 Hi there. I'm Faisal Islam. I'm the BBC's economics editor. Thank you to the many thousands of people who are joining in this very important topic of the Jobs Resets Summit, the new vision for social protection. We have an excellent panel and I'm your moderator. I feel like I've been a moderator of sorts during these extraordinary health and economic times, trying to moderate between people's lived experience in this extraordinary situation that we go and film as the BBC and what's actually happening. We're finding that actually going out and seeing people and filming them, you often get better, more up to date information than the data. And you're seeing huge innovations in terms of public policy, huge reactions in real time and also learnings from other parts of the world and other countries that we haven't seen before. This is a time to take stock, but also to think about this moment, whether it's a time to sort of relaunch a different type of protection system going into the future. As I said, we have a stunningly brilliant panel and I think without further ado, let's just get into that. I think I'll introduce them as we go and we'll start with the, we're lucky to have the federal minister for and special assistant to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on poverty alleviation and social protection. And that is Sanya Nishtar. So, Sanya, if you just help us, you know, given everything that's happened this year, how can national social protection systems in emerging markets be redesigned for this new norm? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on your, on this programme and thank you for convening this very important conversation. I think we need to think of social protection as a right now and governments have to be very clear that we need to massively expand social protection and make it very responsive in, you know, in a post COVID context because the need is so immense. I mean, the loss of livelihoods have been so decimating, you know, in countries like mine as a result of COVID that we will really need to draw social protection de novo. And as I said, look at social protection as a right. As governments do that, I think that there are certain important pillars on, on which to, on which to construct a sound multi-secure strategy, a good data backbone, adequate funding, you know, appropriate digital infrastructure, making sure that the right principles is what we draw on and then of course accountability for delivery. So I just want to quickly outline to you what we have done here in Pakistan because we're in a bit of a fortunate position because Pakistan started off with a very expanded social protection and poverty alleviation strategy pre COVID. So we started back in March 20, March 2019, where after a series of deliberations we came up with a whole of government, multi-sectoral poverty reduction and social protection plan with 140 elements and actions. And all of these were linked by theory of change. So there was a completely new strategy with different programs that were mutually reinforcing targeted at poor women, orphans, the homeless, poor laborers, farmers, the disabled, widows, individuals who are at the risk of catastrophic health expenditure. You know, there were interventions for primary school going children for students, they were livelihood promoting programs for the extreme poor and they were also nutrition interventions from a human capital perspective, a number of different condition cash transfers. So once we had the strategy in place, the government committed funding, you know, indigenous funding, not donor driven. And we made investments in the new social, national socioeconomic registry and not just a household survey, but also the necessary investments to make sure that the data analytics architecture is there, which would immigration data, a land ownership data, telephone data, government employment data and so on and so forth. So that was the second bit that we did the data part. And then we made sure that our registry is not just a one-time exercise, it becomes a live registry. So in addition to the strategy, the data piece was the second pillar. Thirdly, we invested resources to develop the digital architecture. So we did the procurement of a new biometric payment system. We developed a SMS seeking request, SMS based request seeking mechanism, which then allowed us to deliver emergency cash to half the country's population. And then in terms of the principles, we made sure that it was a whole of government approach that we were adopting, that the private sector was an equal partner, that technology was very much the mainstay, and that we were using tools such as financial inclusion and the, you know, to enrich whatever we were doing. The focus was very much on women and particularly on girls, and we have now very explicit incentives for girls to be prioritized in the new social protection framework. And in addition to all that, we made sure that accountability for delivery and delivery with integrity is one of the cornerstones. So we got cabinet approval for a governance and integrity policy, made it absolutely binding on all the executing agencies to follow it. We established a delivery unit, started tracking metrics. And lastly, information because during my experience, giving cash to half my country's population, the most important tool that I found was information. So it was not just investments in digital infrastructure and data and the strategy formulation and the delivery architecture. And the principles on which all these things were founded, but the information citizens must hear the truth from governments, the unvarnished truth, and they must have the confidence that governments are there to deliver for you. That they have clean hands, and they have every intention to be very truthful with you. So I think in order to espouse and in order to follow that policy principle of social protection is a right, you know, just to wind down what I had to say. Governments have to of course legislate and formulate policy, but in order to execute it, there is an institutional architecture you have to build. And on top of that, the right information truth is what will really do the trick. Well, Minister, thank you very much for that. And obviously I share all our participants and