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Mr President,
Director-General Somavia,
Ministers,
Members of Parliament,
Representatives of employers and labour,
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,

"Universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice.” These are the opening words of the International Labour Organization’s Constitution and this is also how I want to begin my speech. For here we have in a nutshell what the International Labour Organization is ultimately striving towards: world peace.

From the outset the International Labour Organization has seen its mission as to serve humanity by advancing social justice. In concrete terms that means – even now at this 100th session, which I’m delighted to be attending today – helping to generate productive employment, developing further the rights of workers, guaranteeing decent work, extending social protection and strengthening social partnership.

These are concerns that have all been around for a long time. And now, too, they continue to occupy us. Over the decades they have by no means become irrelevant. Today they are really tangible concerns, for we live in an increasingly globalized world and we realized at the latest when the international financial and economic crisis hit just how interdependent we had all become. Globalization was the reason, too, why – even before the current international financial and economic crisis struck – I urged the need for the international organizations – including the ILO – to work much more closely together and develop a common basis for their activities.

Nowadays, and especially in times of profound crisis, the ILO remains a strong defender of equitable labour standards. Its Declaration of Philadelphia spelled out very cogently what this means, and I quote: “All human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity.” This Declaration was not drawn up recently or even in the 21st century, it was drawn up – as you are of course aware – in 1944. Everyone knows under what horrific conditions people all over occupied Europe were forced to work for the Germans during the Third Reich. This was the background to the ILO’s statement that “labour is not a commodity.” It can rightly be said, I think, that the International Labour Conference has always got to grips with and taken forward the burning issues of the day. So please accept once again my heartfelt congratulations on your 100th session!

Allow me to thank you for inviting me to join you today – not only because I’m delighted to be here, but also because I firmly believe it’s very important that the International Labour Organization should speak up strongly for justice. With my visit here I hope to underscore that this of course also requires political support from the ILO member states. Let me cite here what UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan saw as the leitmotiv of his term of office: “True peace encompasses economic development and social justice. It means safeguarding the global environment, it means democracy, diversity, dignity and much much more."

The work you are doing here at the ILO is part and parcel of what the United Nations is striving to achieve. You see these endeavours best served by dialogue. You seek partners who are keen to make social justice part of their own agenda. The ILO has helped, for example, to make labour and social issues a higher priority in a wide range of networks involving governments, international organizations and other actors. I for one am absolutely convinced that dialogue is the right way forward here. It is dialogue that has made the social market economy we have in Germany so strong – even if this is hard going at times. This dialogue is not an exchange of pleasantries and sometimes it gets very heated. But it’s always a dialogue with and not about the other side. That’s why I’d like to highlight here your trail-blazing Global Jobs Pact. During the international economic and financial crisis the ILO came up with what could be described as a new tool for alleviating unemployment and safeguarding social protection.

Of course it’s quite clear the business of the International Labour Organization is not to resolve problems that national governments and the two sides of industry have failed to deal with. Every country has to sort out its own problems. But the ILO can certainly help here, for with its wealth of experience – the lessons learned by all its member states – it has much to offer. So let me emphasize how right you are, in my view, to espouse the principle of social partnership here: representatives of government, employers and labour sitting down together to agree on common policies. Obviously this approach will always mean that sometimes one side and sometimes the other side will insist their interests have not been given due weight. That’s something which has to be taken seriously. But you should not allow that to deflect you from pursuing this dialogue between partners.

The International Labour Conference stands for integration, not segregation. That’s the reason its conventions are deemed to have such legitimacy and authority. If we recall the hugely varying circumstances around the world with which you have to deal – the situation in the classic industrialized countries, the emerging economies and the developing countries – we get a sense of the tremendous range of issues you’re concerned with. But whatever the circumstances, one thing always remains true and here I cite the words of our German constitution: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” There are principles that apply to everyone, everywhere – however greatly their circumstances may differ.

Our experience with social partnership in Germany has been extremely good. That’s why I’d like to tell you a little more about it. As Mr Somavia has pointed out, “kurzarbeit” is now a useful new addition, as it were, to our international vocabulary. I admit it’s rather nice to be talking for once about short-time working rather than “German angst”.

In 2009 the German economy, which is highly export-oriented, recorded almost 5% negative growth. We’re a country that has scarcely any raw materials. So it was extremely important to remind ourselves then what our real assets are, the source of our strength. Both then and now, it was perfectly clear we had on the one side the employers – and by that I mean not just the big companies but above all our small and medium-sized enterprises – and on the other side the employees, who have often been working for their company for years.

We realized how important it was also in difficult times to keep the link between employers and employees intact, for these were highly trained people, after all. Our economy would have been greatly harmed if we had not found a way to preserve this link. Short-time working offered a way forward here, and we introduced it as a government scheme. But at the start we didn’t know of course if family-owned companies, for example, or small businesses would accept this new instrument. Had they not had faith in their own future, they would have opted to let people go right away rather than keep them for a while on their payrolls, which always means extra costs for the employer.

The great thing is that it worked. Our new scheme worked because companies had faith in their future. It worked because the state was willing to spend a large amount of taxpayers’ money on this scheme as part of our economic stimulus package. It worked because employees were willing to earn less, use up credits on their working time accounts or collect debits they could offset by working longer hours later. The reason the scheme was successful was that all three partners that play such a crucial role in the ILO were prepared to take on responsibility here.

Social partnership – what I’ve described as the willingness of all partners to take on responsibility – is only going to work, however, also in times of crisis, if it’s something that has been accepted and practised in normal times, before the crisis hits. So the real lesson of the crisis, as I see it, is this: we must invest more in social partnership when our economies are doing well. Then we’ll have a viable partnership to see us through the hard times. This was certainly one of the main reasons why, when our export industry picked up again, the necessary skilled labour was right there, ready and waiting. This was an asset which – along with other aspects of our stimulus package – helped give us that extra edge we enjoy today.

