Juan Somavia and the ILO lose the globalisation argument

In search of things to write about for the Globalisation Institute blog, I came across this report, itself about a report issued by the International Labour Organisation.

Global economic growth is increasingly failing to translate into new and better jobs to reduce poverty, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said in a report Friday.

As a summary of what follows in this report of the report, this turns out to be severely misleading. Globalisation, according to what follows, is cranking out new jobs, and it is cranking out better jobs. True, it is not cranking out “new and better” jobs, all in one go, if by that is meant people in dirt poor countries now being able to leap in their thousands from having no jobs to having nice jobs, but that is hardly surprising.

Half of the world’s workers still do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the $2 a day poverty line, the fourth edition of Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM), said.

There is still a lot of poverty in the world, in other words. So?

“The key message is that up to now better jobs and income for the world’s workers has not been a priority in policy-making”, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said.

This is, at best, thoughtless bluster, and probably a flat lie. If he thought at all about this claim, Juan Somavia would realise that it is false, but he makes it anyway. I believe that he assumes that only the spending of tax money in explicitly labelled better job creation schemes would count as the intention to create better jobs. But I support globalisation, and write regular contributions for the Globalisation Institute blog, because I believe that globalisation is creating and will continue to create “better jobs and income for people” all over the world. This is a big part of why I do this. And I am definitely not the only one who thinks thus. Does Juan Somavia sincerely believe that all of us who enthusiastically support globalisation are indifferent to “better jobs and income for people”? Maybe he really is that ignorant, but I doubt it.

“Globalisation has so far not led to the creation of sufficient and sustainable decent work opportunities around the world. That has to change, and as many leaders have already said, we must make decent work a central objective of all economic and social policies.”

Once again, bad policies to achieve “decent work” – making indecent work illegal, and making it obligatory to perpetuate all decent work (“sustainable”) indefinitely, I assume – are confused with wanting lots of decent work. I do want lots of decent work for people, but believe that making indecent work illegal, and all firing of people from decent work illegal, is the absolute worst possible way to achieve that outcome. Making indecent work illegal hurts the very poorest people in a downright lethal way, by taking away even the crap jobs that they do now have and can now get, and it kicks away a vital rung in the ladder from no work to indecent work to decent work, which guarantees that the lethality will continue indefinitely. Charming. Demanding that all decent work be “sustainable” is to demand the impossible, and to guarantee idleness for all.

The other thing to say about that weasely paragraph is that all that it really says is that poverty is not being got rid of as fast as it might be, and as fast as would be nice. My interpretation of that truism being that globalisation is not working as fast as it might to make all that decent work (some of it perhaps even somewhat sustainable), all that “better jobs and income for people”, and my conclusion is that globalisation should be intensified, and that Juan Somavia and his ilk should get out the way and let that happen.

Coming ahead of the WTO talks in Hong Kong next week, the report said that while in some areas of Asia, economic expansion is fostering solid growth in jobs and improving living conditions, Africa and parts of Latin America are seeing increasing numbers of people working in less favourable conditions, especially in the agricultural zone.

Globalisation is working well in some areas, and not so well in others. How could it be otherwise? Some parts of the world are better at it than others. Astonishing. Once again, this absolutely does not show that globalisation should cease, anywhere, still less everywhere.

For millions of workers, new jobs often provide barely enough income to lift them above the poverty line, or are far below any adequate measure of satisfying and productive work, the KILM said.

What a revelation. Lots of jobs in the world are very badly paid, and are crap. Who would have guessed it? But what are you and your mates saying should be done about this, Juan? You imply, but dare not spell out: less globalisation. I say: more.

The total number of working women and men living on less than $2 a day has not fallen over the past decade although at 1.38 billion it is a smaller share of global employment at just below 50 percent, a decline from 57 percent in 1994.

The best take on that being that the population of the world is increasing quite fast, and the number of not totally crap jobs (jobs above $2 a day) is also rising quite fast. The number of crap jobs, paying less than $2 per day is static, but presumably with much coming and going. A mixed picture, but more good news than bad there, I would say.

The report emphasises that in many developing economies the problem is mainly lack of decent and productive work opportunities rather than outright unemployment.

In other words, there are now lots of jobs out there, but lots of them are crap. Again, a mixed picture, with the good news being just as clear there as the bad. And I repeat, what do you guys think should be done to make the news better? I say: more globalisation. What do you say?