saying get well soon on all that. I'm quite remarkable to think of a system that distributes cash to a sort of 100 million people in Pakistan and will develop that conversation. We're now going to move on though to Jean Zaino, all the way in the USA, talking specifically I think area of expertise here is that he is the executive chairman and founder of MBO partners and specializes in the area of freelance workers big really important underserved in some of the developed country schemes. Let's see what Jean has to say about these millions of independent workers have been particularly hard by the disruption, what needs to change to better support them in the aftermath of COVID and beyond. Thank you fossil and thanks for including me on this panel and with all these great, great speakers and, and it's a very important issue. So specifically regarding the independent workforce, which goes by other names like the gig economy and gig workers and independent contractors. My personal expertise and passion has been understanding this workforce over the last 20 years at MBO partners and we today and over the last certainly 10 years or so we've been studying this workforce with a report that's been fairly well recognized called the state of independence in America and it's, it's surveyed by an independent research firm of the last 10 years that the growth, the behaviors, the attitudes and the motivations of people doing this type of work and in fact we're about to release our 10th year data so it's interesting to look at the trends over the last 10 years. So, so what I would offer here in my perspective with regard to this segment of the workforce, which, which is a significant segment and growing around the world. I would say there's two things that we need to think about as we reset. And as we enter into this new post COVID world. One is independent work is highly desirable by many people. And that's not only from our research but from all the reports that are out there some that might be more self serving than others but even the most recent United States Bureau of Labor statistics. When, when you survey the people doing this work, they, they, they're happy doing it they actually feel more in control of their world and their life and, and people are in either independent workers or traditional employees. They tend to do this work at different stages in their career. And I think that's important. It's important for retraining and skilling reskilling and, and, and filling gaps between traditional work, and even in this COVID situation that we're currently in. I think it's actually been one source of trying to fill some of the financial needs by by doing some type of app based work. So, so the first thing I would offer is that we need to recognize that this is a significant part of the workforce, and it's a desirable way for many people to work. And, and it's usually about 70 to 75% of the people that feel that way there are certainly people that that don't want to be doing this type of work and they're forced into it, which leads me to my second point. I think the second point is, we need more clarity into understanding the classification of the type of workers. It's very, I believe it's very dangerous for us to consider one broad stroke of a solution. There are, you know, as, as the world becomes more technology driven, more diverse, more segmented, there are different work arrangements that require different apparatus and different policies, and different enablements to make it work well. And in our study, what we've learned is that there are there are what we call occasional independent workers or gig workers, and they tend to supplement full time traditional work during the weekends, moonlighting in between work to supplement income. And then there are the other extreme people that at different points in their career are looking to actually work differently on a on a full time basis, as building their own independent what we would call a micro business. And these micro businesses need infrastructure. They, they need liquidity in the market. And a lot of that is a result of innovation technology things like we're doing right now through through zoom and collaboration and, you know, the the delivery of services is much more digital today. So working from anywhere, in fact, one of the recent aspects of a study that we just released is digital nomads in 2018. In the United States, there were 7 million of these people that consider themselves digital nomads where they would relocate at least three times during the year as recently as July and August of this year we did the study again, and that number is now grown to almost 11 million. So people are realizing they could work from anywhere they could deliver their work remotely. And this is more of a of an experience for them that we want to make sure that we don't disable by having rules and regulations that are overly complex by trying to protect people that do need the protection. So, you know, my second point here is, you know, let's make sure we don't have a one size fits all. So in summary, you know, independent work is very desirable for many people. And we need to think about what are the different structures that are needed to enable the different types of work arrangements, and, and making sure that we both enable the people that that want to do this type of work, as well as protect the people that need to protections. And that's not an easy problem to solve. We've been working with some of the policymakers here in the United States. I certainly have done work with the World Economic Forum which have released last year, a charter of the promise of the platform which I think has a lot of good aspects to it. So anyway, thank you and I hope this, you know, is informative for the listeners. Thank you, Dream. Thank you for shedding light on that really important issue of the of the gig economy in this tough time. Let's move on to Sharon borough who you all know is the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Congress. Sharon, let me ask you, and despite all the hardship brought about by this COVID crisis, there is a sense in scale the need and the relief measures we've seen around the world have transformed the public imagination of what's possible. What would a global social protection