 welcome to an incredibly important discussion about how we value our essential workers and, more importantly, how we structures to enable the sectoral economy to flourish in what is going to be hopefully a post-pandemic world one day soon. One thing we've all learned the last 18 months, apart from the fact we've all had to grapple with the technology involved in virtual conferences, one thing we've all learned is that we ignore downplay or deride central workers at our peril. We need to focus more on how to support them because quite apart from the moral issues and the health issues, there's potentially a very exciting economic issue as well. As the World Economic Forum has calculated that if we put increased investment in health and social care, we could be increasing global GDP by $380 billion by the year 2030. So we have today a terrific collection of CEOs involved in companies working in this space. We've got some labour activists and we've also got policy makers who are going to be telling us about what could or should be done. In no particular order on the CEO side, we have Tanya Koch, who's Chief Executive Officer from Telethu Care, Jeff Huber, who's Chief Executive Officer of Home Instead. We've got Guy Ryder, who's Director General of the International Labour Organization, Sally Rover, who's the International Coordinator for Women in Informal Employment and Nicholas Schmidt, who's Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights at the European Commission. So perhaps I can start with you, Commissioner Schmidt, and ask you, governments historically haven't spent a lot of time thinking about healthcare workers, people at the bottom of the par and the employment side of things. We learned in COVID that it can be a terrible mistake. What exactly is the European Commission doing at the moment to try and put this centre stage in the agenda? And do you have any sort of informal numbers or calculations to give us an indication about the importance of this, both in terms of a human context and an economic context? Yes, thank you very much. Good morning and good evening. I think it's really very timely to discuss this issue. And I noticed that the concept of essential worker, I never heard before this idea of essential workers before the pandemic. So the pandemic finally showed us what essential workers are and how indispensable they are for the well-being of our societies and for the good functioning of our society. First, you asked me about what the European Union has done since on this idea of essential workers' long-term care. First, I think this commission has created a new department which is called the Department on Demography and which includes also the issue of aging society. We have become aware that societies in Europe, but not only in Europe, are aging very rapidly and therefore that the issue of long-term care has become a very important issue. And therefore this year we have prepared a report on long-term care showing how the evolution will be, the numbers of people essential workers we will need. Now, this sector in Europe employs about 6.4 million people and we have calculated that given the evolution of the numbers of especially elderly people, but also the needs in the area of child care, the job creation potential is about 7 million jobs by 2030. So this is a very short term and we all know also that this sector is very much gendered because not only a majority of people aged more than 65 are women who have to be taken care because women are older than men, but also those who are working in the care sector are at almost 90 percent women. So this is a very important element also in relation to the labour market and when we include the informal carers, the informal carers and we know that informal care is of high importance in this field, well an overall majority are also women. Now just a few ideas. First what you have mentioned, I think there is a very important human factor and that's why also we have discovered this idea of essential workers because for a long time we considered that these jobs were more or less, well, second-class jobs and this has changed and it is extremely important that this change with us. So there is this societal perception of these jobs and we have really to work on that and I thank you very much for organising this this summit on this particular issue. Second we have and I've mentioned the informal carer, there is these invisible workers, mainly women, who are doing the care work for their families especially for their elderly family members and we estimate that alone this informal care work has an economic value between 2.4 to 2.7 percent of EU GDP so this is also an element we have absolutely to take into account. What could be the solution very briefly improving working conditions because we have already made a shortage in this sector, a labour shortage and in order to correct this labour shortage we have to improve working conditions and this means not only improving salaries, wages, that's obviously absolutely indispensable to improve the wages, we have to improve social dialogue, we have to introduce more collective bargaining in this sector, we see that in some member states this functions in others it is extremely absent, we have to invest in training because these are not jobs which do not require very special skills and I would say it's not only technical skills obviously there are technical skills but there are especially soft skills, soft skills are key in the care work and you cannot be a good carer if you have not this kind of soft skills of empathy which on one hand is important for those people who are you are take care of but also for yourself and therefore we have to invest in their skills and upskill the care workers and finally certainly the digital technologies may a bit alleviate the job of the care workers and this is when I look also at countries like Japan they try to introduce digital technologies, robots but at the end it's about human contact you cannot just introduce robots but robots or digital technologies can improve working conditions and my last point I would highlight is that as there are labour shortages especially in a from the aging society in Europe well there is a dimension of migration there is a dimension of free movement already today any in many European countries are working in the care sector are very often people moving from one part of Europe to another part from the poorer part to the richer part but this is not especially sustainable and on the