a guy Ryder, Director General of the International labour organization:
In these difficult times the main problem that confronts most of us pandemic COVID-19 – how to protect themselves and to protect loved ones from the virus, while maintaining their jobs. And to those who decide policy, the challenge is to defeat the pandemic, causing irreparable damage to the economy.
Never before had the stakes not been so high: today in the world registered more than 3 million cases of the disease that claimed about 217 thousand lives, and the global reduction of working time is expected by mid-year will be equivalent to the loss of 305 million jobs. In search of optimal solutions to the various governments continue to operate, "science", paying insufficient attention to the international cooperation, which the global confrontation of global disaster would give us obvious advantages.
Before the end of the war against COVID-19 is still far, but already widely recognized was the fact that after this victory we are waiting for the "new reality". We are talking about how organized our society and our work.
And here hardly there is reason for optimism. Why? Because no one, apparently, knows exactly what it will be this new reality. Because everything goes to the fact that it will be built on the basis of the limitations imposed on us by the pandemic, and not of our own choice and preferences. And because we had already heard it.
During the crisis of 2008-2009, we are continuously repeated like a mantra: it is necessary to develop and use a vaccine against financial excesses, as the world economy becomes more reliable, more equitable, more sustainable. But this did not happen. The world has not only recovered, but strengthened not new, but the previous reality, and those who are in the labor market is already in a worse position, has been thrown even further.
That is why the international labour Day on 1 may is a great time to take a closer look at the new reality and begin to work to make it not just new, but better. And the best not so much for those who already have much, but for those who lack the basic necessities.
The current pandemic is most cruelly exposed the imbalances and injustice in our sphere of work. In the informal economy employing six out of every ten employees, sources of livelihood disappear in droves, and it motivated our colleagues from the world food programme raise the alarm about new threats of a pandemic of hunger. Failures in social protection systems, yawning even in the richest countries, condemning millions of people to destitution. Failure to ensure safety at workplaces annually kills almost three million lives of people dying only because they are forced to work in such conditions. And the uncontrolled growth of inequality means that if medically the virus infects indiscriminately, in socio-economic sense, it cruelly affects primarily the poorest and most disenfranchised.
The only thing we should be surprised in this whole situation is the fact that we do something in it surprising. Decent work was not enough and before the pandemic, but then the deficit was mostly caused only some manifestations of quiet desperation. And only the scourge of the pandemic COVID-19 joined these private woes into social cataclysm, the face of which was now the world. But we always knew about them – I just prefer not to notice them. By and large, taken political decisions exacerbated rather than solved the problem.
Fifty-two years ago, Martin Luther king, speaking on the eve of the death from the killer’s hands before striking scavengers, reminded the world that any labor inherent dignity. Similarly, the virus has highlighted an important and often heroic role of those working in pandemic conditions. The role of the people we usually do not notice in which don’t pay attention, which underestimate and even ignore – health workers, workers care, cleaners, cashiers in supermarkets, transport workers. Many of them are "working poor" and people without adequate protection.
The fact that today, these people and millions like them, are faced with the denial of their dignity, should serve to remind us of the political mistakes of the past and our responsibility for the future.
I hope that when we commemorate the First of may in the following year, an emergency situation COVID-19, will remain in the past. But we will still be challenged to build a future sphere of labour, in which there will be no place of injustice, manifested in the days of the pandemic. A future where we can successfully tackle both long-term and pressing issues associated with climate change, the digital revolution and demographic shifts.
That’s what determines the best reality, which should become long-lasting positive legacy emergency health 2020.
