The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Berlin, Germany, from 25 to 29 November 2019. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Hello, everybody. Just so you know, we're giving an extra 5 minutes for people to get in the room because it is not exactly front and center at the event. We expect there will be a few scragglers coming in. So thanks for being patient. All right. We may as well get started.
So welcome to the talk on future of work. It's a session that will mostly look at issues around the future work and vulnerable populations. I guess one of the ‑‑ I sometimes like to know what feelings are around the room on things. So I guess put up your hand if you think that in the future, robots will take over your job? One person? 50 years in the future or something like that. One person. That's impressive. So put up your hands if you think technology or advances in technology will actually give you more opportunities for work in the future? Interesting. So there are ‑‑ there are optimists here.
that's good.
So we won't really talk about what is the pressing issue and a lot of media and policymakers of AI, automation and jobs so. Much, but it is one of the reason yes this topic is quite often front and center. Ever since fray and Osborne in 2015, I think, came up with a study that said that 47% of jobs in America were vulnerable to automation. Policymakers, researchers, everybody have been quite concerned with this topic to the point where you had front page headlines around, you know, a world without work. How technology is disrupting or destroying jobs with an MIT tech review title. But the reality is we don't really understand very well the relationship between technology and work. It is still something that we are trying to bet a better grasp of. There are definitely advances all the time. But if there's an area that I think we're starting to get a better grapple with is the whole issue of micro work, the gig economy and some of the types of jobs that ‑‑ that essentially have appeared in the last five years and that you've all heard of. Uber is the best example of this. And it's kind of interesting because to a certain extent, it's the first articulation of how, you know, an Internet Society is creating a lot of new jobs. Some of the people on the panel will tell you a little bit more about the amount of jobs this is potentially creating, but, Mark, if I remember correctly, it was 10% of Americans have actually been part of a gig economy job. 8%. And 10% ‑‑ 10% in the UK. But what's important to our panel is also the extent to which these jobs are permeating in the developing world. And we'll have around the table people who actually have done household surveys across A46a, Asia and Latin America to understand the extent to which these types of jobs are playing a role in those places.
So that will be a large part of what we'll talk about. Certainly, what kind of jobs are showing up in this new internet enabled work environment. What are the opportunities, but also what are the challenges around them. What are the types of labor protections? What are the types much wages that should be expected in these kinds of situations, but in another big part of the panel is how can people best prepare? How do we build digital skills, how do we build a skills base that shows that even the vulnerable people can take advantage of these kinds of opportunities?
So we have with us Allen Giwald from Rya. Carolina from Lacknick. Mark Graham from the Fairwork Foundation. And Manuel from Google. They will each give us 5 to 7 minutes on what they're working on and some key findings in this space. And then we'll have an opportunity for including you in the conversation and getting some sense of the key questions that you have on these topics and just try to have a more informal conversation on this.
So maybe, Alsen, I'll start with you.
>> Alsen: Um, the remarks I'm going to make I'm going to focus on Africa, but the data I'm drawing on comes from a global south survey much over 20,000 households and double that individuals who ‑‑ which we did in Asia and Darcy in Latin America. Now also learn time digital.
I think what is remarkable about this study is it was done in 2018. These are nationally represented household surveys. They're the real penetration rates for Africa. Not the supply side kind of figures. So the penetration rates are far lower than the official view and statistics suggest. It is not surprising you have such a low incidence of online work in Africa. Actually, across many of the countries, it was statistically insignificant. We couldn't use the data. So it has been aggregated to make some sense of it. It masks certain things about certain countries, but I think what is interesting is how diverse it was across the different countries and how contextual the work that was happening in different countries and the responses to online work. So I think there's been a lot of hype about the potential for decent work that is addressing misalignment in our economy. It can provide 46less work and provide people with mobility and those kinds of things. So way below 20% in many of the countries of the 10 that we surveyed. A country like Rwanda. There is an incredible supply side with very strong gender policies. They had the lower penetration rate at least in 10% and the widest gender gap of 60%. It is really not surprising we pick up insignificant number of people actually doing micro work. So until we get those basic development issues addressed, we are not going to be able to see the benefits much online work. But what we do see when we look and interrogated online work that's happening is that in Africa, unlike Asia and certainly to Latin America, a lot of online work is actually just plat sourced manual work. So a large majority much people are doing e‑mailing domestic work, gardening and those kinds of things which has not been sourced. Mark will speak about how that is better for some people, but a whole lot worse for a lot of people. What we have seen across the board of is patents of exploitation or south exploitation especially with the (?) survey and Darcy survey and Europe for example. Spanish work is in Latin America was paid much more if it was identified as Latin American workers. And then on the manual side of work, a lot of traditional exploitations as well. Of course, there are these problems armed quality control and who does get paid and how much they get paid for what they have done. About 20% of people who have done online work had stopped doing online work. The reason for not continuing is because they hospital been paid. So about ‑‑ hadn't been paid. So a significant number had not been paid for work before.
