ILO DIRECTOR-GENERAL GUY RYDER’S SPEECH TO UNI CONGRESS 19 JUNE 2018, LIVERPOOL Firstly, congratulations to the new General Secretary, Christie, on your election – you can count on the ILO for all the support we can provide. Congress, Greetings from the International Labour Organization. Thank you for inviting me. I was born 3 miles from this hall, and I used to be a staffer for UNI’s founder organization FIET – so this is a great experience. Listening to your debate yesterday, I heard many delegates speak about the future of work. Your reflections on it, your plans, your hopes – but all too often as well your fears and your worries too. There are good reasons why this debate is with us today. It’s on TV, it’s in the newspapers, in the electronic media too, in a way that it has not been for a generation. Here are two such reasons: Firstly, obviously, because the world of work is undergoing transformative change of a speed, on a scale, and so far-reaching that we can truly say we have not seen the like before. And when we consider this change we think technology – big data, digitalization, robotics, A.I. – and of course it is about all of that; but it is about much else as well: climate change and how the world of work needs to become the instrument of a just transition to a sustainable future – probably the biggest change to our production system that we have ever seen; demography, as the aging societies of the North co-exist with the youthful South; and the never more uncertain forward path of globalization. Secondly, we tackle these extraordinary challenges at a time of the greatest danger, of a degradation in the political discourse of public life, which is being dragged onto terrain that even a few years ago could not, would not have been accepted. We live at a time when telling the truth
ILO DIRECTOR-GENERAL GUY RYDER’S SPEECH TO UNI CONGRESS 19 JUNE 2018, LIVERPOOL Firstly, congratulations to the new General Secretary, Christie, on your election – you can count on the ILO for all the support we can provide. Congress, Greetings from the International Labour Organization. Thank you for inviting me. I was born 3 miles from this hall, and I used to be a staffer for UNI’s founder organization FIET – so this is a great experience. Listening to your debate yesterday, I heard many delegates speak about the future of work. Your reflections on it, your plans, your hopes – but all too often as well your fears and your worries too. There are good reasons why this debate is with us today. It’s on TV, it’s in the newspapers, in the electronic media too, in a way that it has not been for a generation. Here are two such reasons: Firstly, obviously, because the world of work is undergoing transformative change of a speed, on a scale, and so far-reaching that we can truly say we have not seen the like before. And when we consider this change we think technology – big data, digitalization, robotics, A.I. – and of course it is about all of that; but it is about much else as well: climate change and how the world of work needs to become the instrument of a just transition to a sustainable future – probably the biggest change to our production system that we have ever seen; demography, as the aging societies of the North co-exist with the youthful South; and the never more uncertain forward path of globalization. Secondly, we tackle these extraordinary challenges at a time of the greatest danger, of a degradation in the political discourse of public life, which is being dragged onto terrain that even a few years ago could not, would not have been accepted. We live at a time when telling the truth
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