Women and men are working long and hard for very little because their only alternative is to have no income at all.

Indeed. Which is why making long and hard work illegal would be so lethal. Are you proposing that? If you are not proposing it, what are you proposing?

The report points out that in recent years there has been a weakening relationship between economic growth and employment growth, meaning that growth is not automatically translating into new jobs.

But there still is such a relationship, right? Or has it vanished, and do you think growth does not matter, and should be done away with?

The biennial study found that for every percentage point of additional GDP growth, total global employment grew by only 0.30 percentage points between 1999 and 2003, a drop from 0.38 percentage points between 1995 and 1999.

Which is precisely the kind of thing I would expect if I thought, as I do think, that globalisation, having created crap jobs for lots of people, is now switching to making crap jobs a bit less crap, rather than just thrashing out more equally crap jobs for people who already have crap jobs.

With employment growing between 0.5 and 0.9 percentage points for each additional percentage point of GDP growth, the most employment-intensive growth has taken place in the Middle East and in northern and sub-Saharan Africa.

And your problem is? Again, the creation of crap jobs is going on faster in some places – the poorest places, the places where there used to be no jobs at all, even crap jobs – than in the places where they already have crap jobs and would like nicer ones. This is just what I would expect of a world heading in exactly the right direction.

A review of other indicators, however, . . .

Oh to hell with it. Read the whole thing, if you can be bothered.

What this report of a report shows is that our side is winning the argument about globalisation and winning it handsomely. The Juan Somavias of this world hate globalisation, but since they do not say why, we can only guess. My strongly held opinion is that Juan Somavia hates globalisation because it takes jobs away from his members, in rather small numbers, and gives jobs to millions of people who are not his members, in very big numbers, and he hates that. Plus he probably hates capitalism. He dare not say this, because it is too nasty and too stupid, but he thinks it.

However, hating globalisation as he does, he still cannot find anything really bad to say about it. Poverty is widespread, and is not nice. Poor people have crap jobs, which they do because they prefer having crap jobs to starving. In some places, crap jobs are being created fast, in others the crap jobs they already have are being improved. Blah blah blah, etc. etc. etc.., moan moan moan.

At no time did Juan Somavia, or the writers of this report, judging by this report of their report, say that globalisation is worse than their proposed alternative, for they propose no such alternative. Had they done so, and if they did do so without the report of the report mentioning this, that alternative would presumably be (presumably was) non-globalisation. More or less big gobs of: tariff barriers, laws against importing and exporting, subsidies for existing industries, etc. etc.., the whole discredited panoply of command-and-control, national socialist, bugger-the-damn-foreigners economic policy which, the last time it was seriously imposed, caused the Great Depression.

Juan Somavia and his cohorts moan about globalisation in the same feeble and pointless way that others moan about the price of beer or the bulkiness of SLR cameras or the noisiness of washing machines. Should beer be done away with? Should big clunky SLR cameras be illegal? Should laws be passed demanding silence of washing machines? Well, no, but, but, but, … it’s just … not good enough!!! Idiots. Others may still be saying semi-plausible but stupid things against globalisation, but Juan Somavia and his mates have lost this argument. But because of all their futile grumbling, and because of the prominence that their futile grumbling still gets in news reports by people who would prefer them not to have lost, this defeat may only be clear to the practised eye, but a defeat it nevertheless is. They have lost, and we are winning.

Winning a mere argument does not automatically translate itself into immediately getting the right policies and dumping the wrong ones. It may well be, for example, that this report that this report reports on contains many detailed and evil anti-globalisation proposals, which the report of the report dares not mention because these anti-globalisation proposals are just too obviously evil, but which are still there, and which for all manner of less obviously evil reasons may still be acted upon. People may have no good reasons for opposing globalisation, but they still have plenty of bad ones. Like: wanting to keep their own non-crap jobs and to hell with the world. And like: wanting capitalism – which they took against in their youth – to be mucked up, and then wanting capitalism to get the blame for the resulting ruin, instead of accepting it themselves. Overcoming such ignoble interests and intellectually corrupt positions is tough work. But, at any rate if this particular report of this particular report is anything at all to go by, the argument about whether these interests and positions ought to be overcome is now over.