other hand migration is becomes indispensable if we want to fill these millions of jobs which will open and in this sector and will not be filled now how do we face these issues well we have as I've already mentioned the long-term care report but now we are working on a new European care strategy because this is a European issue as it might be a Japanese and also a US issue but it's obviously a European issue and therefore we have to work on the best solutions which allows Europe to face this and to make out of this profession out of care a real well perceived well regarded and well remunerated profession thank you thank you very much indeed Commissioner Schmidt for that very thoughtful overview so we've heard what the government direction is the good news is that there's a recognition that there's an issue which needs to be tackled and that essential workers are indeed essential and should be visible um I would imagine the bad news is there's still quite a long way to go until the ideas that Commissioner Schmidt has sketched out are put into practice so let me bring in Guy and Sally to ask you from your point of view trying to champion workers whether this is enough perhaps we can start with you Guy representing the ILO International Labor Organization are you convinced by what you've heard from Commissioner Schmidt as always I'm convinced by by the Commissioner but I just perhaps want to expand the conversation because if I'm getting the conversation right we're sort of making essential workers synonymous with health and care workers and I think it goes beyond that of course of course health and care workers are essential to the conversation but all of us who've lived through the the pandemic together and know that I think there are other categories that we need to need to keep our eyes upon I'm thinking of cleaning staff I'm thinking of public transport workers I'm thinking of retail workers I'm thinking of maritime workers who have been declared essential workers by the UN General Assembly food production distribution it goes on and on but I think the point here is somehow this pandemic has been a wake-up call drawn our attention to things that we knew or previously that there are people in our workforces who are contributing enormously to the the well-being of us all and to our societies and whose work is undervalued I mean the fact that we're having a conversation about revaluing rather presupposes that something's gone wrong here and we need to think about how we put it right and perhaps I can address that from a you know a labour market perspective well I don't think there's any big secrets here and Nicola has Nicola Schmidt has referred to some of the things that we have to look at we have to get people's wages and conditions to where they where they should be commensurate with their contribution the value of their work there are labour shortages in all of these sectors or liable to be people preferring to get out of these sectors if something else is available and there we have the tools the tools are available to us when we're talking about public sector workers obviously government policy comes in public sector wage settlements that always gets to be a bit of a bit of a difficult situation minimum wages sectoral collective bargaining arrangements these are the classic tools and till now we've chosen not to use them we just it's a matter of choice and I think it's as simple as that so if we're you know sufficiently serious in believing that these people's work needs to be better value than it previously and currently is we have to take these tools out of the toolbox and put them to work and I think reverting to the care and health sectors yet there is something bigger at play here we've got to rethink the way our societies provide health and care the whole notion of a care economy and its professionalization valuing the work which is currently unpaid informal and invisible these I think require a slightly broader and more innovative approach to the issues so that would be my take on the on the discussion Jenin right um what was actually I mean in terms of um you know what you've seen develop you know during COVID from the the perspective of the women you represent you know what's happening with pay what's happening with recognition and working conditions yeah thanks Jillian I mean I think the the the place to begin just to expand a bit more um from what Guy said is in order for us to think about this question of essential work we we first need to take into account context and to ask what the employment structure actually looks like in any geography in question because the standard toolbox of policy measures may not be appropriate so for example what percentage of all workers are in informal employment in this geography meaning that they have no social protection and no labor protection what percentage of workers are in wage employment employment as opposed to self-employment in some places the vast majority of workers are in informal employment and if we're looking particularly at women informal workers the vast majority are actually self-employed so a standard policy tool like wage subsidies for example or minimum wages and so on won't apply to most most of those workers so beginning to ask these questions about what the employment structure looks like we can start to see and really open up some some thinking about what tools will will work where just to to add a bit more on that point if in developing countries on average 90 of total employment is informal employment so if we're thinking about essential work actually we need to reverse the concept and recognize that work itself is essential to everyone regardless of what sector there is there in so there's nothing to fall back on except for work to work today means to eat today and then we need to think about you know what at this moment particularly and looking at the mounting evidence that workers who were already vulnerable before COVID-19 because of labor force status place of work migrant status and so on which who have faced the greatest risks and largest impacts and and think about the question of essential work depending on from whose view is being solicited so these are questions that I think we need to keep in mind again as we think about the right mix of policy measures and actually ask ourselves what is the miss mix that will do the most to reduce risk and vulnerability across the broadest section possible of the employment structure and then really really distinguish the different