• Minister Muhamad Hanif Dhakiri,
• Mr Douglas Broderick, UN Resident Coordinator,
• Representatives of Indonesia’s employers and trade unions,
• Representatives of the Government of Indonesia,
• Colleagues from our sister UN agencies,
• Ambassadors and representatives of the diplomatic community,
• Fellow participants,

Thank you for joining us today to discuss how Indonesia could implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and in particular its goals and targets related to inclusive growth and decent work.

Douglas Broderick has outlined the significance of the 2030 Agenda for all member States of the United Nations and Indonesia. I think it is particularly important for the world of work – workers, employers and Ministries of Manpower and Employment to take up the challenge of realizing the goals and targets related to the decent work agenda.

To help get our discussions moving today I would like to highlight the opportunities and responsibilities the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present to the ILO and our constituents. I will conclude with some remarks on our expectations for the discussions over these two days.

The full title of the 2030 Agenda is “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. It was adopted by a special Leaders’ UN Summit of the UN last September.
This followed over two years of extensive discussion about how to learn from the experience of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and address the economic, social and environmental challenges that the world now faces.
Indonesia was a very active participant in these reflections and in the negotiations of the final text of the 2030 Agenda.

As Douglas Broderick mentioned, last April Minister Hanif Dhakiri spoke at the UN at a special meeting on “Achieving sustainable development through employment creation and decent work for all”. He reported to the UN on the meeting on that topic we held here in this room just a year ago. The commitment shown by Indonesia in these final stages of the negotiations certainly helped to bring them to a successful conclusion with inclusive growth and decent work prominent amongst the goals.

I must also applaud the strong support given to the government and the ILO by Indonesia’s trade unions and business community. Your international organizations, the International Trade Union Confederation and the International Organization of Employers, were also a major presence in the civil society advocacy for a comprehensive and ambitious set of goals and targets for 2030.

Allow me to read one of the opening paragraphs of the 2030 Agenda which I think captures well why it so important to the prospects of working families here in Indonesia and worldwide.

“We resolve, between now and 2030, to end poverty and hunger everywhere; to combat inequalities within and among countries; to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies; to protect human rights and promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls; and to ensure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources. We resolve also to create conditions for sustainable, inclusive and sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all, taking into account different levels of national development and capacities.”

Now you might be tempted to say “that’s just words, will anything really change?” Well, I think we the international community of the world of work, in partnership with many others, have to make those words into a reality. We have 15 years to do it but these are ambitious goals so we had better get started now.

The Agenda contains 17 Goals and a set of associated targets under each goal. Number 8 is to “Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”.
Important elements of the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda are also present in several other goals. For example social protection is covered under Goal 1, training and education under Goal 4, women’s’ economic empowerment under Goal 5, industrial development and job creation in Goal 9 and reducing inequality in Goal 10.

Indeed, the ILO’s mandate makes us interested in all 17 Goals and an integrated approach to follow-up. We thus place great importance on working with the family of UN agencies represented here today by Douglas Broderick. Within the UN system feel a particular responsibility for facilitating follow-up action on the key issue of inclusive growth and decent work for all.

The 2030 Agenda places the main focus of implementation on national sustainable development strategies, plans or programmes. These national plans will be reviewed and discussed at the UN level with the aim of ensuring that they together add up to a global transformation of the current trajectory of the development process.

The goal of inclusive and sustained growth through the generation of decent work for all is at the heart of the 2030 Agenda. Extreme poverty has fallen during the 15 year effort to pursue the MDGs particularly in Asia including in Indonesia. But it has yet to be eradicated. Ending such extreme poverty by 2030 is highlighted in the Sustainable Development Agenda. Doing so will require the transformation of low productivity, poorly-rewarded work into productive and decent work.

More people in productive decent work generates the resources needed for investment in health, education, improved infrastructure, and stronger social protection systems. In turn better health, higher levels of education and skill, more efficient and greener infrastructure as well as a social protection system that guards against poverty improve the productivity capacity of the workforce.

A growth process built around bringing more people into productive and decent work thus becomes self-sustaining – sustainable.

The 2030 Agenda thus provides a valuable framework for Indonesia. Indeed it corresponds rather closely to the ambitions you have set.

As well as being relevant to national development strategies, the 2030 Agenda aims to promote collective action by all countries on a common set of goals. This is also very important for Indonesia.

Your economy is very interconnected to others in your region and around the world. Sustained growth in your export markets is an important source of growth. And where does that growth come from? It comes from more and more people escaping poverty and establishing a secure income from a decent job.
A vigorous effort by Indonesia to implement the 2030 Agenda will show that by focussing on the inclusivity of growth and the generation of decent work it is possible to transform current growth patterns on to a much more sustainable path.
This, the first year of the fifteen year run to 2030 has not started well. Growth is slipping backwards rather than accelerating in many parts of the world. Unless this slide is reversed it could stop progress on poverty reduction and lead to increasing unemployment and informal work.
A slowdown in employment creation would be very worrying not least because Indonesia’s growing young workforce urgently needs decent jobs. More jobs yes, but also more productive jobs to enable the country to stay up with the global demand for ever more sophisticated products and lift family incomes out of the poverty trap.

I believe this is one reason why the concept of decent work has proved attractive to Indonesia.

A second is that it is based on respect for fundamental principles and rights at work. The last twenty years or so have seen enormous strides in creating and stabilizing democracy not just through elections but also in people’s daily lives through respect for human rights including at the workplace.

This is a tremendous asset for the country. One of the reasons foreign and Indonesian businesses invest here is your hard-won reputation as a country which is steadily building up a legislative framework and compliance system based on ILO Conventions. Maintaining this momentum is not easy and there will be a difficult times. The ILO will be with you whenever you might need us in helping to sustain progress on decent work.
 
So to conclude these opening remarks, we are looking forward to hearing from you how the new SDG framework can help you to transform your development path on to a trajectory that will enable Indonesia to realize the ambitious goals you help set in the 2030 Agenda. We would like to accompany you on that road.

Through your ILO, you can access, quite literally, a world of experience in meeting the challenges of shaping a strategy for sustainable development founded on decent work. As part of the UN family we can help to connect together implementation of the full set of SDGs. The integrated approach called for in the 2030 Agenda is essential if we are to make our economies more efficient, our societies more equal and stop damaging our environment.

By the end of this two day conference I hope we can set out an Indonesian agenda on decent work for sustainable development. I do not expect to find all the answers but I hope we can identify the key issues. Furthermore I hope we can agree that strengthening social dialogue around these key issues is the best way to shape a policy framework that can place your country on the steep and narrow path to sustainable development.

Thank you.