And then the very going gender differences and the different kinds of work people are doing. So the idea for women, certainly in the literature from the economies is that evidence seems to suggest that online work really provides an opportunity for child care as people are forced to be at home for various reasons to do online work in a more flexible and bit of fashion. Because so few in many of those countries are women are not online, the possibility of them doing that kind of work is fors diminished for them doing predominantly and not educated enough. So one of the main reasons they're not allowed to do online. Driven not per se, but by the fact that they are not getting access to knowledge and therefore, income and therefore, they have the skillings to do those jobs. Obviously the fact that they are not getting educated are all very cultural gender issues. It is determined by that.
Perhaps I should leave it then and come bang to things in the last 5 minutes.
>> Mark, you. To go ahead?
>> Mark: Thanks. I will be talking about the new project, the Fairwork Foundation. The project is basically about days of improving jobs in the gig economy. When I say the gig economy, I think about something called online work and also work that has to happen in a physical play so can be delivery work and taxi driving and many other things. So just work that's mediated by a digital platform.
Now, so what do we know about the gig economy? We continue is growing and in cities all around the world, it will know hard to find a city anywhere on this earth. What do we also know? In many cases, they're simply not good jobs. The way it works is instead of an employment relationship between an employer and an employee, the digital platforms set themselves up as a simple intermediary between the user or consumer or the client and the worker. So they don't employ the worker, but they treat the worker as an independent business. So in some cases, this class fixing a of workers as independent contractors is genuine. The platform is essentially a version of the yellow pages. It's a clear case of misclassification. Irrespective of whether this classification is legit or not, the point I want to make is that workers are not classified as employees in almost all platforms. They're not protected by any of the rates they have if they were employees. What I have done is we have done of years of research into the platform economy. Into the experiences of platform workers in those mines. We have interviews over 300 workers. And in all of that research, we found a lot of benefits that accrue to platform workers. So it is having a job, having income they wouldn't have otherwise, but also more flexible and more objective workers. Workers fall through the cracks. They're not employees and they're wearily protected by local labor saw. So they can suffer. So I'm not going to refound the full details of our research here, but the basic point is that the work that I'm talking about is by definition bi carious and insecure. What's that Group of the south African food delivery messages. This weekend they remember sharing pictures of a coffin at a funeral. One of them died on the road. Other issues is that in these cases, there's an overfly of labor power. There's low pay and sometimes below local minimum wage. There are workers who can experience explicit discrimination. So some experience wage theft there's a lack of accountable for platform. They can be fired without any due process and there's an ability to organize or bargain. These are the starting conditions. We have done it with some support from the German federal ministry. And the European research counsel as we're doing it in Europe and starting soon IDRC fighter of work item program and the point of this again is to side stem this discussion about employment status and acknowledge that irrespective, a work is classified, the platforms still some control over the working continues of their workers. If they have that control over their working conditions. We co‑developed a set of fair work principles with the people and with the organizations they impact on. So primarily gig workers, but also trade unions and platforms. What we then do is take those principals and carry out research against those and we use that research to give a score out of 10. I'll explain in more detail in a second. And then we use that as a pressure point to do this in India in collaboration with our partners triple ITB and in South Africa with our partners UCT and EWC and in the beginning rya who helped us get off the ground. We piloted with the partners in the first instance and this year we're expanding to Germany and the UK and some partners in Chile and Indonesia. This means paying at least a minimum wage for our condition. Protecting workers, health and well being for our contracts and not misclassifying workers fair management. This means having earn appears processing if disciplinary procedures. So this moons having a process fly which worker voice exists. So what we have done is worked at measuring those principles and giving each platform a score out of 10. So we give the platforms the scores. The scores are all on the website if you are interested in seeing them. Easy to remember. And so we give every platform a scorecard and then we put them all under a league table. So you can see how platform A compares to platform B. And that ‑‑ so our theory changed there that slowly over time, we might see more platforms feeling pressured to score better than one another because of the leads table. We encourage this. We launched with a bang. We made the scores quite visible. When we sit down to gather evidence about their coarse, one of the questions that often comes to us is what do we do to get more points? What did we do to score better? So we had platforms do things like implement minimum wages, implement safety training, works counsel in one case, agree to the formation of a trade union. Platforms have agreed to all of these things in order to score more highly in the league tables.
