Foreword: Promoting and Economic Recovery with Job Creation and Decent Work

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 2010 closes with an encouraging scenario of economic recovery. Nearly all countries in the region recorded positive economic growth, moving away from the spectre of recession.

The macroeconomic strength of the countries in the region determined their level of economic growth. This growth was also directly related to the diversification and expansion of these countries’ foreign markets and their capacity for investment and public and private domestic consumption.

Policies to stimulate growth and investment also favoured the economic recovery, as did initiatives to promote employment and training, strengthen the purchasing power of wages and income and expand social protection.

The economic recovery had a positive impact on job creation in the region. The most direct effect was the reduction in the urban unemployment rate, which fell from 8.1% in 2009 to an estimated 7.4% in 2010. This meant that in 2010, economic growth generated employment or jobs for nearly 1.2 million people. Nevertheless, in 2010 unemployment affected 16.9 million men and women, which represents a major gap in decent work.

Available information also indicates an increase in employment with social security coverage in the formal sector. However, this rise in formal employment did not account for the total growth in the labour force, given that many new workers joined the ranks of the informal sector. Thus, it is estimated that in 2010, the trend toward the informalization of the labour market continued, with a sharp increase in own-account employment, unpaid family work and other categories of wage and salaried employment, as well as a growing percentage of employers who work in small, informal or unregistered enterprises. This phenomenon continues to work against the objectives of improving productivity and decent work in the countries.

In 2011, economic growth is expected to continue in Latin America and the Caribbean, although at a slower pace than in 2010. This will require countries to extend policies for stimulating growth and employment within their possibilities, and to implement measures for maintaining sustained fiscal budgets and low inflation. The conclusions of the recent ILO/IMF conference (Oslo, September 2010) emphasize that job creation should be at the centre of the economic recovery and should be a key macroeconomic objective. The two organizations agreed to work together to develop a social protection floor, which is one of the pillars of the ILO Decent Work Agenda.

The proposals of the ILO Global Jobs Pact (Geneva, 2009) have newfound significance in light of the current global economic recovery. At the ILO’s Seventeenth American Regional Meeting, Latin American and Caribbean employers, workers and governments reiterated the viability and priority of these proposals in this region of the world. Moreover, they stressed that the proposals can be promoted through the Decent Work Agenda for the Hemisphere. The statement that the quality of work defines the quality of a society resonated deeply at that conference. All of this requires the development of sustainable enterprises in a sustainable environmental context.

Target 1B of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which calls for decent work for all, including women and youth, is an indispensable condition for achieving the first MDG to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger in the world.

At the halfway point in efforts to achieve the MDGs by 2015, recent experience in the implementation of policies during the crisis demonstrates that it is indeed possible to achieve objectives of macroeconomic stability with targets for economic growth, employment and decent work. Further advances in this direction depend mainly on the political will of the actors of the world of work.

The ILO and its constituents continue efforts to fully achieve the objectives of social justice that inspired the creation of the ILO in 1919. “At this hour of growing global insertion of the continent, we must acknowledge a truth based on concrete experience: no one was served by a development model that reinforced inequality. We must strike a balance between capital and labour, between finance and the real economy, and between the state, the market, society and the individual.”

Jean Maninat,
ILO Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean