Notes prepared for  the International Conference  on Universal Social Protection and  Labor, organized by the Asia-Europe People’s  Forum and Nepal Partners. Held at Kathmandu, Nepal,  April 4-6, 2019.

Rene  E. Ofreneo
(President, Freedom  from Debt Coalition, Philippines)

1. Two decades  ago (1997-98),  Southeast Asia gave the world the “tom-yung” financial  crisis, better known as the Asian financial crisis (AFC). Four Asian countries sunk into  depression: Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and  Thailand. The Philippines and other Asian countries, including Russia and some countries in Latin American countries were shaken.  The AFC was followed a decade after (2007-2010) by the bigger global financial crisis (GFC), which originated from the heartland of financial capitalism: New York and London.
2. Millions lost jobs overnight in Southeast  Asia due to the AFC. Indonesian strongman Suharto himself lost his job, after meekly submitting his country to  the supervision of the IMF.
3. It  was against this  backdrop that some  serious re-thinking about social protection took  place within the official policy circles in Southeast Asia.  In the 1980s-1990s, the World Bank and its neo-liberal cohorts actively  promoted the privatization of government-managed pension and social security programs, as  part of the broader program of privatizing, deregulating and liberalizing economies of the world. This privatization  proposal was meaningless to all those who lost their jobs and incomes due to the AFC.
4. In Thailand, the government of  the populist Thaksin Shinawatra pushed  for the 40-baht universal health care despite  the earlier austerity program pushed by the IMF-World  Bank group. In Malaysia, Mahathir defied the IMF by imposing capital controls  to stop the haemorrhage of capital and jobs out of the country. But the beleaguered Suharto completely succumbed  to the IMF diktat.
5. And  yet, ten years after,  at the height of the GFC,  the world re-discovered the  Keynesian approach in crisis situations, that  is, government stimulating the economy through various deficit spending mechanisms.  In America, the spending program was even seized by the big banks, which precipitated  the crisis, as a means to save themselves by arguing that their collapse will lead to the  bigger collapse of the economy. These banks that were projected as “too big to fail”. In 2017, the  IMF Research Department wrote a “mea culpa” on capital controls, virtually telling the world that Mahathir,  the medical doctor, was correct in making interventions in the capital market in 1997-98.
6. The  foregoing narrative  on IMF-World Bank policy with somersaults on austerity and  capital controls shows that there are social and economic realities on the  ground that cannot be ignored. These realities are forcing these institutions to adjust  their neo-liberal lenses somewhat somehow.
7. One  important  adjustment is  the way these  lenders and their neo-liberal supporters are treating  social protection. In the 1980s-1990s, the ILO had a weak  program on social protection. But from the turn of the millennium, the ILO  has become more assertive. In 2012, the ILO’s concept of the social protection  floor has gained global acceptance with the adoption of Resolution 202.
8. This ILO Resolution   is now supported by the World  Bank, which has been collaborating with the  ILO in a number of social protection promotion  programs. The World Bank also stopped talking of pension  privatization, after strong criticisms by Joseph Stiglitz. One  major program of the World Bank is the promotion in Asia of  its Latin American experiment called “Bolsa de Familia” or conditional  cash transfer (CCT).  Under the CCT, minimal monthly allowance is given to poor mothers  on the condition that the mothers get maternal medical check-up and  her school-age children continue to go to the schools.
9. In  Southeast Asia in  the meantime, the Thaksin universal health  care initiative has also gained wider acceptance in some  countries, in Indonesia and the Philippines in particular.  Social protection has also become a major ASEAN theme since 2007, when the  ASEAN Charter was adopted. Thus, there has been a proliferation of social protection programs  being bandied around or being proposed, with the World Bank and ADB coming in now as the social protection  champions and supporters. In 2013, the ASEAN came up with a sweeping Declaration on Strengthening Social Protection, which cites all UN conventions  on economic and social rights that citizens should be able to get. There are other ASEAN Declarations: an ASEAN Declaration on Ageing: Empowering Older  Persons in ASEAN, an ASEAN Declaration on Strengthening Family Institutions, an ASEAN Declaration on the Enhancement of the Role and Participation of Persons  with Disabilities, and an ASEAN Declaration on the Enhancement of the Welfare and Development of ASEAN Women and Children. Today, the ASEAN has been organizing numerous  ministerial meetings on how to push social protection through the ASEAN Strategic Framework on Social Welfare and Development (2016-2020).
10. At the level of the individual ASEAN countries, political leaders also talk endlessly on the need for social protection  — universal health care, education, pension for the retirees, social assistance to the disabled, etc. – for the poor and  those in the margin of society. The only limit is budget that can be allotted for this purpose, or money that can be borrowed  from the World Bank, ADB and other aid givers, again for this purpose.