To sum this up, we know that the digital revolution or digital transformation is without changing the landscape of work around the world. I think what we need to do is insure jobs are good jobs and decent jobs and I think part of how we get there will be using research to not just understand platforms and understand how they work, but also using that research to make working conditions in the gig economy more reasonable. At the end of the day, platforms work and they profit by essentially being weightless in a femoral organization. They don't own assets or employ workers, but that weightlessness render them quite vulnerable to attitudes. They're really sensitive to public opinion. They only exist about we pay attention to them. My hope is this project offers a way to account platforms and shape the quality of work and what we hope to do in this project is play our part to get them to acknowledge that and live up to that responsibility. Thanks.
>> CHAIRMAN: Thanks, Mark. You have macro perspectives online work, the gig economy and platform economy. How we'll hear from Carolina who will tell us a little bit more about a micro case of trying to enable online work in Haiti.
>> Carolina: Good morning, everyone. In my case, we have the Latin America and Korean. And together, we have been working on ITS global in Haiti. I did certainly a frequent that. It is a very summarized form we can say the project developed in three stages. The first thing we did was we mapped job opportunities that program beneficiaries could do remotely from Haiti. And then we developed online training courses based on those job profiles that three had identified. Then we collected some 350 beg fish areas and had them complete this online training that we developed.
And lastly, we worked with program graduates exposing them to platforms to give you a sense of what platforms I'm talking about, I'm thinking of platforms such as freelance or guru. And also generally provided support to our beneficiaries and everything that had to do with professional development. So rendering support, efforts to help them and additional training opportunities and topics such as entrepreneurship and coding. There are two main lessons direct is from this project that I think are relevant for the discussion today. When we talk about future of org one of the central topics is this question of closing thinking about how we can develop or upgrade digital dwells and local little communities are lagging behind. We selected 350 women from low to middle local households. We had them go through the courses. What we saw is in spite of Connectivity challenges and even limitations to access electricity in the context of hidy, we ended up with a 36%. So we feel the project proved. It is upguiding digital skills is possible and research constraint environment search as safety and also online learning can be an effective mechanism for closing skills gaps. Again even in complex settings such as Haiti obviously provide. I am happy to share more thoughts anticipators to what those strategies may be during the second.
The second big lesson from this project has to do with our efforts around our ‑‑ yeah. Efforts to Connect women with online work opportunities. So here while we're online trainings that were relatively successful and had good results, they went and supposed women to online platform which is a lot more modern. What we did was is to navigate infrastructure, the (?) we gave to computers and Connectivity. Some this Group of beneficiaries only manage to developed two clients. One of the tile and platforms they worked on. And they completed only a handful of online gigs of the project that we conducted. So essentially here we started off the project with this assumption that is mitigating infrastructure and skills deficits was sufficient to level the playing fields and allow Asia. We found other factors and we understand some of these may also be playing a role in other countries across the global south. So I am happy to share those findings with you today.
So we have grouped this into subsets. We have what we call platform (?), which are some what documented already in existing literature and then we have what we have called cultural or preference related barriers. On the platform, we first have the question of language skills. Here French speaking and Creole speaking, here lack of proficiency limits our abilities to provide for bits. When the gigs did come in, they also sometimes struggle to fully understand job offers. All right limiting factor that we identified was lack of credit cards and financial tools to enable beneficiaries to receive money from clients. This may seem a very easy to overcome, but it was perceived as a personal issue. There is a strong element connected to financial inclusion, that I think placed the role in this type of initiative.
We also had lack of priority work and experience and certification. They're very important on that platforms. There is credibility but also confidence. And lastly, there's the question of time invested and perhaps this is one of the points. It is mostly covered in existing literature, but certainly the on time to be lower the income rate and these in our case they motivated the graduates that we were working with from applying to more bids.
And this last point really ties into the cultural or preference related barriers. We have also identified. Here what we find was again we're working with women from low income households or middle low income households and in spite of difficulties, all of our program (?) had higher education for themselves. They wanted to continue with part time or full time studies. They appear to actually have more jobs in the domestic market. Essentially what ended up happening with the project is that as beneficiaries became aware of the time lead to be online on this platform, the economic decision invests their time elsewhere. So either looking for jobs or conditions with their part time education and prioritizing household chores, that they had.