fund look like? So the minister from Pakistan, let me say congratulations because they've actually put in place the backbone of a social protection system. Now, the moment it's focused on cash transfer, but at some point on income for those who are unemployed or don't have enough income to live on, plus health access of the two key areas we've been promoting as a first step, but a social protection floor covers a range of areas to give people security. What's what the COVID-19 exposed in huge craters? It was there before and Olivia Distuta knows the history as well as I do, but we've got commitment in the UN system to a universal social protection floor 10 years ago. And yet the progress we've seen is so narrow that indeed 50% of 55% of the world's people have no social protection, no resilience, no foundations for any sense of security. And when you marry that with informal work and you're not making money every day, there's 1.6 billion of our brothers and sisters facing destitution potentially on a daily basis. And then of course 75% have little or no social protection. So it's an inadequate base of social security. We have to separate indeed the classifications of work. But let me say this, if you look at the ILO declaration, we can put a floor of decent work under every worker irrespective of the contract, the nature of the employment contract. I've very firm views about technology can't be used for exploitation. And indeed last session in this discussion we guy writer and I pointed out that indeed some of the new work looks like work of the last century before it was cleaned up with employment regulation. That doesn't mean everybody works in the same way. And technology is changing that although for the bulk of people not so much. So what do we have to do if we're going to build a just future, we have to have a new social contract that is about recovery and resilience and of course jobs are at the center of that decent jobs, climate friendly jobs if we're going to sustain the planet for future generations but we must have universal social protection. And if we're going to build that social protection in the poorest countries, then the only way we will enable that to happen is indeed to start by kickstarting those systems with a global social protection fund. And, you know, when you think that there's many ways of building up such a fund, but even official ODA going to developed economies only 0.4% of it goes to social protection. That's not acceptable and we need to look at the ways through direct funding through liquidity swaps from special drawing rights through debt relief and conditionality around SDGs. But if we don't care as a world about both universal social protection and that's for everybody. And indeed solidarity for the poorest countries, then we are going to see any kind of disaster, climate disaster, pandemics, further pandemics, whatever, knock people out of again a hope of a secure future. When you know those same people are losing trust in democratic systems, when indeed young people now are saying they won't have pensions, they won't have access to health, then something is very wrong. We are three times richer in just the last 20 years and yet we have not put affordable systems in place universally around the world, not just in the poor countries in some of our wealthier countries, but we'll fight those battles. What we have to do is act together for a global social protection fund for the poorest countries. Well, thank you very much to big idea there from Sharon Borough much appreciated we'll discuss that but let's move on now to the UN special report on extreme poverty, Olivier deschutes. So, Olivier, thanks for joining us. How can we move from the current short term relief measures around the globe to a comprehensive approach to universal social protection in this new normal. Thank you. I think this is indeed the exactly the right question. As a matter of fact, for the United Nations. I recently surveyed the approximately 100, sorry 1400 social protection measures that were adopted after the COVID-19 crisis in the field of social protection, covering some 200 countries. What was really impressive was that although that figure seems very high and very encouraging only 600 billion US dollars were committed to social protection during the crisis, which is a very small portion of the 13 trillion dollars that have been injected in the government's in order to stimulate the economy recovery, but more importantly, many of these 1400 social protection measures were actually leaving many people behind. The findings from the study I made of those measures can be summarized as follows first many of these measures were temporary stop gaps and were improvised in order to respond to the crisis in other terms countries were taken off guard. They were not prepared for this. And many of the support schemes, whether in the form of cash transfers to poor households or in the form of unemployment benefits under temporary unemployment schemes have been phased out after three or four months. Secondly, many people have been left out workers from the informal economy workers in precarious employment positions. Together, these categories represent some 2 billion workers, 61% of the global workforce with weak or no access to social protection, migrant workers, people who are just too poor to fill in the forms, people who do not have access to documentation, people who cannot fill in online information because they have no access to Internet, for example, have been left out from quite a few of these schemes. And the, and the third finding is that very often these schemes that were designed in the midst of the crisis, although of course it's very encouraging to see that governments have reacted were designed without any participation of the social partners. In fact, the, the ITUC, the International Trade Union Confederation has examined some 95 countries, examining how they adopted social protection schemes, and only in 49 of these had unions being consulted. So I think it's very important that we learn the lessons from what happened and what we learn is that we are ill prepared for the next economic climatic, or indeed sanitary shock and we must build much more robust social protection course on the basis of a rights based approach as quite eloquently described by Sanya Nishta at the start of this panel. What this means, building on the rights based approach means we have to provide people with entitlements they may claim in order to be granted the benefits they have a right to that is empowering to them. It means we have to organize social protection in ways that protects everyone and not selectively or in a way that is only targeting the ultra poor people, and it means that we need to ensure the participation of social partners in the management of social protection schemes. And yes, one important part of what we must do is support low income countries, perhaps developing countries as a whole to help them overcome the financing gap today that they experienced, making it difficult for them to invest in social protection. And quite frankly, this is affordable. The latest study we have on the financing gap shows that to cover all low income countries, social protection floors, we would need some 79 billion US dollars per year. That may sound a lot, but it's actually about one half of the total official development assistance already provided by OECD countries by which countries to developing countries, and it's 0.15% of the gross national income of rich countries. In other terms, it's entirely affordable for us in the OECD countries to provide this encouragement to low income countries to invest in social protection for us to cover all the population, all women, children and men throughout their lives. And if we make this a political priority, and that shall be indeed for the next few months. And my main objective is to convince governments and international agencies to join in this worldwide effort to support poor countries efforts to strengthen social protection for us. Great. Thank you very much for that. We'll move on to Mike Mansfield from the private sector from the insurance company, age on Mike is the program director of the Center for Longevity and Retirement. Mike, what is the role of the private sector in this type of world, both in terms of what's happened during the pandemic and what might happen and what changes might occur on a long term basis. Thanks guys and thanks for the opportunity to speak today I think we can we can build on some of the points that have already be made by looking at the private sector as being one of the key partners in the contract that we've created to support social protection for people when they need it during their life and as they move into retirement. I think employers together with other social partners like governments and individuals need to work together to develop more sustainable systems that rebalance responsibility in a way that everyone has the ability to retire with dignity and that nobody has no one is left behind. And for the past three years we've been writing retirement research reports calling for a new social contract, recognizing the fact that our current system is under severe financial strain and responsibility is shifting to the individual. The report we brought out earlier this year is looking at what employers can do to create age friendly workplaces and help people prepare for retirement. And I think there are three areas where the employers and you can private sector can help in that area. And these are our results of the long term relationship that many people have with their employer. And they offer opportunities for people to prepare for the future and enable them to become more resilient and support our social protection systems for the long term. And the first area is in providing access to retirement savings arrangements. And here I think the encouraging news is that over half so 52% of the workers in our survey said that they were offered a retirement plan by their employer. And this creates a great opportunity for workers to save by opening them up to all workers, workers in the gig economy and so forth, and making them portable and people move jobs, employers can make sure that retirement savings becomes the norm. Employers really have a home game advantage here in that 41% of the workers in our survey said that they started to save for retirement based on a nudge from their employer employment related reasons. So employers can really play a role in helping people on the journey to saving for retirement. So the second area I think in making people more resilient is creating an environment that supports workers in making healthier choices easier and helping them take better care of their health. So even small steps like providing healthy food and snacks in the office were found to have great appeal by almost a third of the workers in our survey. And the third area I think builds on something that we've spoken earlier about, and that's offering opportunities for continual learning and development for people throughout their career. And in an increasingly fast paced world, where the job market is becoming increasingly uncertain, many employers may not be able to guarantee employment for people throughout their careers, but they can help them stay employable, which is why it was disappointing to see that just over one in four workers in the survey said that they didn't receive training to help keep their skills up to date. I think this is a great opportunity for companies to be able to help out and it's a women opportunity. So I think that there's three areas just cognizant of time, where I think employers in the private sector can help make things more resilient in the future. Great stuff. Thank you very much, Mike. Much appreciated. I was going to check whether I'm on mute or not with this. Well, that's a great discussion that we had new insights from emerging economy from the minister about how to create a system of handing out cash to half a country's population from gene on the gig economy. The big idea there from Sharon borough about the global social protection fund. A price tag put on something like that from Olivier the shooter of $79 billion a year and support that will be needed for developing countries. And then Mike Mansfield telling us about the role of the private sector in trying to manage some of the change of this extraordinary time and trying to create some sort of opportunity for sustainable and sustained change. So thank you very much to everybody that joined us on the live stream.