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Add to Preferred SourcesILO Director-General Guy Ryder has welcomed the decision to place the fight against inequality at the heart of this year’s G7 summit. Ryder, who will be attending the summit in Biarritz, France, called inequality one of the key challenges of our time.
This year’s G7 French presidency has chosen the theme for the Biarritz Summit well. ‘Combating inequality’ is indeed one of the key challenges of our time. A strong declaration by G7 leaders will do much to demonstrate their commitment to providing effective solutions to this critical problem.
The theme of combating inequality strongly aligns with the International Labour Organization’s mandate for social justice, as articulated most recently by our Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work adopted by the International Labour Conference in June 2019. The G7 presidency’s intent for the Biarritz Summit to reaffirm the G7 members’ commitment to respond to global challenges through collective action further provides important support for the declaration’s call for stronger multilateralism to confront the issues facing the world of work.
The G7’s labour and employment track, known this year as the G7 Social, furthered the overarching theme of France’s presidency by concentrating on four goals: further integrating international labour standards into the multilateral system, supporting access to universal social protection systems, supporting individuals through digital transformation and its impact on the future of work, and promoting occupational equality between women and men. Because these themes are integral to the Decent Work Agenda, they provided the ILO with an opportunity to engage deeply with G7 members, not only by providing technical inputs on each of them but also by participating during the discussions.
In the context of the G7 Social’s focus on the rapid changes in the world of work, France highlighted the importance of the ILO’s centenary by welcoming Work for a brighter future, the report of the ILO’s Global Commission on the Future of Work. It also emphasised the critical role played by the ILO in the multilateral debate on economic and social policy, and the importance of the ILO’s groundbreaking new international standard on violence and harassment in the world of work.
The ILO is looking to the G7 summit to provide an important boost for the efforts to bring that about, and by so doing to provide its own contribution to the G7 priority of combating inequality.
Original source: ILO
Published on 22 August 2019