The Global Governance of Precarity: Primitive Accumulation and the Politics of Irregular Work by Nick Bernards

Author:Nick Bernards [Bernards, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351398541
Google: m39KDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38505572
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

WEP and the ‘discovery’ of employment

WEP was probably the ILO’s defining programme in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The project was started with a considerable degree of fanfare in 1968, as one of David Morse’s final acts as Director General before retirement (the Pope even attended the ceremony to launch the programme). The program would contribute to several major ideational developments in the governance of poverty in the 1970s – not only the concept of the ‘informal’, but also ‘basic needs’ and ‘redistribution from growth’ which were highly influential at the time (see Saith 2005; Bangasser 2000).

Many insider histories produced by the ILO and former officials locate the genesis of WEP in the ‘discovery’ that without widespread employment, economic growth did not necessarily lead to ‘development’ in the sense of greater human wellbeing (see Saith 2005: 1168). In contrast to conventional approaches to development at the time, emphasizing economic growth and capital formation, the ILO sought to place ‘employment generation into the center of the national planning and development efforts as an explicit policy objective in its own right, instead of leaving it as a residual and eventual consequence of “successful” development efforts’ (Bangasser 2000: 5). Importantly, employment was seen in this context as a means to increasing human wellbeing rather than an end in itself. In explaining the purpose of the WEP, outgoing Director General Morse would argue that:

Productive employment by itself is very much an economic concept. But it leads… to a wider sharing of the fruits of development… Where poverty is widespread, these elementary gains are the first and almost the only meaning of social progress.

(1968: 519–520)

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