Global and national strategies for poverty reduction should provide a framework for local strategies to escape cycles of low incomes from work and social exclusion. The ILO has considerable practical experience of community actions that create more and better jobs for women and men living in poverty and improve their chances of securing a life free from deprivation.
Much of this work is in developing countries, but these approaches have also proved to be easily applicable in a number of transition and industrialized market economies.
Community action for decent work and social inclusion It is sometimes argued that a low-income developing country can have either more or better jobs for the mass of the working poor, but not both.
Similar arguments are also used to suggest that the provision of social services for education, health and income support must await the achievement of a reasonably high level of national income. In practice, however, these distinctions are hard to draw. Increasing and stabilizing the earnings of low-income workers requires an approach that combines improved productivity and remuneration with increased purchasing power and a stronger social infrastructure in local communities. “A job at any price” is not a strategy for a sustainable reduction in poverty. Breaking cycles of poverty is thus really about creating a new cycle of local wealth creation, in which step-by-step progress towards more and better jobs and social inclusion are mutually reinforcing.
Communities all over the world are changing rapidly as a result of the powerful forces of technological innovation and economic integration, as well as social and cultural factors such as the assertion of women’s rights, improved education and the wider availability of information and ideas. Migration for work is a growing phenomenon in virtually all parts of the world, with many families now relying on the earnings of members who have left home in search of better opportunities and no longer live permanently with their families. The challenges posed by increasing migration for work will be examined in the context of a general discussion on migrant workers at the 92nd Session of the International Labour Conference in 2004. The ILO’s work on migration will add a further dimension to our understanding of how creating opportunities for decent work relates to strategies to overcome poverty.
This chapter describes some of the main policy tools developed by the ILO to respond to the needs and aspirations of people living in poverty. It highlights the interaction between training, investment, enterprise, finance and social inclusion policies and the way they address the priorities of particular communities. Developing the capacity of trade unions, employers’ organizations and cooperatives to work together with public authorities, local communities and other forms of voluntary associations to adapt and use decent work policy tools is key to broadening and deepening action to achieve a sustainable reduction of poverty. To reduce poverty substantially, as called for by the Millennium Summit, requires a major scaling-up of communitylevel action across the developing world.
Accordingly, the ILO has developed policy instruments in the following areas:
● training and skills development; ● investing in jobs and the community; ● micro and small enterprises; ● microfinance; ● cooperatives; ● social security; ● hazards at work; ● eliminating child labour; ● overcoming discrimination.
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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