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Preface to Transitioning to Decent Work and
Economic Growth
Isabelle Schluep, Philipp Aerni and Marianthe Stavridou
1. Introduction
We live in unprecedented times. Five years after the launch of the United
Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) in 2015, and one year after the
first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the global effort to build a
more equal, inclusive and sustainable society will likely experience a serious setback.
The desire to create a more inclusive and sustainable global economy proved
to be one of the few common denominators in the design and launch of the
SDGs. The emphasis on the creation of economic opportunities to address global
sustainability challenges also implied that business should play a prominent role
in the implementation of the SDGs. This view amounted to a major paradigm
shift in the way we think about sustainability. The Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs), which were launched by the UN in 2000 to reduce poverty by half in 2015
(UN 2000)
, did not regard private sector involvement as highly relevant. Regarding
environmental sustainability, the aim of the SDGs to create a green economy also
implies that regulation alone will not be able to save the planet; instead, it requires
the courage to invest in innovative solutions that effectively address environmental
challenges, while creating new jobs for the next generation. This progressive
understanding of sustainability is clearly articulated in the Agenda for Sustainable
Development (2030 Agenda), designed to implement the 17 SDGs with its 169 targets.
The 2030 Agenda calls on governments, civil society, and, most importantly, the
private sector to join forces in realizing this plan of action for the people, planet
and prosperity (UN 2015). It is based on the basic insight that business is a part of
society—not apart from society.
SDG 8 very much embodies this paradigm shift. It aims to “promote sustained,
inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and
decent work for all”. Its emphasis is on the creation of business opportunities
that especially benefit the local people and the environment. It is also linked to
the importance of institutional and technological innovations designed to enable
this transition. As such, SDG 8 is connected with many other goals, such as the
elimination of poverty (SDG 1) and hunger (SDG 2), the promotion of access to quality
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education (SDG 4) and improved infrastructure (SDG 9), the reduction in global
inequality (SDG 10), the promotion of responsible consumption and production (SDG
12), and capacity development and access to markets (SDG 17). Its emphasis on
economic empowerment has also an important link to gender equality (SDG 5).
Finally, SDG 8 is key to every person’s life. “Decent work is at the heart of
the search for dignity for the individual, stability for the family and peace in the
community” as put by Juan Somav
í
a, former Director-General of the International
Labor Organization (ILO). In addition, SDG 8 stands for the catalytic linkages and
spillovers between employment and development. After all, labor income contributes
considerably to the reduction of poverty (Azevedo et al. 2013); and more and better
quality jobs are the surest pathway to achieve social inclusion, to end poverty and
boost prosperity (IFC 2013).
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the world economy, the jobs
challenge has been enormous; it was calculated that, between 2016 and 2030, 30 million
jobs would be required per year just to keep pace with the increasing global working
age population (UN 2018). COVID-19 caused the worst global recession since the
Great Depression in the 1930s (Gopinath 2021), and resulted in the loss of 255 million
full-time jobs, which is about four times more than over the course of the global
financial crisis in 2009 (ILO 2021). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects
that, in 2021, more than 150 economies will have per-capita incomes below 2019
levels, and that workers with little education, youth, women and persons employed
in the informal sector will be disproportionately affected by the expected losses of
income (IMF 2021; Gopinath 2021). As a consequence, the IMF projects that close to
90 million persons could fall into extreme poverty over the course of 2020–2021, which
could reverse many of the social achievements of the past 20 years
(Gopinath 2021;
IMF 2021
). In reaction to this crisis, the United Nations have released a socio-economic
response framework (UN 2020).
UN Secretary General Ant
ó
nio Guterres rightly argued that “Everything we do
during and after the COVID-19 crisis must be with a strong focus on building more
equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the
face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global challenges we face”
(The Lancet 2020). This quote represents the core of SDG 8 on the creation of inclusive
growth and decent work, it very much addresses the concerns of the majority world,
the people who live in low-income countries. Since more than 90 percent of jobs in
developing countries are created by the private sector (IFC 2013), more attention
must be paid to entrepreneurs that help create dynamic, growth-oriented, innovative
and responsible enterprises. To succeed in the long-run, entrepreneurs need to gain
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trust as responsible business partners and create value for society. As such, they not
only propel their own business, but also enable other people to get out of poverty
through the enhancement of local economic opportunities.
In high-income countries, the fear that the fourth industrial revolution could
render many jobs obsolete is real. In response to this concern, the policy focus in
many of these countries has shifted from a defensive attitude toward sustainable
development, which is mainly concerned with preserving economic structures and
preventing unsustainable change through regulation, toward a more forward-looking
attitude, which is more focused on creating new sustainable markets through
innovative entrepreneurship. In this context, the volume “Transitioning to Decent
Work and Economic Growth” may be a valuable guide for policy makers aiming to
move towards a more progressive understanding of sustainable development.
2. Chapters in the Volume
The contributions in this volume may only cover a fraction of the breadth of
SDG 8, but they outline the major opportunities and challenges of the efforts to
implement SDG 8 from different perspectives. Generally, there is a consensus among
the authors that SDG 8 is also highly relevant in the effective implementation of many
other SDGs, and that institutional framework conditions are of crucial importance to
enable inclusive and sustainable change by making “business part of the solution”.
This volume aims to approach decent work and economic growth under different
perspectives. Each chapter highlights a diverse set of issues.
