9^th Asia–Europe People’s Forum

Vientiane, October 2012

Plenary on ‘Social Protection and Access to Essential Services’

Introduction: Multiple Crises

A multiple crisis has been buffeting affluent states such as the US and those of the European Union for the past five years. While the main focus has been on the financial aspects of the crisis, with its terrible effects on jobs and debt, in fact the crisis manifests itself in many ways. The multiple, overlapping global crises of food insecurity, volatile energy and climate change are just the most obvious manifestations of today’s grave problems. This has all led to a loss of confidence in the international economic system and agencies of global governance. The developing countries of Asia, which did not cause the crisis, are nonetheless severely affected by it. Many parts of Asia already experienced an economic recession in 2009–10 and all the indicators are that severe social catastrophes are imminent. This combination of interrelated crises creates huge challenges for social activists from both Asia and Europe, challenges that demand our immediate and concerted action.

 Thirty Years of Neoliberal Globalisation

While the immediate trigger for the current crisis was the toxic combination of mortgage loans and bad debts in the US economy in 2007, the roots of the current crisis lie in a much longer process associated with neoliberal globalisation and the financialisation of capital that has taken place for more than three decades. As a result, we have an unprecedented social polarisation – captured in the slogan ‘the 99 per cent vs the 1 per cent’. Every day 1.5 billion people confront a crisis of survival without social protection or access to essential services. Two-thirds of the world’s poor are in Asia; 900 million of them live in extreme poverty and 600 million go hungry every day. More than 70 per cent of working people are in the informal sector with poverty wages and precarious work conditions, living in sub-human conditions without decent homes, safe water, adequate food and basic services like health and education.

This severe social crisis has not come about by accident. From the 1980s onwards, the international financial institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Trade Organisation operated as the drivers of neoliberal globalisation. They imposed structural adjustment programmes on many developing countries, compelled the liberalisation of trade relations and opened up their economies to ease the entry of transnational corporate interests. This neoliberal transformation devastated developing countries’ young industries and agricultural capacities. This, in turn, caused massive unemployment and contractualisation in the urban areas, and dispossessed millions of small farmers of their livelihoods which resulted in mass migration into the cities. Neoliberal globalisation deepened market dependence and undermined the economic sovereignty of many countries.

At the same time, the neoliberal agenda has removed the social dimension that for a while guaranteed people a modicum of socio-economic rights. It crushed workers’ rights and social rights, dismantled public utilities, and privatised the commons, social services and goods. In a related development, states relinquished their prime obligation to their citizens to provide them a life of dignity through social policies as they surrendered to the market forces and adopted the poverty reduction and social protection framework advanced above all by the World Bank. While the World Bank claimed that it would help ‘globalisation work for the poor’, the reality is that today ‘the poor work for globalisation’.

The World Bank’s framework promotes the notion that poverty is an individual problem and that improved access to the market is the best solution to social protection and poverty alleviation. For their part, states should have only a residual role in providing targeted safety nets and limited payments for the extremely poor in times of crisis. As a result, poverty has not only persisted and but intensified, even though poverty reduction has been a central agenda of governments and the international financial institutions for the past three decades. What the World Bank’s approach deliberately ignores is the fact that poverty cannot be eradicated when the structural causes that constantly produce and reproduce poverty continue to reign unchallenged. In fact the UN Research Institute for Social Development describes these 30 years of neoliberalism as the ‘lost decades of development’ for many parts of the world.

Network for Transformative Social Protection

In 2008, when the global financial crisis was unfolding, representatives of poor people’s movements and civil society leaders from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and India were attending the seventh Asia–Europe People’s Forum in Beijing. Making use of this opportunity, they met, discussed and strategised to look again at the specific conditions of poverty and exclusion in the Asian region, and then they met again in Manila to form the Network for Transformative Social Protection. These activists saw a unique opportunity offered by the crisis for democratic forces to act, unite and create the conditions for a common response to the multiple crises that were becoming manifest. The core aim was to advance people’s socio-economic rights and to end the processes of impoverishment. The Network resolved to use transformative social protection as a vehicle and to pursue this aim nationally, regionally and globally, with the poor and powerless at the forefront of this struggle.