pathways between for example wage employed workers and self-employed workers recognizing that actually some needs are all the same but some needs are different so they all need social protection we have 4.1 billion people on the planet who have no income security at all from their national social protection systems but of course the impact of those of these issues play themselves out differently across different categories of work right I should say by the way that if anyone watching wants to ask a question do send it in and we'll deal with that via Slido and we'll have some Q&A towards the end now I'm going to turn in just a second to Jeff and Tanya to ask you know what are the models that can lead to better job quality and pay before I do I mean just Sally and Guy are there two or three things specifically you'd like to ask policymakers to do I mean do you have a shopping list of your top one or two quick bullet points of what needs to happen Guy? Well I do think that this whole notion of a strategy for the future of a care economy the professionalization the improving the quality of care work needs to be addressed I think in the national in the national context we're facing because of the dynamics of demography and much else an extraordinary deficit in that regard we know that we're talking about the deficit in health workers of 18 million by 2030 as well so I think we need the bigger discussion it's got to be the level of governments in Europe at the level of the European Union so that would be perhaps my my biggest take in that regard right and what about you Sally? I would say the top two things on our shopping list would be first of all universal social protection that includes a mix of social assistance inclusive social insurance and social services such as healthcare and childcare to to reach all workers and all households and the second thing is to recognize that there are these distinct pathways to recovery because there are distinct pathways of impact of the pandemic itself and so and I think on that one we would really love to see national governments working directly with local governments because local governments have a disproportionate impact on so many workers in the informal economy if you think of for example in South Africa street traders selling food were designated to such workers because the low population sources most of their food or in some cases all of their food from informal street vendors and so finding ways for national and local governments to work together on this to create a more a more supportive environment is is higher on our list as well right thank you okay so we've had a look at the policymakers what about business Tanya tell us what exactly tell us your care does and how you think you can or cannot create a new business model to try and support some of these you know calls for action thank you Jillian so tell us is a hardware and software company that uses technology to help with remote care and we specifically sell to facilities and I can speak to how businesses can use technology to improve job quality for caregivers in the field in general my view is that the role of technology can be used to automate these really difficult tasks for caregivers so an example is nighttime care in a facility a shift that's typically really understaffed in Japan caregivers will check the elders every two hours and it's really difficult because you're on your feet it's not efficient because you can miss a lot by just doing these spot checks but with technology if you know the status of someone in a room whether they are asleep or awake or otherwise you as a caregiver can be on call to focus on the situations that matter and as a caregiver you get to do the really valuable work where you really need the personal and human interaction that judgment and experience and ability to escalate so in one facility we work with for example we do just this because we notify caregivers of their resident status in one particular case for example our technology alerted that a resident with dementia had left a room which was unusual for her and they immediately found her falling asleep over the sink they took her back to bed and and ultimately prevented a fall from happening and you can see how this could easily be missed if they were only checking rooms rooms in a spot like check so that's just one example of how technology can be used I've also seen other types of care robots really successfully used you know for lifting residents something that's really physically demanding especially um you know for care workers lifting into to wheelchairs for example so there are many examples and I think Japan as some others have noted is a example of a really a success in terms of government encouraging the use of technology well having lived in Japan for a while myself I can say that Japan is one of the few countries in the industrialized world where people love their robots and AI platforms might be partly due to astro boy for those of you who've lived in Japan and have long memories it's probably also because they are running out of workers and there's nothing like necessity being not just a source of invention but a reason to embrace invention and disruption but um Jeff um what about you what is home instead what are you doing and how does this play into your work yeah thank you Jillian it's great to be a part of such a great conversation home instead is a global provider of in-home care for older adults so we send a professional trained caregiver into our client's home typically that is the traditional family home but it can be in a residential facility of some sort as well and provide essential services such as social interaction stimulation making sure they're having meals making sure they're taking their medications noticing and escalating critical changes preemptively in the client's condition so we're able to through a relationship focus really provide a better quality of life for our clients lower overall health care costs so we know that when we are part of the equation our clients are going to have a higher quality of life enjoy better outcomes access the traditional health care system far less and allow them to remain exactly where they want to be which is in the safety and security of their own home if the pandemic taught us anything at all it taught us that the home is the safest place to care for our global aging society so as we think about the future we're about the largest demographic shift in the history of the world 500 million baby