From a business and economic history perspective, Alex Gertschen discusses
multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) local embeddedness in Mexico during the period
from the early 1970s to the 2000s. Analysing the interplay of economic cooperation
and cultural change, he reconstructs MNEs’ transformation from sceptically viewed
outsiders to engines of economic development and normative role models. Together
with local business, they promoted the idea that competitiveness in global value
chains allowed for or even required social responsibility. The author concludes
that MNEs’ embeddedness in Mexico indeed serves as an example that economic
performance and social standards can be reached simultaneously, as postulated by
SDG 8. However, this “virtuous cycle” may work only under certain circumstances
and not for all. This qualification is suggested by the fact that it is largely confined to
the globalized part of Mexico’s economy.
For Maria Elo and Arla Juntunen, preventive governance and targeted
collaboration with diaspora organisations and the civil society are needed to
reduce the phenomena of exploitation, slavery, human trafficking and abuse in
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a developed country like Finland and help the country safeguard decent work
principles. The case study on Finland presents illicit and abusive practices related
to migration, which develop partly due to an institutional lack of attention and
experience. Human trafficking, slavery and abuse may start in the migrant’s home
countries during the recruitment of the workforce by transnational criminal networks;
however, they represent a recent and unperceived phenomenon in the host country
with fundamental socioeconomic implications. The actors of such networks are mostly
people of foreign-origin or people within ethnic enclaves in Finland. This indicates
the existence of cultural- and language-related institutional divides. The authors
suggest investing in targeted collaboration among the main stakeholders to increase
awareness about decent work, close loopholes, and prevent illicit practices early on,
before they start mushrooming.
Philipp Aerni challenges mainstream economic thinking on sustainable
development in high-income countries, which tends to ignore the potential positive
externalities created through scalable innovation for society and the environment.
It fails to understand that poverty is still the main enemy of sustainability in many
low-income countries. He argues that tackling the unmet material needs of the
poor, promoting inclusive economic change and enabling innovation that helps to
decouple economic growth from natural resource use would require action-oriented
public–private partnerships and institutional framework conditions that better award
innovative entrepreneurship for sustainable and inclusive change. He also proposes
an understanding of businesses as an integral part of society and not just an external
black box. In this context, he presented concrete international and national initiatives
that were proven to contribute to sustainable and inclusive change. Finally, Aerni is
concerned that most of the teaching material used in “Education for Sustainable
development” (ESD) tends to ignore examples, which prove that businesses can be
part of the solution.
Dino Sozzi was a practitioner at Ciba–Geigy company in the 1980s in Indonesia,
when the indebted Indonesian government was forced to stop buying agrochemicals
in bulk from the company in order to subsequently resell it at a subsidized price to
farmers. He describes how this agricultural reform forced the company to focus its
attention directly on the farmers, and how they apply their products. The company
realized that it is in its very long-term self-interest to encourage their farming clients
to apply their input in a more sustainable, safe and effective way. It did so by
creating local capacity-building programs that helped farmers to better manage
their resources. Thus, the commercial activities of Ciba-Geigy crop protection,
and eventually its legacy company Syngenta, became more embedded in the local
4
economy, which also increased the appreciation of the local farming communities.
The new corporate commitment to supporting local farmers in improving their
agricultural practices changed the landscape of income, education and employment
for the local communities as a whole. This is the turning point at which Sozzi
believes that his company started to make a genuine contribution to a more inclusive
local economy.
Lia Ferrini discusses the literature gap in corporate social responsibility (CSR)
research regarding the ethical tensions faced by subsidiaries of MNEs operating in
developing countries when they have to navigate between global ethical standards,
local contexts and CSR guidelines. Her review brings together two distinguished
debates on “business ethics and culture” and “trade-offs in CSR”, and highlights
research gaps proposing new advances in research.
Romano De Vivo, Ettore Capri, Henri Rueff, Antonio Gaudioso, Alexandru
Marchis and Gianpiero Menza explore climate change mitigation and adaptation
options for agriculture, the world’s largest employer and provider of livelihoods for
40 percent of the global population. They present Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA)
as a model that can best help to guide transformative actions in the agri-food sector
to increase productivity and resilience and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
in a sustainable way. The CSA’s “action path” for sustainable and inclusive
economic growth includes policies that enable multi-stakeholder collaboration,
and are implemented by organizations that have integrated sustainability into their
business models.
Sumon Vangchuay and Amanda Niklaus examine the gender gap in the
workforce of the renewable energy sector, a young and fast-growing sector often
perceived as progressive by the public at large. The authors discuss this issue at two
levels: framework and practice, and argue that the socio-economic progress to be
made in the renewable energy sector under the SDGs does not necessarily extend
to gender diversity in the workforce. They conclude, that a widespread gender
gap in the renewable energy workforce casts serious doubts about the inclusive
growth and progress made in the energy transition under the SDGs. Vangchuay and
Niklaus highlight the need to align economic growth with inclusion, and recommend
that significant, targeted efforts be put in place to challenge the traditional gender
perspectives and guarantee a sustainable change within this sector.
The last chapter by Marianthe Stavridou focuses on the contribution of a high-end
technology Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) in Switzerland to inclusive and
sustainable change. She shows how innovative entrepreneurship is guided by a
vision to create long-term prosperity among the workforce by taking a human-centred
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approach to business. The author challenges the existing concept of decent work, in
which economic growth is still understood in its crude measurement as the growth
in gross domestic product (GDP). Instead, she proposes a 21st century narrative of
decent work that is based on a more holistic understanding of economic development.
3. Conclusions
This Volume pulls together analyses and experiences from the past and present,
from large and small companies, from the Global South and North, and from different
sectors. Many contributions point out that entrepreneurship and innovation are
important drivers of inclusive and sustainable change. In this context, there is a
general agreement that business can be part of the solution in efforts to realize the
2030 Agenda in general, and SDG 8 in particular.
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©2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open
access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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