 Transformation and Rights

Transformative social protection is comprehensive. At its core, it demands a nationwide system of social protection that is all-encompassing and which includes labour rights, social security, social assistance, and access to social services in order to prevent and reduce poverty. Among other things, transformative social protection covers a number of inalienable and interrelated rights vital to a life of dignity and security:

• The right to work – access to work guarantees, living wages and decent work according to ILO core standards, full employment with shorter working weeks.

• The right to food – the progressive realisation of the right to adequate food, in accordance with FAO guidelines.

• The right to essential services – access to universal and quality health care and education, water and electricity and low-cost and decent public housing.

• The right to social security – living pensions for elderly and disabled people, and child subsidies.

• The right to social insurance with a guaranteed minimum income – to militate against risks of unemployment, illness and agricultural and other natural calamities.

All these demands cannot be delivered immediately. Rather states and other public authorities must develop clear policy guidelines, budgets, a timetable and the necessary legal frameworks (i.e. a ‘road map’) to introduce, consolidate and realise these rights.

The approach to transformative social protection is rights-based. Social protection and the right to essential services are fundamental human rights, regardless of time, place and circumstance. These rights are already enshrined in international human rights covenants and laws, to which nearly all states are signatories. The challenge is therefore to realise their systematic implementation.

• Transformative social protection is universal – social protection should be provided by governments unconditionally to all people: citizens, migrant workers and refugees alike. The contrast here, of course, is with targeted social policies. In countries where a large number of people are poor, studies and practice have shown that targeting is prone to errors of undercoverage and entails high administrative costs while stigmatising the beneficiaries. In short, targeting is inefficient and often omits the most vulnerable sectors of society.

• Transformative social protection is legislated – there should be a constitutional framework to underpin the social protection system. As Martin Luther King Jr said, ‘Legislation won’t change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless’. Therefore we need legislation at local, national, regional and international levels, to ensure that all acknowledge social protection and access to essential services as human rights and not as commodities. This distinction is fundamental.

• Transformative social protection is underwritten by the state – as the only actor with the democratic legitimacy and authority to create policy, legislate, implement and monitor on a national and universal basis states remain the primary vehicles to take responsibility for actively providing universal social protection for people. This means they have the leading role in the delivery of basic services and infrastructure, administering and regulating social protection programmes and institutions. In addition, states have the duty to develop adequate fiscal and budgetary policies to generate sufficient domestic funds for universal social protection.

• Transformative social protection is affordable and feasible – Only 20 per cent of the global population has access to social protection and the overwhelming majority resides in rich countries. In most developing countries, only a tiny minority – typically the military, civil servants and workers in the small formal sector – has social protection and access to social insurance or social security, funded by contributions of workers and employers. However, universal state-funded, national-level social protection for all people in developing countries is both affordable and feasible. Costing studies by the ILO show that the ‘social protection floor initiative’ of the UN costs only 2 per cent of global GDP. Studies in Africa and Asia show that in these countries 4–8 per cent of a nation’s GDP could fund a programme that includes universal health care, subsidies for all children, income support for all poor and unemployed people, pensions for elderly people and benefits for disabled people.

 Funding Transformative Social Protection

The standard argument against universal, right-based social protection is that states can no longer afford it. This dubious assertion is especially emphasised at times of financial crisis and debt restructuring. A vital component of the work of the Network for Transformative Social Protection is to demonstrate that this is not at all true and that social protection can indeed be financed by a thorough overhaul of existing systems of revenue-generating taxation and the identification of new priorities for public spending. The heart of funding for transformative social protection are progressive and broad-based tax systems that redistribute wealth and mobilise funds for socially valued progammes. These include:

• Effective taxation transnational corporations – developing countries collectively lose $160 billion in annual tax revenues as a result of international tax evasion practices by the transnational corporations alone.

• Closure of tax havens – Not unrelated to the above, offshore tax havens deprive developing countries of more money than they receive in development aid; according to Tax Justice Network, some $11.5 trillion is held in offshore accounts across the world.

