ILO: world of work is changing and the union movement has to keep up

The world of job is changing rapidly and the relevance of the union movement in the near future will depend on its ability to adapt to new realities, in the composition of the workforce or the way of doing business, and on being attractive enough for workers to judge that It’s worth unionizing.

The deputy director general for Governance, Rights and Dialogue of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Manuela Tomei, makes this analysis in an interview with EFE, in which she recalls that the union movement is one of the most important modes of representation of the world, with 250 million unionized workers.

Of that total, 35% are in the Europe and Central Asia region (according to the ILO regional division), 10% less than ten years ago, while unionization has increased in the Asia region. Pacific (China included), which has 36% of unionized workers in the world.

The rest is distributed between Latin America (18%), Africa (10%) and Arab countries (less than 1%).

In addition to the numbers of workers who are part of a union, the health of the labor movement – the name under which it was born and gained importance in the 19th century – can be measured by its influence on political debate and the design of public policies, as well as as well as for its way of facing new challenges, in particular the digitalization of the economy and, as part of this, the use of artificial intelligence.

In his analysis of the current situation, Tomei regrets that the success of the tripartite negotiation (governments, employers and unions) to mitigate the loss of jobs and the collapse of businesses during the covid-19 pandemic has been forgotten.

“At that moment we saw the added value of having this tripartite dialogue, which made it possible to find practical and tailored solutions, in which all parties had to make sacrifices. The problem is that we have forgotten what we learned in the pandemic”, he maintains.

“We have gone back to the same old thing and failed to apply the lessons learned. And I am referring, for example, to the deterioration of civic space and civil liberties, as well as the rights of union members and employers’ organizations.”, he specifies.

The ILO leadership maintains that unions have traditionally attracted workers with formal jobs and fixed salaries, but as the organization of work changes, self-employed workers or even informal workers are increasingly important to maintain the base. union.

“We are seeing that in several countries the self-employed (self-employed) are joining unions, while in countries where informal work is the norm, unions are making efforts to reach workers who are not their traditional members and for that they are doing adjustments in their organization, strategies and services they provide”explains Tomei.

The changes go hand in hand with the expansion of digitalization of tasks that until now were performed by workers, despite which the ILO does not anticipate a massive loss of jobs.

The senior official recognizes as true that some jobs will disappear, that others will undergo changes to increase their productivity, while others will arise due to the needs to feed, manage and provide permanent support to artificial intelligence.

“What really worries us is the polarization of jobs. Artificial intelligence is tremendously expensive, like any other technology, so only those who can buy it will be able to benefit from it“, Explain.

The ILO considers that to prevent the digital divide from growing even further, “massive public investments, that is, states invest in infrastructure and training, and private investment does the rest, but we are seeing that this is not happening in developing countries”.