Conference Agenda

Introduction

Energy, food or health crises have greater economic consequences on low paid or unpaid work-ers. Some of them, such as unpaid care workers, nevertheless contribute highly to essential values by conducting work that can be qualified as “meaningful work”. Other activities are highly paid and highly productive, yet may exacerbate crises, such as speculating services on food or housing prices. However, legal institutions, States or the ILO generally do not intervene on the value and purpose of work beyond market mechanisms despite some attempts to look at “essential work” during the pan-demic. Based on post economic growth theories (Raworth 2018, Fioramenti 2018; Hickel 2021; Jackson 2022), this paper aims to discuss the meaning of work beyond its economic valuation in a post-growth logic. It aims to show how a discussion on meaningful work can contribute to reduce inequalities and social protection beyond traditional redistribution mechanisms.

Research question

To which extent should States and the ILO develop and discuss the notion of meaningful work beyond productive market work that are emerging in post growth theories?

How to create opportunities for meaningful work beyond the market and to which extent could meaningful work complement traditional redistribution strategies ensuring social protection?

Methodology

The paper first describes post economic growth theories and the idea of work in these theories. These theories move towards a new concept of meaningful work (Veltman 2016). This paper will then discuss the limits defining meaningful work. Finally, it will review the policy work of the ILO and assesses whether the ILO should engage with post growth theories by defining the value of work beyond market mechanisms.

Contribution to literature

Despite an emerging literature on post growth economics and meaningful work, these notions have also not yet sufficiently been exploited and discussed by labour law scholars (Bueno 2021, Dermin and Dumont 2022). This paper would like to encourage authors to develop legal strategies for promoting work that can be considered meaningful beyond the market.

Findings

The paper would like to start a debate on the meaning of work beyond its value on the market. It aims to discuss the potential and limits of moving beyond a productivism as a manner for workers to become more resilient when facing crisis.

The disruptions of Covid-19 in our lives unsettled many of our assumptions about modern societies —regulation, economy, governance, community, and, of course, about work. It was a moment of awakening, with great potential for change. Standard notions of work were questioned by millions of people who found themselves choosing between income and family, job and health, life and death. But many of these concerns were driven to the sidelines by dominant players who found in Covid an opportunity for intensified extraction, exploitation, and wealth accumulation. For these players, Covid created the best of both worlds — more wealth and less accountability — while for the majority of people it was business as usual, or worse. In between, we had a group of hot-skilled individuals who could find comfort in having the option of teleworking, albeit with some sacrifices in their social life. In short, Covid intensified preexisting fissures in our societies, creating parallel universes — a trend that has, by and large, continued after the pandemic, with protests rising around the globe but capital showing little sign of retreat.

In response to this growing gap, social and labor institutions have to adopt new ways of thinking about labor, work, jobs, employment, and other related concepts. A good starting point would be to revisit the meaning of these terms as a “cluster,” driven by certain evaluation criteria. As shown in the table, the current cluster of concepts around work is driven by “efficiency,” largely emanating from a capitalist logic that takes “profit” as the bottom line. It is because of this perspective and its criteria that terms such as “task,” “gig,” and “AWA” have found their way into the conceptual cluster of “work” in recent times. Thinking about the future of work, however, does not have to be guided by such a perspective or by the efficiency criterion attached to it. In a post-scarcity society driven by a different set of criteria — e.g., decency, dignity, solidarity, mutual support — a different cluster would emerge around “work.” What that cluster might look like would be a matter of social debate and collective struggle, but instead of “task,” “gig,” “AWA,” and even “job” and “employment,” it might include terms such as “meaning,” “creativity,” “ACA” (Alternative Communal Arrangements), “service” and “engagement”, for instance. I propose to explore this alternative cluster as a way to inform and guide the thinking of institutions in ensuring decent work and social protections.

This paper presents the Structural Model for Sustainable Development (SMSD) – a modeling framework developed in the ILO for the purpose of policy and scenario simulation. The framework relies on economy-wide model disaggregated by products, industries, institutional sectors and covers the full sequence of production and income accounts covered by the system of national accounts (SNA). A full Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is the natural source of accounting restrictions and data for a class of models that focus on how system-wide outcomes are generated by integrated socioeconomic components. In other words, the modelling approach links the social, economic and potentially the environmental dimensions of the impacts of policies or shocks at the sectoral and economy-wide level. The SAM and the model may also include industry and labour breakdowns based on the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), the classification of occupation and of status in employment and other international standard classifications. The model works allowing for the composition of different adjustment channels that bring product supply and demand into equality, and determine the different sets of prices, the functional distribution between primary factors of production and the personal distribution between households. These adjustment mechanisms allow capturing the characteristic features of significantly different economic sectors. By closely reflecting the national accounting structure and adopting parsimonious specifications, the model can adapt to a variety of country-specific socioeconomic characteristics and generate detailed and policy-relevant insights.

During the last 40 years there has been a redefinition of the incumbencies of central banks worldwide, and a strong push for their independence. These made that labour market goals are completely ignored when it comes to the interest rate setting. And many times the implications are quite bad for job creation.

In this paper we try to show how the apparent independence and neutrality of Central Banks can severely affect employment creation, beyond the well-known aggregate demand effects of monetary policies.

The dynamic of the financing of SMEs will be analyzed and developed, its implications, and a broad policy recommendation aiming to surpass the "supply side" crisis that emerged with COVID and the restoring of the normal productive process.

The approach is relevant for developing economies, especially middle-income countries, that face financial constraints that can't be solved just by small interest movements and fine-tuning, but also for richer countries where the development of SMEs and "family businesses" stalled in favor of large corporations, franchises, and other oligopolistic practices.

The idea of the so called "garage shop" that goes public, bringing some investors via crowdfunding or other financial instruments, only applies to a handful of successful experiences. In our work we will show how a few regulatory measures, that don't affect other economic measures.

Contribution to the theory and policymaking: Most of the work from mainstream economics on the process of financing private sector development have been around the neo-classical canonical wisdom of property rights, rule of law, ease of entry, fair competition, etc. This will show that there are other alternatives of easier implementation and more in line with the objective of job creation.