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Cape Town – People around the world need governments and the private sector to tackle five key hurdles to ensure they can transition effectively into the new world order set by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
That is according to the World Economic Forum’s white paper on the topic, which was published on Wednesday, ahead of its Davos meeting from January 17.
The paper is titled “Realising human potential in the fourth industrial revolution: an agenda for leaders to shape the future of education, gender and work.”
Its five action points (extracted and edited from the paper) are:
1. Recognition of all work models and agile implementation of new regulations
The patchwork regulatory framework must be improved within countries and harmonised across countries for globally comparable data and standards on a wider range of work models, including situations where a worker falls into multiple categories.
Reforming employment law and regulatory classifications to better enable independent workers to benefit from new opportunities while managing associated challenges may require an agile approach that involves modifying current policies as well as testing wholly new models, as well as measuring and monitoring the outcomes.
2. Updated social protection
Most existing social security systems have been built around the concept of employment in a full-time job for a single employer. However, people already work, study, have families and retire differently in their lifecycle than in the past. The increasingly heterogeneous career paths of workers necessitate updated social protection systems to support workers through these transitions.
The International Labour Organisation’s social protection floor calls for basic income security for persons of working age who are unable to earn sufficient income, in particular in cases of sickness, unemployment, maternity and disability.
Businesses and governments should work collaboratively to explore: 1) incentivising and creating sustainable benefit plans, products and solutions tied to workers and not employers; 2) creating a simple process and single point of entry for managing benefits irrespective of income source; and 3) creating a portable system that follows the worker from job to job, and is universal (across employers, employees and employment types).
3. Adult learning and continuous reskilling
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will pose the challenge that workers will need to reskill throughout the course of their working lives. Building a lifelong-learning culture in the workforce entails moving from “education for employment” to “education for employability” and from “job security” to “career security”.
Priorities for reform include: a) moving away from front-loading education in the earlier part of the life course: learning should occur in all stages of life by default; b) moving beyond multi-year degree programmes as the default towards a system of accreditation based on “micro-credentialising”; and c) transferring ownership of learning back to students: a promising model to incentivize this are individual training accounts.
4. Proactive employment services
While the new employment landscape will see job growth as well as displacement, labour markets globally continue to undergo a long-term trend of increasing polarisation, with jobs concentrated at both the high-skilled and lower-skilled end of the occupational spectrum. Middle-skilled occupations that, for a long time and in many countries used to constitute the gateway to stable middle-class lifestyles, are being “hollowed-out”. While these developments predate the disruption of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and are not solely driven by technology, accelerating technological change is nevertheless amplifying wage instability and polarisation trends.
To address the global geographic task-reallocation and polarisation we will need new partnerships and mechanisms to connect workers with jobs, and jobs with workers, complementing adult skilling and training and income safety nets.
The new world of work will require more innovation in such policies, including tapping into the very same technologies that have caused disruption. For example, for many white collar jobs, new forms of remote working can be harnessed - including transitioning such jobs from freelance work to long-term employment.
Such efforts will also require new regulatory frameworks and tax models when cross-border remote work is involved. For blue collar manufacturing jobs that are displaced, the opportunities for remote global work are severely limited and the loss of identity acute. Reskilling and social safety support will not be enough and governments will need to take a proactive approach to job creation in such geographies.
5. Empowerment of the individual
Workers must lie at the core of managing the transition to the new world of work. Benefits, training and services must be tailored to worker’s needs and priorities in order to ensure social safety nets are both efficient and effective, reduce the risk of growing inequality, promote social mobility, and allow developing economies to tap into the growth opportunities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Another key aspect of this individual empowerment is expansion of digital access to all to enable more workers to reach new markets and benefit from the digital economy. As recently pointed out by the McKinsey Global Institute, over half of the world’s population, is still offline - a population that is disproportionately rural, low income, elderly, illiterate, and female.
Keeping individuals at the centre will go a long way towards ensuring all workers have the opportunity to create dignified, meaningful working lives.
Taking actions forward
The proposals in this White Paper will be used at the World Economic Forum this month to shape public-private collaborations on education, gender and work in specific countries and regions, and will form the basis of leaders’ discussions on global multistakeholder collaboration.
“In addition it is our hope that this White Paper will encourage a shared vision of priorities for reform within education, work and care, and support leaders in advocating for investments in human capital in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the paper explains.
