Mthunzi Mdwaba from South Africa was the third person to be interviewed. Mr. Mdwaba has had direct experience with the ILO, all within the Employers Group and emphasized his commitment to “three-legged pot” of tripartism. He is listed as an Employer delegate to the ILO Governing Body as far back as 2010, but his biography only refers to his ILO-related credentials since 2017 when he was elected to lead the Employers’ Group in the Governing Body for a term that ran from 2017 to 2020. My recollection is that his competition for this position was Ed Potter, a long-standing American representative to the Employers Group and world-renowned expert on ILO labor standards. Mr. Potter’s last major leadership role was to represent the Employers Group in negotiations regarding a very controversial (to the Employers) normative process to cover global supply chains. Continue reading “Mthunzi Mdwaba – Candidate for ILO Director-General”
ILO Candidates for Director-General on Informality
Here are the summaries of my perspectives on how the five candidates for ILO Director-General addressed the issue of informality in their January 2022 interviews. Continue reading “ILO Candidates for Director-General on Informality”
ILO Candidates for Director-General on Gender Equality
Here are the summaries of my perspectives on how the five candidates for ILO Director-General addressed the issue of gender equality in their January 2022 interviews. Continue reading “ILO Candidates for Director-General on Gender Equality”
Candidates for ILO Director-General on Multilateralism
Here are the summaries of my perspectives on how the five candidates for ILO Director-General addressed the issue of multilateralism in their January 2022 interviews. Continue reading “Candidates for ILO Director-General on Multilateralism”
Candidates for ILO Director-General on the Normative Future of the ILO
Here are the summaries of my perspectives on how the five candidates for ILO Director-General addressed the normative future of the ILO in their January 2022 interviews. Continue reading “Candidates for ILO Director-General on the Normative Future of the ILO”
Proposals and Commentaries for a Global Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Compendium (updated 17.03.2022
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to feature a lively debate on the balancing of scientific and policy perspectives. From the beginning of the pandemic, I have been writing commentaries on the importance of applying both a political lens and a scientific lens to the management of the pandemic. At the time, we were all understandably concerned about the risk of political actions that were clearly contrary to the scientific evidence. But that should not have led us away from the value of incorporating the science into a workable political framework for collaborative action. I still embrace the need for balance – combining the scientific guidance on who needs to wear a mask, for example, with political guidance on how this should be implemented in specific circumstances.
A second interest of mine has been to write about the remarkable flowering of global and multi-stakeholder collaboration that the pandemic has inspired – in vaccine development most strikingly but also in the efforts to ensure global sharing of vaccines and therapeutic needs. In fact, the multi-stakeholder nature of this collaboration has been a particular focus of my ongoing commentaries.
With these themes in mind, I started a compendium here of the proposals and actions since January 2021 that continue to inspire me to write about the global and multi-stakeholder response to the pandemic. This list had been regularly updated until March of this year (2022). It seems that I lost interest at that time – recognizing, perhaps, that the promise of better things to come just didn’t deliver the transformation in global collaboration that I believed was in the offing. So I stopped adding items to the list – even as new promises were dangled before us so temptingly – at the Second Global Pandemic Summit, at the World Health Assembly, at the G7 Elmau Summit, at the 12th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization….The list goes on. But the enthusiasm does not. So I have put a pause to the exercise and am preparing a wrapping-up commentary to boot. Stay tuned.