So having said that, I would like to close on a positive note. I feel the findings that we've been discussing shouldn't discourage us, in an effort to strive for more digital economy. I didn't speak about this in length, but our project was above and built around gender. We worked primarily with women and we documented how the education of this program really transform power relations for them. And even though we did not have significant results on the employment front in our focus groups and I think Mark hints at this. There are not a lot of jobs available in the Haitian appreciate. I appreciated things that have to do with flexibility, of work which also allow them to pursue other pathways. If you were beneficiaries, I would diversify what they do and this can closely relate to the fact that the economy is somewhat unable and Haiti. So they certified what it is they invest their time in and what I fall in. So this one and discussions such as the one we were having here today, um, should allow us to ‑‑ of the factors at play and come up with improved work force development strategies. Thank you.
>> CHAIRMAN: I will pass it over to Manual who is from Google and we know Google has played a big role in trying to build these digital skills in a scaled way. And interestingly, they built, I think, a little bit from the experience in Haiti where they did build data and digital skills by looking at how that experience went. So over to Manuel.
>> Manuel: Thank you for leading us engage and our social and economic lives have been transformed worldwide. Let me start that we recognize that the internet is a huge (?) for the economy. It has created worldwide massive development and it's changing the way economic relations are being shaped today in the world. Let me say we're starting to see the beginning of how these technologies are changing and creating ‑‑ one finding we're seeing is a receipt study found the ability to rent ITS as needed on time is particular Cloud computing. It was survival and growth among manufacturing plants and development of machine learning technologies and AI for being great Pacific. For example, we are seeing doctors using AI to find a better diagnosis via to find breast cancer, tumors, skin carpet and these advances are just the tip of the ice. What do they mean for traditional jobs or jobs that require certain specific skills or routeing tasks to believe performed? This is being changed and transformed in so many ways. Since these technologies allow for more productivity to know achieved, some of the tasks which are recurring and which need to be implemented on a recurring basis will be fade out by the 16. They may display some jobs, but may also create other jobs. Transformation is not new in the sense. And when these jobs are starting to be transformed, there are opportunities for more creative jobs to be more in place. In the 19th century, almost 70% of Americans worked as farmers whereas only 2% do that now. It means they are recurring and manually intensive are being transformed and are now introducing technologies to be ‑‑ may be less labor intensive and more.
But on the same time, we recognize the economy isn't working well for everyone and we recognize this has challenged implicated. For example, all my colleagues have mentioned the view economic and platform of a growing trend of work done. This raises questions and concerns. But also it gives the need to the robots and AIs, technology is going to steal our work. But new challenges are being arised from that because of that.
There are things we need to focus on. We need to rethink education. They have lacking changes in particular. We need to include the changes as early as possible from elementary education, secondary emergency. We than children in secondary location right now will 60% of the children world wide in secondary local and elementary schools, 80% will be working on jobs which right now they don't exist. There is a huge challenge to integrate non‑traditional works and thinking ahead on how the economy is going to be sate for the next years later. We need to also think about reducing dependency to work on traditional companies and start fostering more entrepreneurship. For example, this is something which Google has already done focusing on a lot in Latin America. There are ‑‑ I don't have ‑‑ for example, I can say that in Mexico last year, we trained $85,000 people entrepreneurial skills. We have a set of programs from cold aggregated we have one program called grow with Google which try to aim skills. We have open sources, three line courses. The detail look horses and creating skills in entrepreneurs and these are ‑‑ they can depend less on traditional companies and traditional jobs and start building something with an entrepreneurship spirit.
We need also to update social programs. Tech doesn't affect everyone equally in that sense, but we're thinking about how to obviate our job loss and how to upgrade storms in the countries where we operate because technology is also creating some brackets of low wage work and that's where we are seeing a certain polarization. Companies are benefiting from acquiring engineer and hiker people with higher skills. But there is a bracket where we are not including new people and for example, something we have seen in Latin America is there is a specific Jack of 901919 Prince France. Not program in jobs, but people who can solve IT equipment tech issues. In that sense, we launched in Latin America last year along with IDP. The certificate program which aims to train 1 million people, 1 million people from the ages of 20 to 30 years. Specifically in particular IT services. We have invested in programs in young people. The program that Carolina was mentioning that age bracket represents 25% of the work force in the Caribbean. And in that sense, a way to include these people who are not neither studying nor working, you can provide very specific IT skills. In that sense, data, data managing and big data analysis is something where we see a growing trend. We need people to analyze big data and aggregate and who can actually create some specific skills for them to be able to challenge them in workshop skills and in gig economy.
