Towards a More Potential for Systemic Empowerment

I am speaking on behalf of the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization

I- PREFACE:

A micro-social dialogue ( 77 years ago ) : 

 A young child stood in front of his mother shivering from the severe cold during one of the winter days of 1929, and asked innocently:

The child: Why don't you warm the house mama?

The mother: Because we don't have coal in the house dear son.

The child: And why we do not have coal in the house?

The mother: Because your father is out of work.

The child: And why Dad is out of work.

The mother: Because there is plenty of coal in the market.

N.B. (The father's work was a coal miner) 

"If we don't take the responsibility as a whole, then we would be discussing the same in the next 10 years."

Ana Maria Romero Lozada, Peru's Social Development Minister, a news conference, Feb, 2005 

Taking responsibility as " a whole", as the Peru's minister has pointed, means approaching it in a systemic way. Neglecting of this approach may contribute to failure in arriving to suitable solutions                                                                            .

In other words, in absence of the proper systemic approach, time passes without bringing a solution, and a similar micro-social dialogue like that mentioned above, will continue replicating and diffusing all over the world, years after years, and decades after decades.                                                                                           

The subject that needs to be approached systemically is the theme of the 2006 High-level Segment of ECOSOC, which is: "Creating an environment at the national and international levels conducive to generating full and productive employment and decent work for all, and its impact on sustainable development."                                    

While it is beyond the present papers' scope to treat the above mentioned theme systemically, its aim is just to throw some light on-only-some of the elements of the theme. The target is just to show, at a glance, the possible extent to which " creation" of the above mentioned " environment " needs of systemic manipulations that are supposed to help in proper optimization of the social dialogue and the alliance building-up.                                                                                                                    

Essentially, three points will be shortly elaborated, as following:                                  

i) Major challenges that are aroused at the international level.                                     

ii) Major problems that are working at the national levels.                                      

iii) Certain routes for maintaining better environment.                                    

II- MAJOR CHALLENGES : 

1-  The notion that the world economic activities can be carried out by

20% of those performing them, while the remaining 80% should live on charity of the 20% previously mentioned, [the famous meeting in "Fermont" hotel, San Francisco 1995, gathering dominants of globalization (politicians, men of finance, economy…etc)]. 

2-  Supremacy of trade over development in the goals and dynamics practiced by globalization. 

3-  Directing the techno-scientific activities and their huge added-value for interests and benefits of the minority and not the majority of the world people. 

4-  Increasing numbers of people living in poverty in the developed countries.

Thus, increasing the inequality and social insecurity in both the developed and the developing countries as well. 

5-  Superimposing pure international political targets on the possible mechanisms for generating employment opportunities. Also, enforcement of certain economic policies and measures on the developing countries. 

6-  Damaging the value of "belonging" in the work atmosphere. A phenomenon that grown steadily in association with the massive waves of reduction of employees as a result of growing of "Merges & Acquisitions". Thus, a globalization outcome is damaging a management value.  

III- MAJOR PROBLEMS: 

1-  Inability of many of the governments in developing countries to practice ownership to their national development process. 

2-  Arise of large qualitative differences in basic needs regarding education and health. These differences are expected to lead to long-term adverse consequences that may damage unity and security of the society, and hence , cause massive chronic depowerment. 

3-  Over-ridding of long-term development demands by very short-term private benefits to the minority (usually the business men). 

4-  Rise of local -usually false- problems affecting citizenship. 

5-  The growing of "silent frustrations", especially among the young people due to missing trust in both, the local development plans, and the foreign given advice regarding these plans. 

IV-MAIN ROUTES FOR TACKLING THE CHALLENGES AND THE PROBLEMS: 

1) Assurance and dissemination of the understanding of "social dialogue and alliance building" as a cultural mega process .

Accordingly, this process becomes integrated as a value and a tool at the same time, and succeeds in developing its own best practices. In this way the dialogue continue and attains its long term outcomes of minimizing the misunderstandings and maximizing creation of major commons. 

2) Paying enough attention to the model of East Asian countries where, collective social responsibility (like Communitarianism) has succeeded in achieving and maintaining national development and not just an economic growth.

In this regard, it is quite questionable that the International Financing Organizations are not introducing that model to other developing and less developing countries, especially in Africa. 

3)Providing and facilitating intermediate- and long-term empowering approaches and techniques for youth and for the workers. These may include education, effective training and skill development, life long learning, microfinance, promotion of small enterprises (SEs) as well as networking among these SEs in matters like negotiation, transfer and development of technologies, marketing and exportation.

4)Maintaining proper balance between investment in capital-intensive and labor-intensive projects. 

5)Utilizing ICT and the power of knowledge in boosting “societal creativity” which is based on achieving a creativity outcome that is much larger than the algebraic sum of that of each individual, whether persons, work units, or institutions. 

6)More attention to the long-term strategies and to benefits of the Nation as a whole, that consists of individuals, enterprises and institutions. 

7)As ILO has a unique history , being the only part of League of Nations system which survived the  second world war and still maintaining its vital universal functions during the beginning of the new millennium then, it is -perhaps- a suitable moment in the history of this unique organization for considering impacts of the starting new era on it . In this regard, the tripartism character of ILO may need to become QUADRIPARTISM where a new part of knowledge workers (the thinkers and concerned academicians) may be considered. 

Finally, it may be possible to say that, if the world is passing with major changes that may be regarded by some as globalization, then the organizational components of this world have to practice change, either to maximize the benefits or to influence the ongoing changes .The question here may be: whether the change that counts is change in the paradigm or a change within the paradigm?