boomers are about to enter the highest health care usage years of their lives we know that the home is the only scalable place to care for them i like to say that the hospital the future looks a lot like your living room so i think it's essential that we quickly scale up a workforce that can meet that incredible demand so that we can provide higher quality care to our aging society better outcomes higher quality of life allow people to age exactly where they want so the bottom line is i think we all have to come together i think the folks on on this call can or the right group to start this conversation we've created also a report called building the caregiver workforce our global aging society needs we're about to have a workshop in collaboration with the oecd to really elevate the conversation about this i agree with commissioner schmidt the first and probably most important thing we need to do is to change the perception of these jobs from jobs of last resort to being the valued and professional vocations that they truly are and recognize the value that they bring to society so that's the the first and most important thing that needs to happen we also need to create training standards elevate training um and and really help to onboard uh mass numbers of people that really see this as a growth uh economy uh in the labor market thank you i'm curious i mean from your accent and you can't always tell you know i have an english accent i'm actually sitting in new york from your accent though you are american we've heard from commissioner schmidt a view of what the european commission wants to do um right now of course in washington we have a contentious bill being proposed to congress which picks up on some of these themes which may or may not actually see the light today in practical terms so i'm curious um to what degree do you think that you're going to get any support from the american government um or is this just going to be an area where the europeans talk about it where the japanese learn to love their robots but nothing actually happens in america well i think it's going to take a multi stakeholder approach we can't uh approach this with just government solution in mind so here in the united states you know we have 80 million baby boomers about to enter their eighties prime caregiving need years the highest healthcare usage years of their lives were also nearly 30 trillion dollars in debt and so there's just a reality that we're going to need multiple solutions we're going to need um uh you know technology solutions that help to uh increase capacity just like tanya talked about we're going to need to create new funding resources because there's a reality that um the government simply isn't going to be able to pay for this we're going to need a new uh whole structure to create a whole new job market in the in this care economy uh and give people the ability to help fund their own care um so it's going to take a multi stakeholder approach i think if we wait if we wait for congress to do something we're going to be waiting a very long time this is an area where i think the private sector can lead and help to shape the policy needs of the future right right well that's certainly one of the roles of forums like the world economic forum trying to bring these different stakeholders together and get the conversation going both across the Atlantic and between different parts of you know public private net year world but we've got a great question that's come in which is this with widespread labor shortages across essential jobs is now the time that care providers retailers etc will be nudged into finally starting to pay their workers fairly are we going to see wages going up and to my mind that's a very interesting issue because you know i mean even amazon which used to be regarded as you know someone that was not in a hurry to pay people is now paying you know warehouse workers 15 18 dollars and talking to see yo's in america that's having a real knock on effect across the board so i'm curious any of you want to jump in perhaps i should start with guy as to whether you think now is it for the ilo to start campaigning for wage rises for your workers that's not the sort of campaign we engage in but i think the answer to your question is yes i mean it's a long while since i studied economics but when you have a shortage in the supply of labor normally the result is in a free market the wages go up and it's interesting to speculate why that there's not that adjustment it doesn't seem to be filtering through as yet maybe you could argue it's it's early days yet but you know what are the mechanisms to which wages go up okay the you know the back and forth of demanded supply is about minimum wage in many countries i mean health staff care staff generally are at the bottom rung they're on the minimum wage so that matters a great deal so there's a discussion that we have particularly in the united states around minimum wage there's also been quite a long history uh and i think of the united states an example of organizing in the uh in the in the care industry the service employees industry sci u has been extremely active and there's been some some quite difficult stories to be told about that so as i said we know the tools we know what what what what what uh you know how how markets should react and how labor market should react and i would say that you know to those who say and i agree with it that you know the key here is improving the perception of work in the care and health sectors you know the perception will go with the reality the perception will go with the reality of working in the sector and that goes straight back to to wages career development etc etc with everything of course uh the technology can do to help no doubt about it everything we can do to provide the the best very best quality care to those who need it uh being you know guiding polls for these things but the perception will adjust to the reality and i i think it's illusory to think anything else i see jeff you're nodding nodding do you expect wages to go up yeah you know yes absolutely but um uh we're already experiencing you know dramatic upward pressure on on wages right now i think the market conditions are such that there's a real war for talent and so that's creating upward pressure uh and so absolutely we need you know a well trained um well respected well compensated um professional uh home care sector part of the equation is it just the wage itself very important we have to take