In two years, we achieve to train a list of 1 (?) risk around those ages from 15 to 24. American what this means to a agreeing economy. When we managed to get a company or when we going to get a medium based company online, there are (?) 15% in the first year they are expected. And also in the first year, they planned to expand their market. So in that sense, what we're trying to do is just create an integration and to have people to be able to work with persons and job could ‑‑ demand for work force coming from other countries and for people in Latin America to be able to have the skills to fulfill that job behind that is being requested. I believe leave it that way.
>> CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. Last but not least we have Alexia who is from Uruguay. She's worked on education and skills building. She will tell us a little bit more about that.
>> Alexia: Thank you and good morning to everyone. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for the invitation.
Yes I'm going to focus on the case in Uruguay and the program in the country which is named Plan Sival. I am part of the foundation which I handle research and technology and the foundation was created by Plan Sival. The program was created in 2008 at the very early age. With the gold of reaching the digital device in the country and despite or(?), it is still one of the most equal countries of the region. The digital device that the country faced in 2006 one more before the creation of the program was rented to the socioeconomic contest. During that first year actually, the digital device was only 6 of the population of the lowest social economic level had accessed to their home. And a 49% in the highest ‑‑ they reached 60 and 65% respectively and the interesting issue about this is that ‑‑ well, it is part ‑‑ it was the first action in order to favor digital inclusion in the country. But it was also part of a wide strategy that includes many other organizations in the country that work across different fronts in order to effectively integrate digital technologies across every field in society, economy, et cetera. Education was the first area and during its near 14 years of existence, it has not only focused initially creating the ‑‑ providing access and creating the necessary infrastructure for ‑‑ well, for allowing people to Connect, students and teachers mainly to Connect to the internet and providing them with devices. But it moved forward and he adopted to the changes that information society has known in the past few years. So during this second and third face of development, it focuses specifically in digital skills, including digital skills for teachers and for students. I say it has the nearly hundred beneficiaries which include students from preschool to secondary school and teachers across the whole country. It has also focused on a large number of programs in order to foster digital skills development and training in areas as coding, robotics, electron skills, digital and data literacy among other, and a program that I would like to point out and that is particularly related to digital skills training and the importance of digital education for the future of work. It is called youth to code. It has been implemented for the past nearly three years. And the program is a clear example of afternoon eternity and informal educational training. It was created along with all the main companies and enterprises working in the IT industry which Uruguay, which is one of the most ‑‑ the highest ‑‑ well, let's ‑‑ they show a very good performance during the past few years. And the program is focused directly on the needs of those companies. Has trained so far many boys and girls from 18 to 30 years old in coding, software development, and these were all profiles that junior profiles that companies actually have required in Uruguay. And during this past year and in particular ‑‑ we have different service and research conducted, um, during the previous two years, the program decided to focus only on women because during those first two years and by the fact that a 50% of women access the program and were admitted. During the first few months, there was a higher dropout in women in relation to men. Therefore, after research and surveys, it was ‑‑ there was ‑‑ this was related to their perception and relation to their male peers. The program focus specifically on women and so fair we can see that the dropout rates have reduced. So I would like to end up with a few conclusions.
First regarding digital education and skills, there's actually Manuel mentioned educational systems need to rethink themselves. And in many cases and during the past few years, alternative and formal educational models especially in this area such as coding, software development, have been develops and they are showing that they are more effective in bridging the gap between education, kills and employability. It is due to many reports even while the word bank is the last one. They are going threw a very crisis, a learning crisis and even providing students with the basic skills that they need to enter the job market. Then on a second BASIS, there is also very few programs specifically focused on digital skills and providing students and also teachers with the skills in order to enter the job market or the skills they will need in the forthcoming years. So those are a few considerations and there is also the need to have more research about which are the skills,s specific social technical skills that the job market will require in the years to come. Otherwise we are educational systems in general preparing students without actually knowing which are the requirements in the next few years. Thank you.
>> CHAIRMAN: Now over to you. Any questions? Comments? Reactions? Absolutely.
>> I have a curious history here because I started as a historian labor market in Africa and now information society. So I bring the two together. I wanted to base three points. One is to do with employment rights and the sort of transaction that we're seeing at the moment towards platform type jobs and notice longer run whatever we come from AI and (?) points. We simply don't know what is going to happen and that is the right starting point to have that other than trying to pin it in one way or the other. I am very much behind what is Mark trying to do it. Is mitigating the big economy, but I think we ‑‑ if you look at this, what you're seeing is modern employer relationships because they're digital and digital is modern. And many of the problems that arise for workers are similar to the problems they had in the 19th century. We are certainly weaker in terms of rights (?) and it would be right quit they had an opportunity like this. It also addressed employment rights. The second point to do with digital skills and I think it's a ‑‑ and we make assumptions that digitalization will change the nature of employment and employment prospects and that is clearly going to be right even if we don't know the details of it. So there's an emphasis on what policy makers are doing on digital skills. However, if you read much of the literature around ‑‑ from enthusiasms for post AI kind of employment scenarios. A lot of that is because what happens is people will move towards doing those jobs that helps report do. That is the caring and digital skills. I know if no government policy for employment in the digital age which is focusing on non‑digital skills of that kind. And secondly, they are among the lowest paid occupations that there are. That leads into a likelihood of bad things to come. And the last point I made. It is often said that, you know, this is a great opportunities for employers and governments to improve quality of services. My sense is that particulars in particular will bank the efficiency savings and do very little in terms of the quality of jobs.
>> Yeah. This is Steve Labornet in San Francisco. I find it striking that this panel has a representative from Google, which I'm in favor of, but no labor representative, no union representative. Why wouldn't you have someone from the union and from labor? Strange. I find that problematic in the whole IGF conference is that we're at. There are very few panel ‑‑ no panels discussing the conditions of labor globally. I think this is ‑‑ I think a dangerous thing because globally, the marginalization, the working class has had a placive knock in the bay area of San Francisco would be workers and they're cutting social services. People have seen the film Joker. That is what's happening in the United States. It's creating a great social crisis. The other thing is a Googles have been trying to organize and they have been fired. You have a tiered structure where they get benefits and perks and others are contracted out who have horrible living conditions. For a company that says they want to change the world, it raises eyebrows. Another economic we talk about is education. Google education ask to help people, but it has been used to spy on opportunities and teachers and also a (?) public education. The program is free. Public schools and public education is basically teen offer by Google in the United States. It is offered as a free document. You can do your documents and training and research. Who benefits from it? It's the Google operation and whoa own Google. Whoa benefits from digitalization, but the owners ever these companies. In category, they're cutting the budget. Google gets away without paying taxes. So these are basic fundamental questions of the future of labor globally. What is the future of labor under these circumstances that I think to be booked at seriously.
>> CHAIRMAN: Okay. Let's start with those really easy comments. I always like having a historian in the room. That is also my background and I think it's always important in these conversations to have that point of view. I think also having the comment about a labor ‑‑ I read this from Jack Choo who wrote the working class network society. He had seen in China what's happening in the digital world is there's a digital underclass being created and the class system is being recreated in the digital world. And to a certain extent, I would see some panelists are suggesting that this is happening in the gig economy and digital world overall. So panelists, do you want to take on some of those comments?
>> Thank you for those really, really interesting and important questions. I might address (?), but I did want to sort of raise the challenges around enforcement of labor rights and generally rights. In the content of the failure across justice dictional law. They will be to do any kind of coordination around this. And the need to look at of mitigation. So I think only ‑‑ but the problem with some of the more responsive platforms to the fair work foundation stuff is obviously the platforms who are more concerned with those kinds of businesses. Sweep tables, it's been a very good performance see that has a strong ability (?) labor online was part of a tempt. How do we make a nun love compliance companies inform. I think I think really trying is to look at issues beyond the very sort of ‑‑ we go to another form and look at something else. So I think we really need to think more creatively about it. We have had issues where South African workers tried to take Uber to code around labor. So that is a very progressive labor regime and I tried to address the issues in the South African area. And the (?) was registered in Brussels and pro counselors would not be able to. That's the problem with that. As I said, even in that environment, the we have a certain obligations where they provide protections and insurance and to those drivers. For they have no protection and won't have as high above. Others don't have the same protection. There is almost inequality to those things. Because the law will take a long time is to catch up and we will have to find the key places where we can get President, I think we have to look at the oil forms of global performance people are trying to get a response and issues that concern us. We need to be looking at the way that G20 and OECD are suggesting taxation at the global level forever platforms that will insure that the ‑‑ so provide some relief to the irrational taxation through networking and very poor countries. For ‑‑ so legitimate taxation can easily be done. You have big data. International deck data and we know how much African is going and it's either a left ready. But that is strictly important because if we talk about the future of work and we're talking about more people coming online, what we're going to see is greater visibility of people online. Self‑employment and people online. One wants to insure that this southeast of extractive nature of taxation, it doesn't happen again, but it doesn't able self‑employed people and people running platforms who are all presented at the national level to come online, we provide social protection not against direct workers, but in terms of general safety nets that can be provided. We might be able to have a BASIS in a digital economy and ray safety general text for people. So I think the fact that this visibility will give informal sector workers, online workers and these platform companies need to be thought about what can be done in a more integrated way.
>> Yeah. Actually, very interesting. And you mentioned very right, you know, the tax issue, the tax example is one of how that can illustrate very much better how we need new rules, new forms of coordination. For example, I can speak to much about the case in California because I'm not based and I don't have the specific nuance. But for the case of Mexico, I can peek about it because is it is my day to day BASIS. Mexico, 90% of Google's business comes from out serving. It is operated by a Mexican company. So in that sense, it is compliant, but what happens with the other 10% of the business that is being offered from Google LLC. Those are the rules which are there is the OFCD. We need a global framework to know. We at Google create products served in 100 or 200 countries and we need ‑‑ it is very difficult for us to be. We need to plan with old lots that are current in every country where we are. For us, we have covered ‑‑ they got a specific framework and for us to know how to braid is all compliant with all the 200 laws which might differ between them. So that's why we want to engage in this conversation and what we want to insure policy makers in the sense of having better coordination which for the case of Mexico. Tax laws are there 1970s. I'm in the process of being updated and it's a good thing. We want to pay taxes. We pay all the taxes that we need to pay or that must be paid. In that sense, what we are only requesting is have clear guidance on how to do it and then it's a job that comes from the governments.
And yeah, to tackle the other question, I think it's a very good comment. New skills ‑‑ well, I think in the future, it is correct to say that jobs ‑‑ I think it's going to be a mixture like implementing new technologies. I was mentioning that doctors now detecting cancer using AI. It is something that the doctor will still need is to be trained in physical and obtain education, MD, for example, but we'll also need to know how to integrate in new technology to detect cancer. You are going to see new technology and work video, um, yeah. Play by play I will build on that a little bit. I think the question that David raised is what are 21st century skills? How do we define them? The number of Africans that I have is state of emergency with two Ms? Is it none of those things and just being a hairdresser. Cutting hair is supposedly something that a robot will never be able to did. We really don't know. I wonder if colleagues from foundation say they might want to speak to that.
>> Thank you. Yes. I believe it. It is a very good comment. We have been working in Uruguay and promoting digital skills. But without losing that and of education in general. So I do think that in the future and the jobs of the future am require a combination of both types of skills. There has been quite the attention in the past few years from policy makers and IT companies and many others on digital skills development. But ‑‑ there are many frameworks the OACD was one of the first organizations to work in this area between commission as well with lately there is a need to mapped skills to test the skills and to measure them to creating the metrics and others. I think that ‑‑ well, in research in the area, we have been trying to work across that. That is a necessarily pillar in order to speak out about the future of work in the coming years.
>> I wanted to tell you this question that Lauren brought up about creating the digital and/or class. Perhaps you get that sense when we tell you we're looking to women with opportunities and this is an aspect we struggle with quite a bit. We start to explore and I think it's very important for program to think about app work ‑‑ this goes towards projects instead of a more limited scope like our pilot initiative and perhaps something that goes to governments or even private sector when they're planning work force development, strategies. And here the idea something we did with our program graduates was we saw the micro work. It is considering careers and technology. I spoke about how we worked to sort of expose them to an online platform. We commented all that work with mentoring and sort of exposure to sort of additional training. It would allow them to take an interest in after doing this basic training took an interesting in coating and programming. You can view and see. Having an eye and up with mobility, all the opportunities that lie is important. Going back to thinking of the major marginalized communities and roles.
>> I think it's important to point out what you might think of the standard employment relationship. It's not the historical initial. There is an employer and a network in the global north and south. It is a blip in space in time in a way. I think it's important to knowledge that, but I also think when I speak to platform companies, they are quick to point this out. They're quick to point this out as they want to describe their workers as free lancers and entrepreneurs and I think we can get a big lost in this debate in the labor law debates when we have the debates about which box to put workers in. Are they employees or freelancers. I think it's absolutely important. It protects workers. But I think the platform model shows there's a limit to the traditional classifications as they're being applied to the gig economy. A lot of debate centers around now do we get them reclassified as employers so they're covered by protections. I think one of the ranches (?) somewhere in the UK, and you say we need to rethink labor it will between employing and independent contract. It doesn't stop platforms from classifying everyone as an independent (?) the workers and all the risk and liability of doing that work is laces on toes worker. So I guess what I'm trying to air is at the moment, is there a limit to what we can do instead of arguing in the space. It is clearly an action to all of these workers that they're entrepreneurs and self‑employed, they're variable and low paid and to get to your point, it's extremely hard to organize them. It is extremely hard, but in some cases, it has worked and there's been a huge example, but you have seen trailers and gig workers. The second they stoop to have no idea they were self‑employed luckily. We need more protections, but I think you need to think about whether we need ways of sort of allowing. The Gil company, the platform sits between this relationship between the user and the consumer. What responsibility should we be putting on them? The answer is not none, but the answer is also we need to rethink the traditional model as well.
>> Thanks, Mark. We are running out of time. Kevin will try to sum up the conversation in a few minutes. A few things that I'd like to take away from is this is one that this is a fascinating field because the issues are extremely important. We have to redefine labor protections in the new environment, but also following great unknowns. What will happen in the future with respect to technology and jobs. So there is a need for more research on these issues. Easy for me to say being a research finder. This is a ski thing that we all need to do. Kevin, over to you.
>> Kevin: Thanks very much. So we started this session ‑‑ they're quite so as opposed to some ever the proxies that were used and all the work in Africa and data that is usage, but at the same time, the responses across the continent are quite diverse in terms of how well digital work was being taken up. Despite the hype, there was not enough penetration rates to achieve (?) to get the benefits as to give an example of Rwanda that had 10% penetration rate. In the south, there's an example of Latin American workers in Europe getting paid less than Spanish workers. There is also statements about gender differences especially with literature points to a more mature economy suggesting all the opportunity for women to have child care and have employment, but there are other conditions to women accessing education which tended to be low. Therefore, income levels which are determinants for being online.
For Mark, on the (?) foundation, he spoke about their project to improving jobs in an economy. Not just jobs that happen online, but in a physical space that would remediate by technology. He spoke about his research that was used to score to come up ‑‑ sorry. Co‑develop sets of principles to develop platforms against each other and be able to give the platforms a score of 10. They included fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts and fair management and representation. And the scores are available on the fair work foundations website. One of the benefits of the scoring and publishing was that platforms were able to approach and ask how they can do better and how they can score better and in the medium term, there were recommendations such as implementing minimum wages and safety training. There is also one case where there's an agreement to form trade union.
Carolina spoke about Lacknics collaboration on a project called IT global. She spoke about the three phases of this project. Firstly being the mapping of job opportunities and beneficiaries. Also the creation of causes that am tailor to the beneficiaries based on the profiles developed and then the last component which was working with program (?) exposing them to platforms and give them general support for professional development. Carolina outlined two main issues when speaking about future of work and skills gaps. In the case of this Haiti project, many of the 350 women that were beneficiaries came from low to middle households. But despite all of that, there was an 86% graduation rate and 3% dropout rate demonstrating and upgrading skills is possible. Women were more than willing to explore and exploit online opportunities. Carolina spoke about entry barriers on to France. Platform barriers which dealt with practical consideration such as lack of language skills, the 80 to understand contracts, the 80 to have financial instruments such as credit cards or accounts to receive monarch broad, the lack of certification and work experience. And Carolina also touched on some culture barriers to these young women accessing jobs, but despite the culture barriers and these platform barriers with practical limitations, the project proved to generally gender sense ‑‑ and use their training for order types of endeavors.
>> (off mic)
>> So getting to the meat of it ‑‑
[ Laughter ]
Let's see. So from Manuel and from other interventions, one of the key points is a need to reformulate how we look at education. For the most part, we have seen our way of education systems that are not appropriate in training people for jobs that do not exist. They're not appropriate in understanding the evolving profile needs and this continued to be ongoing concern. There are many other attempts at addressing this. This is one of the points that Alexia pointed out. It is basic (?) matching technology with persons to active research to see how to change the face of employment within the content of Uruguay and there were initiatives in that country to address where that industry participated in the training of young people to meet future needs.
And, of course, just to summarize it all in this entire issue, there is a lot of uncertainty. The way we approach reconciliation of labor laws and the way we approach how platform companies look at employment relationships, these are things that are always in motion and it requires a lot more work and understanding to get our heads around in the first place classifications, how we can get organized and rethinking the traditional employer, employee relationship.
>> Excellent, thank you all so much for coming.
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