11. And this is precisely the problem.  The issue of social protection, now  accepted and articulated by government officials, has  become a question of budgetary allocation. The deeper problem on why there are so many poor and so many are  on the margins is not being addressed fully. More importantly, neo-liberal policies that are in place and the  neo-liberal thinking that still dominates general economic policy formulation are not being questioned. For example, the privatization of  public services such as water and electricity, instead of being kept in the hands of government to ensure universal access for all, is still  a priority program in many countries. These are usually bundled under what the technocrats call as the Public-Private Partnership (PPP), a scheme pioneered  in London under Margaret Thatcher. Under the PPPs or their hybrid forms in Southeast Asia, the big private service providers are able to transform natural monopolies into private sector monopolies.  As a result, inequality is deepening and the exclusion of the many is being exacerbated.
12. Worse, programs  or policies that are  anti-poor deepen poverty and  the lack of social protection  for them. Example: many peasants, indigenous  people and rural poor are being displaced due to the rapacious land  accumulation programs of the big land developers, the big agribusiness investors and the  members of the national elite who want to get the best lands. In this process, the displaced  become the “floating population” of poor circulating within countries. They join the huge army of the  ‘informals’ who constitute two-thirds of the labor force in most countries. They include the home-based  workers, the street vendors, the informal transport workers/operators and the coastal fisherfolks. Most of the informal labour  do not get adequate social protection, only paltry social assistance programs that are dependent on limited budgetary allocations  of governments.
13. In  the formal  labor market,  there are also problems.  The army of the precariat continues  to grow, partly because of the efforts of  neo-liberal economists and corporations to pressure governments to maintain labor  flexibility policy, meaning employers can hire or fire workers at will. The non-standard or non-regular paid workers, who outnumber  the regulars, are often not given formal employment contracts nor are they enrolled by their employers in the social security system.
14. To complete  the labor market picture, the  floating population of displaced  landless rural poor and jobless urban poor is supplemented  by the floating population of migrant workers crossing borders.  There are varied estimates on their number. In Southeast Asia, the biggest destination countries are Singapore, Malaysia and  Thailand. A number of migrants are doing well. But majority, who occupy the low-end jobs are shunned by the nationals of the destination countries, and are in  the most vulnerable position, with limited access to legal and social protection assistance. Again, increased migration is largely the outcome of poor economic policies at home, while  those using migrants’ services are able to restrain wage increases in their own countries.
15. So how  then do we wipe  out poverty and provide social  protection for all given the foregoing?
16. In the ASEAN, the good thing is the rising awareness  within policy circles on the importance of providing universal social protection, starting with universal  health care. The sad part is: all this is treated as a funding or budgetary issue. There are numerous meetings and  workshops on social protection or various aspects of social protection such as systems of delivering services, packaging the  services and so on. But rarely is there an exhaustive and serious discussion on the root causes of poverty and social exclusion.
17. And  yet, the  reality is that universal and  adequate social protection is not possible if there are  no meaningful social and economic reforms to ensure that economic growth  is inclusive, balanced and sustainable. The point is that a program of social protection  should be part of a bigger transformation program. It means discarding the neo-liberal assumption  that growth automatically trickles down to the benefit of the poor. There is a need for re-thinkinging and  transformation too of the overall design of regional and global integration. Why should countries at different levels  of development be subjected to uniform rules for the rich and poor countries? Each country, given the level of its development, should be given the  freedom to determine its development priorities based on the principle of special and differential treatment. As well as needs of their people.
18. Socio-economic  transformation programs  should be synchronized too  with programs dealing with transitions – just transition  in addressing problems of the environment and climate change risks and  just transition to prepare the people on the impact of rapid technological change  under the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution. On the environment, climate change risks are mounting everywhere and  decimating agriculture, water systems and so on.
19. On  the other hand, the  technology revolution is subverting Factory Asia, which is based on international  subcontracting initiated by the multinationals in the car, electronics and so many industries.  Some institutions, including ironically the ILO, are talking of scaling up developing countries’ participation in the  global value chains when the reality is that these GVCs are now being reconfigured because of robotization and automation.  Also, there is no way, the laggards can graduate to a higher level of development if they simply tie their fate to the coattails of the GVCs of the MNCs.
20. So,  it is  an urgent task for governments and  the working peoples to come up with just transition  programs tailored and sustainable within the parameters of  the environment and the technology revolution. ‘Just’ here means  just transformation programs involving the people every step of the  way. For example, cleaning a coastal area should not lead to the displacement of the coastal fishing community but should enable the  community to become partners and keepers of clean coastal areas while building a prosperous fishing community.
21. Clearly, so much has  to be done. The task of securing universal, adequate and  comprehensive social protection for all cannot be reduced to a mere question  of creating the fiscal space for this such as generating new taxes. The most basic is  how to align social and economic policies in support of inclusion and sustainability by  abandoning the neo-liberal development straitjacket and by abandoning the regional and global  Race to the Bottom in the treatment of workers and resources of a country. We need to embrace a new  paradigm of regional and global integration, where people are truly at the center of development.