care of that but we also have to look at their entire um work experience and so we've recently uh been merged with a company called honor technology which is really focused on providing solutions that create a better overall job experience for our caregivers our professional caregivers care professionals so that then they go and create better um experiences for their clients so it's it's about making sure that they are paid when they are paid uh timely what they're expected to be paid but they're also able to have greater autonomy and agency over their own schedule because in the home care sector you can get paired up with a client that client goes away for one reason or another that creates tremendous job insecurity so uh having technology that allows them to then immediately have uh new clients new jobs better matches for their skills and their personalities more consistent hours we have to look at the whole uh experience of the of the care worker not just look at wage in isolation it is the entire proposition of their employment right well i'm going to come back to commissioner schmickon just a moment before i do though i'd like to ask um sally and tanya a question another question we've got which is it across this is the question across economies have a growing mismatch between labor supply and demand how can we accelerate job transitions into future care jobs i'm sure part of that must be about technology and training but any thoughts on that sally or tanya and then i want to turn to commissioner schmick i can quickly jump in um so this comes up a lot in uh working in japan which is uh facing a major caregiver shortage and they are looking for for caregivers from abroad and in this case technology can really help and we've talked with facilities about this a lot because it helps with communication between foreign care workers and uh you know care workers who um are already in the facility and um i think that's really important that you know having objective data having technology can really ease those that communication and really the facilities can deliver better care so that's that's one thought i have right thank you sally yeah just to add i think um one place to look for answers uh is the representative organizations of workers in these sectors so for example uh the international domestic workers federation brings together unions of domestic workers from uh more than 60 countries and so they are in touch with care workers domestic workers in all of the geographies where they have affiliates and they can you know put put their finger on what the needs are what supposed let's suppose you know skills training reentry um what have you those representative organizations are the ones who really have the answers to these questions and there are now there's now a global network of street vendor organizations there's a global network of home-based workers who are both self-employed and then work subcontractors and global supply chain so that's the place to go for for the answer to the question of of how to do it i think right well thank you commissioner schmidt what are your thoughts i mean do you want to have a minimum wage across the european union for care work do you want to enforce a ban on zero-hour contracts i know that's primarily an american concept but it does exist in part of europe um do you want to have mandatory training schemes i mean what's your thoughts on this one and you have about two minutes to tell us okay that's well i just want to say we we pay very very well people who take care of our money and we do not consider the the work of those who take care of people of our families of our parents of our children and this is a paradox in our society and i think we have to rebalance this a bit and change a bit the hierarchy in wages and salaries and in uh not only a perception but also in real terms now i think working conditions are essential in that sense minimum wages have been mentioned certainly they are important and europe we are working on a framework for minimum wages especially for those countries where minimum wages are very low and by the way a lot of people leave these countries to go in to other parts in europe and especially also to work in these care sectors but we consider that we have to increase or at least reduce the gaps in terms of minimum wages and especially also in terms of gender equality because we have a lot to discuss the issue of informal workers and a lot of inform the majority of informal workers domestic workers are women so there is an issue of gender pay gap the commission now has made proposals on job on wage transparency we have to reduce we have to suppress this pay gap so there are a lot of issues which come together we have to to deal with in order to to to change the situation and make these jobs attractive last word i i agree on technology i think this is very important but technology will not replace the human side and second we have to develop home care i think this is a very important issue in our societies and the third is the financial issue yes our our protection social protection has to be adapted to people aging aging society and therefore some countries have introduced care insurance so in order to finance old age and the care you need and and this would also allow better wages better financing better institutions and this is what we are dealing with when we talk about a european care strategy we include all this aspect in this in this strategy thank you well thank you very much indeed that's a very comprehensive shopping list um let's hope you get to the least some of it through and in the meantime it just remains to me to say a very big thank you to all of our panelists have to sum up you know the conversation with one sort of phrasal image it's really this um before i became a journalist i trained as a cultural anthropologist and anthropology is dedicated to making the unseen scene to look at the problem that we so often ignore what we call social silences to cite the works of pierre or dieu a wonderful french intellectual and covid 19 really has confronted us with all manner of social silences the often terrible state of care workers um essential workers um has been one of the silences that has been exposed and let's hope that we don't forget the lesson too quickly as covid hopefully begins to recede and actually do try to address this to build back better in every sense so thank you all very much indeed and best of luck to you in pushing forward with these very important initiatives