UN labour agency calls for global action to end poverty through decent jobs

Stressing that work is the best route out of poverty in a world where nearly 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day, the United Nations labour agency today called for global partnerships between governments, employers and workers to provide decent jobs for the poor.

“The persistence of poverty is the moral indictment of our times,” the Director-General of the UN International Labour Office (ILO), Juan Somavia, says in a report released in Geneva. “While there are some signs of progress, the fact remains that never have we seen so much wealth while so many continue to live in abject poverty.”

Mr. Somavia is to launch a debate on ways out of global poverty when he formally presents the report, entitled Working out of Poverty, to ILO’s annual meeting of some 3,000 government, worker and employer representatives on 9 June. He is set to call for new global partnerships to support national efforts against poverty.

Warning that global efforts to cut poverty in half by 2015, as mandated by the UN Millennium Summit of 2000, will fail unless new ways are found to allow the world’s poor to work for a decent living. Mr. Somavia says in the report: “We know that work is the best route out of poverty. But we cannot legislate employment in and poverty out.”

Noting that the poor have enormous reserves of courage, ingenuity, persistence and solidarity that helps them get through the each day on less than the equivalent of $2, Mr. Somavia says: “Instead of waging war on poverty from the top down, the multilateral system must find ways of tapping into this unused potential. In many ways, the working poor are the ultimate entrepreneurs.”

With the “income gap” between the wealthiest and poorest fifths of the world’s population widening from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1999, the report notes that regional poverty varies. While the number of people living on very low incomes declined in China and other East Asian countries in the 1990s, to about 900 million from 1.1 billion, slow growth in sub-Saharan Africa elevated the number of the poor by 25 per cent, to nearly 500 million.

Meanwhile, the number of poor in Latin America and the Caribbean rose to 132 million from 121 million, and in the Middle East and North Africa those living at or below the $2-a-day line rose by 20 million, to nearly 70 million. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the number living in poverty increased three-fold to 97 million.