One key element of social partnership is of course autonomy in collective bargaining. I won’t gloss over the fact that in Germany we have extremely heated debates about minimum wages, on the one hand, and the right of both sides of industry, on the other, to agree wages and salaries in free collective bargaining. So it’s perhaps rather important to point out here that nowadays, especially in the new employment sectors, management and labour lack the high degree of organization they usually have in more traditional sectors. That’s why we tend to see minimum wages more in these new sectors than in industries where collective bargaining is still strong.

In this connection – as I’ve just been discussing with Mr Somavia – your new Convention for Domestic Workers is extremely important, I believe. Domestic work often takes place in a grey, unregulated area and it’s good that standards are now to be progressively introduced to help ensure such work is compatible with equal rights and human dignity. I wish you every success in giving this new ILO Convention practical effect – for of course it’s going to take some time for it to be universally ratified. In my view this can be a landmark Convention for fair and equitable employment also in other, quite new sectors.

Ladies and gentlemen, in Germany we now have more people in work than before the crisis, thanks to the steps we’ve taken to safeguard employment. But we have another problem we share also with other industrialized countries: the problem of an ageing population. This is a problem unfamiliar to many of those present here today, coming as you do from countries where young people make up a very high proportion of the population. In our country, however, the problem is how to ensure, both now and in future, that we have the skilled labour we need. And there’s another thing, too, we have heated debates about. Should we bring in skilled labour from abroad when we still have three million people out of work, who have sometimes been unemployed for years? That’s going to be an important debate in Germany over the next few years.

Internationally of course the main concern now in today’s globalized world is how to give practical meaning, in the fullest sense of the word, to more and more core labour standards. I’m thinking here of fundamental rights such as freedom of association and free collective bargaining, a ban on discrimination at work as well as the abolition in particular of forced labour and, most importantly, child labour. Here I appeal strongly to you all to do everything you can to support these goals.

The Decent Work Agenda is a universally recognized tool, which we must now use to pro¬duce outcomes. The world of work is changing – especially in the emerging economies – at incredible speed. If we look at just how many people in China and India flock to the cities from the countryside to work under conditions very different from what they’ve been used to, it becomes clear how important it is, in the interest of long-term social cohesion and equitable development, that these countries should embrace and practise social partnership.

Over the past few months the situation in North Africa has been very much the focus of attention. Tremendous changes are under way there. And right now people are also suffering greatly, in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. Of course we want freedom and democracy to take root and flourish in these countries, too. That will crucially depend, however, on whether young people especially, who are ready and willing to work, have a real chance to make something of their lives. That’s why Germany is keen to assist here by launching what we call a “a pact for employment”. The aim is to offer as many young people as possible training, job skills and decent work in their homelands, in order to boost growth and give people a realistic hope of a better life.

That was also one of the topics discussed at the latest G8 summit. And it should be discussed, too, at the G20 meeting in France. I’m most grateful to the French Presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy, Christine Lagarde and others, for ensuring right from the start that employment, the world of work and social partnership were on the agenda of both meetings. In our discussions especially in the G20 we need to make sure that we don’t talk only about abstract rules for the financial markets – they’re important, too – but also get across to people all over the world that we’re talking about them, their prospects and their future.

That’s why I’ve been campaigning for years, as Mr Somavia has pointed out, for greater cooperation between the various international organizations – IMF, ILO, the World Bank, OECD, WTO. They exist, after all, to serve the people of the world, so they need to become organizations that help give shape and structure to this increasingly globalized world we inhabit today. The institution with the greatest authority here is the UN. But each of the organi¬zations I’ve mentioned makes a contribution here and has a particular angle on the economic issues posed by globalization.

After World War II the United Nations was primarily an institution concerned with issues of peace and international security. Now, however, international cooperation needs to focus also on issues of equitable and sustainable economic development. The institutions I cited earlier – including the International Labour Organization – can play a crucial role in this connection.

So I’m delighted to see that the participation of all these organizations in G20 meetings is now accepted. G20 meetings are unthinkable indeed without their expertise. For the next 100 sessions I would therefore like to wish the International Labour Organization the same courage and commitment it has shown in the past also in tackling areas where regulation has hitherto been lacking! Thanks to the Internet, we all live today in a very different world. And the world of work is changing, too. The organization that reacts fastest to these changes, whose voice people around the world choose to listen to first, will be a successful organization. I want the ILO to be successful. So my heartfelt congratulations come, as I said earlier, with best wishes for the drive, stamina and courage you’ll need to take your mission forward.

Given the current breathtaking pace of globalization, all of us, in whatever part of the world we live, are now entering uncharted territory. Anyone who claims to know everything is simply fooling themselves. So arguments can also be a very productive exercise, they can be an attempt to start a dialogue aimed at exploring new paths that may turn out to be the right ones. As I see it, any organization that fails to attempt this is unlikely to be around a few decades from now. So let me invite you to take up this challenge. Never mind if sometimes there’s rather too much argument, as long as it’s productive and of course there’s eventually a worthwhile outcome. What you’ve done for domestic workers, for example, shows that you’re com¬mitted to achieving results. I’m well aware naturally that it’s going to be a long hard haul for you to move things in the right direction. That’s why I’m very glad to be here today, for I also have a message to give you. The efforts you’re making to help shape globalization are bearing visible fruit. So let me encourage you to keep up the good work and wish you every success for the future. Thank you very much for inviting me to join you today.