PRESS BRIEFING BY INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION

The International Labour Organization’s (ILO) most comprehensive study to date on discrimination, entitled “Time for Equality at Work”, was launched at Headquarters this morning by Lee Swepston, Chief of the ILO’s Equality and Employment Branch.

In 1998, he said, the ILO had adopted the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which set out four principles as fundamental to balanced and equitable development.  Today’s report, which dealt with discrimination, was the fourth in the first series of global reports on those four principles.

The ILO had been concerned with the issue of discrimination, he said, since it began in 1919.  There were not many surprises in the current report, which dealt with different kinds of discrimination.  Gender was, of course, one type of discrimination that pervaded all societies.  Women were usually lower on the economic scale, had more trouble accessing work, and had lower pay scales than men in all countries -- a 10 to 15 per cent gap due simply to gender discrimination in wages.  That was one of the areas in which the ILO would work very seriously in following up to the report.

A number of other issues were also highlighted in the report, including race and ethnicity, which was compounded by recent increases in migration around the world.  There was often discrimination on the basis of race and religion tied to the fact that one was a migrant.  HIV/AIDS and other disabilities due to illness were among the other areas covered.  It was the perception of lesser ability that kept people out of jobs and economic opportunity and, thereby, redoubled discrimination, he noted.  All of that was compounded when there were multiple forms of discrimination, such as women who were also ethnic or religious minorities. 

The situation of indigenous and tribal peoples around the world was an equally large part of the ILO’s concern on discrimination, since the ILO was responsible for the only international conventions on the subject, he added.  That would lead to a discussion in the ILO on new forms of action to take, and to trying to gather up support from the rest of the international system.

Responding to a question, Mr. Swepston said that the ILO was promoting the concept of decent work.  There had to be the promotion of employment, but in decent conditions.  He did not see how it could be argued that just because someone was making an income –- below the poverty level, in terrible conditions and ruining family life -- they were necessarily better off, just because there was employment.  There had to be balanced action, that is, work in decent conditions. 

Asked about the situation of discrimination regarding pay in developed countries, particularly in the United States, Mr. Swepston replied that, as far as gender was concerned, the United States was like all other developed countries.  Women had been making increases in both access to work and in access to higher levels of the employment market.  But, they remained “severely

underpaid” as compared to men.  The best that any developed country had been able to do was to get women to 85 to 90 per cent of the wage rates of men.  That got worse in times of economic difficulty.  In the United States, at the best, it was 85 per cent.  The United States was among the few countries that had not ratified the ILO’s conventions on those subjects, so the ILO’s monitoring was based on the country’s own statistics.

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