• Taxation of rich individuals and landowners – tax evasion also applies to wealthy individuals who exploit a variety of legal and illegal loopholes to escape their statutory obligations. Applying progressive taxation on incomes and assets rather than regressive taxation such as sales taxes is a central component of any scheme of tax reform.

• Implementation of a financial transaction tax – long touted as a feasible policy initiative – and long blocked by powerful economic actors – a small tax on financial transactions can generate sizeable funds for social protection schemes.

• Cancellation of illegitimate debts – a wide range of national and international tax reforms can be complemented by cancelling odious debts. Most people do not know of, consent to or benefit from these debts. Yet developing countries have been paying a significant portion of their government revenues to pay off the interest on these debts. The Network for Transformative Social Protection calls not only for further debt relief but also for the cancellation of all illegitimate debts.

 Beyond Poverty Reduction

While the notion of a ‘social protection floor’ proposed by the UN and ILO is an outstanding initiative it also has inherent limitations. It remains a policy based on targeting and does not go beyond the aim of poverty reduction. Activists can and should certainly cite it but in order to then introduce the ‘transformative’ concept of social protection that in fact embodies far more than the UN/ILO initiative. The programme towards transformative social protection has strategic and empowerment dimensions.

• Transformative social protection has a strategic agenda – It seeks to address the structural roots of poverty and inequality, and advances a people-centred national development strategy – with social justice, equity, ecological sustainability and participatory democracy at the centre of its agenda. Universal social protection cannot stand alone and should be made an integral part of this strategy. In concrete terms this means, among others:

o Overturning neoliberal policies on liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, and export-led growth;

o Developing the domestic market and domestic demand as the only feasible strategy for sustainable growth and development;

o Social redistribution through land reform, living wages, full employment, progressive taxation and universal social protection;

o Building the capacity of domestic agriculture and industry and protecting them from the overbearing power of global markets and actors.

o Recognising the limits to growth posed by environmental considerations.

• Transformative social protection is empowering – It goes beyond a focus only on social redistribution and equal access to services and opportunities and the fulfillment of socio-economic rights. It also addresses the fundamental issue of people’s participation in decision-making and the empowerment of communities. People are not just recipients of protection but are involved in the decision-making at all stages of the process: the planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of social programmes. This can help break clientelistic political relationships that do so much divide societies. Transformative social protection can be an empowering movement that stirs poor people to more inspired actions, builds their confidence, realises their collective strength and expands spaces for their participation for systemic change.

• Transformative social protection should be advanced at the regional and global levels – The global crisis offers as well the unique opportunity for solidarity and cooperation. By its nature, extent and complexity, the crisis can no longer be addressed simply at the local and national levels. Rather it requires the joint actions of people’s networks regionally, interregionally and globally.

o At the regional level, major human rights networks in Asia through operating through Forum Asia and progressive parliamentarians are committed to lobbying regional bodies like the ASEAN for the adoption and implementation of an urgent social agenda. This will include the universalisation of social protection and the decommodification of all essential goods and services indispensable to life.

o At the interregional level, the Asia-Europe People’s Forum already provides an established series of partnerships between non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, social movements, parliamentarians and activist-scholars who can explore commonalities and differences in the experiences of the two regions and work towards coherent policy positions to be presented to the Asia-Europe Meeting and other interregional forums.

o At the global level, an international alliance of civil society organisations and social movements seeking universal social protection was formed this year. This alliance is part of an initiative for a UN Charter on the Common Goods of Humankind that will establish the common ownership of resources, goods and services which are essential to life and their cooperative management by the international community. The alliance is also part of a global movement for an appeal at the UN to declare poverty illegal. In the same way as slavery and apartheid have been banned, the time has come for poverty to be made illegal worldwide.

 Conclusion

The 1.5 billion people living in extreme poverty provide the ethical imperative for a truly universal social protection in our time. But social protection systems have to be fought for; they do not fall from the sky. We need to wage wide-ranging and vigorous struggles, organising and mobilising the overwhelming majority of people and all democratic political institutions to create a critical mass for change from below. Only a people who organised and mobilised can achieve their rights and reclaim the state and representative of their real interests. The objective will be nothing less than the transformation of political authority – by the people, of the people and for the people.

Tina Ebro

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