THE RIGHT TO A DECENT JOB
Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment”.
However, the working situation of millions of people the world over is a far cry from meeting the stipulations of this article. The search for work offering these “just and favourable conditions” is at the origin of most of the immigrant flows from one part of the planet to another. This is an unstoppable phenomenon given the difficult situation of a great number of impoverished countries, the populations of which dream of working to earn a living wherever there are most job opportunities.
Often, on successfully arriving to the rich countries, these people are obliged to work in far worse conditions than they had imagined, but which they have no choice but to accept out of necessity and because they are still earning more than they were in their countries of origin. But this mustn’t serve as a cover for the precariousness, the insufficient payment or on numerous occasions, the downright abuse suffered by these people.
No matter what the case, apart from the distances, the job market in rich countries has its own share of problems for all involved. In recent years, the growing flexibility and lowering of labour costs has been accompanied by an obvious job precariousness particularly affecting young people, women and immigrants. Women continue in many sectors to receive a lower wage than men for the same job, while suffering a much higher proportional unemployment rate, not to mention the difficulty they face when it comes to accessing positions of management and responsibility.
Youths are often obliged to do training work at companies on extremely low wages (or sometimes none at all), with temporary contracts one after the other and wages on which it is difficult for them to lead an independent economic existence, hence putting paid to any life projects they may have had.
Apart from this reduction in labour rights, we should make special mention of accidents at work, which amount to terribly high numbers every year. Temporary contracts and precarious jobs have an extremely negative influence on the number of accidents at work due to savings in training on prevention and safety. In addition to this are excessively long hours and hard work, together with a dread of demanding labour rights for fear of being rapidly and cheaply laid off.
The challenges of the new economy mustn’t translate into a reform of the labour market undermining the rights that it took so long to achieve. It is therefore necessary to foster a global social agreement based on regulations guaranteeing the right to a decent job for all citizens.