't know enough about the legislation, but certainly we'll work with the ILO. We're a member of the ILO as well, the United States. And I don't know what the legislation is, but I don't think, you know, I would not support anything that would take away from workers. Thank you very much. If I can quickly maybe add to that, you know, ILO, we do also have our supervisory independent supervisory control mechanism on that. And the United Kingdom trade union, they know this machinery. They can also file, I'm not suggesting to do it, but they do have the possibility also to file for a complaint on that. And for that, yes, ILO has been also in discussion with the trade unions on that matters, yeah. Thank you very much. I do want to use the final minute that we have left for just a final few seconds from each of you on one challenge as everybody walks away from this conversation. One challenge we need to overcome and one major opportunity around the future of jobs. Dan, would you like to start? Not really. What is it? One challenge and one opportunity? One challenge and one opportunity. I think they may be two sides of the same sword. I think the challenge is that technology is moving so rapidly right now. We are at the early stages of an AI revolution. We're at the early stages of connectivity at massive speeds and reduced latency, new forms of compute power through quantum that will fundamentally change everything. And I think keeping up with that is very difficult both on the private and the public sector. At the same time, it offers tremendous opportunity to do things faster, more efficiently, redefine a lot of the status quo that I think can open up tremendous opportunity for the world. Thank you, Julie. Technology has the power to reskill millions of people which is what we need. The challenge is that whatever we do has to be sustainable so it has to work from an economic perspective and that needs to have real discussion so that we make sure that we are having sustainable solutions that are the right thing to do and that we can afford. Thank you. Shilber? Yeah, I would agree with Dan and Julie that the technology, for me the digital economy is one of really the prospect for all of us and I also agree with Dan by saying that it's two sides of the same coin. The challenge is to make sure that how do we capitalize on the digital economy at the same token making sure that we have a minimum protection for workers in the domain. But globally, both the silver lining and the challenge is how do we ensure that both the economy, the environment and the social, they are three equal feet in moving forward for the world. We need a new social contract for that. Thank you. Final comment. Yeah, I'm going to bring it back to work for us development job training. I think that we need to make sure companies have the workers they need and I think we need to make sure we strengthen the infrastructure, particularly in the United States around how do we make sure that we are creating opportunities and reaching into communities that haven't had opportunities in the past. Just simply saying it and laying out initiative is great makes you feel good for five minutes and a press release, but it's how do you make sure that that is actually happening and making sure that we use data to back up the information and continue those conversations. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Julie. Thank you, Gilbert and thank you, Secretary Walsh. Thank you to our in-person audience and to our live stream audience. Have a good evening.