Creating Full and Productive Employment and Decent Work for All as a Way of Overcoming Inequalities to Accelerate the Recovery From the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Full Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

E/RES/2023/14View PDF

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

A Resolution of the Economic and Social Council, under agenda item 19b Social development, published in 2023.

Who cites this mandate in the budget?

3 entities

(Sub-)Programme	Title	Total mandates cited
Programme 7	Economic and social affairs	291
Subprogramme 3	Macroeconomic policies and growth	9
Programme 16	Economic and social development in asia and the pacific	254

Historical expenditure covers the complete programme or subprogramme, not this mandate. For an overview of all UN entities and programmes, see UN entities and programmes.

Who cites this mandate in the budget?

3 entities

(Sub-)Programme	Title	Total mandates cited	Expenditure
Programme 7	Economic and social affairs	291	—
Subprogramme 3	Macroeconomic policies and growth	9	—
Programme 16	Economic and social development in asia and the pacific	254	—

Historical expenditure covers the complete programme or subprogramme, not this mandate. For an overview of all UN entities and programmes, see UN entities and programmes.

What subjects does this mandate have?

7 subjects

Covid-19 Decent Work Employment Creation Equality Recovery Social Policy Sustainable Development

What’s in this document?

62 operative paragraphs

Takes note of the report of the Secretary-General;¹⁰

¹⁰E/CN.5/2023/3.

Acknowledges the urgent need to accelerate action on all levels and by all stakeholders to fulfil the vision and Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,¹¹ and emphasizes that the international community, through the outcome documents of the major United Nations conferences and summits adopted by the General Assembly, has reinforced, inter alia, the urgency of eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, creating full and productive employment and decent work for all, combating inequality within and among countries, protecting the environment, creating sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth and fostering social inclusion within the United Nations development agenda, including the outcomes of the World Summit for Social Development, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development,¹² the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030¹³ and the New Urban Agenda;¹⁴

¹¹General Assembly resolution 70/1.

¹²General Assembly resolution 69/313, annex.

¹³General Assembly resolution 69/283, annex II.

¹⁴General Assembly resolution 71/256, annex.

Reaffirms the commitment to implementing the 2030 Agenda for all by ensuring that no one would be left behind and reaching the furthest behind first, and by recognizing human rights and that the dignity of the human person is fundamental;

Recognizes the need for strengthening international cooperation to provide necessary financial assistance, technical support and capacity-building to developing countries for attaining Sustainable Development Goals related to social development, by creating full and productive employment and decent work for all;

Calls upon Member States to promote and protect human rights, in accordance with their obligations under international human rights law;

Reaffirms that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, for all people everywhere, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development, as well as an overarching objective of the 2030 Agenda, of which the Addis Ababa Action Agenda is an integral part, supporting and complementing it;

Stresses that the benefits of economic growth should be inclusive and distributed more equitably and that, in order to close the gap of inequality and avoid any further deepening of inequality, comprehensive social policies and programmes, including appropriate social transfer and decent work and job creation programmes and social protection systems, are needed;

Acknowledges that recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic gives additional opportunity to develop integrated long-term policy frameworks to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, and that such frameworks should aim to simultaneously build a more inclusive, equitable and adaptable labour market with full and productive employment and decent work for all, enhance people’s capabilities and well-being, promote acceleration actions at the national, regional and international levels and ensure sustainable livelihoods for all, and also recognizes that a multidimensional analysis of poverty and unemployment should inform these recovery strategies;

Encourages Member States to promote affordable and equitable access to basic services, in particular quality formal and non-formal education, at all levels, including programmes that promote equality and inclusion through the affirmation of the fundamental dignity of the human person, and health-care services, including through the acceleration of the transition towards equitable access to universal health coverage, as well as access to affordable housing, nutrition and food, and access to employment and decent work, information and communications technology and infrastructure, through advancing gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls;

Recognizes and promotes lifelong learning for all, in both formal and informal settings, and supports domestic literacy programmes, including vocational education components and non-formal education, to support employment growth, enhance the quality of jobs, foster equal opportunities and reduce inequality in the labour market;

Encourages Member States to address underlying causes of inequality by promoting a sustainable economy for the well-being of all, investing in programmes for poverty eradication, as well as in the promotion of equitable and universal access to basic services and in quality and resilient infrastructure, including health-care services; education, lifelong learning and skills training; education infrastructure; safe drinking water and sanitation; affordable housing; affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy services; sustainable transport systems; and affordable access to the Internet and connectivity, including by working to ensure that service delivery is aimed at progressively reaching universal access, with particular attention given to the needs of those in vulnerable situations;

Encourages Governments to continue their efforts to develop strategies and programmes aimed at strengthening national capacities to address national priorities relating to family-oriented policies and to step up their efforts, in collaboration with relevant stakeholders, to implement those objectives, in particular in the areas of fighting poverty and hunger, to prevent the intergenerational transfer and feminization of poverty and ensure the well-being of all at all ages in order to achieve the 2030 Agenda;

Invites Governments to undertake the necessary adaptations to policies and regulations to support decent work and employment growth, foster equal opportunities and reduce inequalities and discrimination in the labour market, by enhancing effective labour market institutions, by enabling adequate remuneration through measures such as statutory or negotiated minimum wages, equal pay for work of equal value, employment protection legislation and employment law, and their effective implementation so that all workers enjoy labour rights;

Reiterates the commitment of Member States to promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, including through access to financial services;

Stresses the importance of developing policies to expand work opportunities and labour productivity in both rural and urban sectors by achieving and recovering inclusive economic growth, investing in human resource development through ongoing training and skills development for the new forms of work, promoting technologies that generate productive employment and decent work, and encouraging entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized enterprises;

Encourages Governments to incorporate the provision of digital competencies, including but not limited to entrepreneurship and complementary soft skills, in formal education curricula and lifelong learning initiatives to address the implications of fundamental changes in the digital economy and industry 4.0 for labour markets;

Invites Member States to consider adopting labour market policies that strengthen institutions and provide adequate labour protection to all workers, especially the most disadvantaged, including through social dialogue and minimum wage policies, while taking into account the role of workers’ and employers’ organizations, as applicable, as part of policies to boost income growth for the vast majority of workers, taking into consideration the specific circumstances of each country;

Stresses the need to address challenges faced by those working in informal or vulnerable jobs, by investing in the creation of more decent work opportunities, including providing access to decent jobs in the formal sector;

Encourages Member States to accelerate efforts to promote the transition from informal to formal work in all sectors through integrated strategies that comprise nuanced and differentiated measures for decent work and reliable social protection, including by leveraging e-formalization policies and supporting new and growing sectors such as the care economy, sustainable economy and digital economy to absorb informal workers, and to establish appropriate interventions that can strengthen the capacity of employers and workers to comply with existing standards and regulations of paying taxes and making social security contributions in ways and intervals tailored to the income patterns of informal and rural economy workers, by supporting the adaptation or simplification of regulations and procedures, establishing incentives to formalize and strengthening government oversight and capacity-building of tax and labour inspection services and social security;

Calls upon Member States to establish well-designed programmes that are aimed at ensuring equal opportunities and treatment in the world of work and facilitating and supporting the inclusion in the labour market of those in vulnerable situations, including women, youth, persons with disabilities, older persons, Indigenous Peoples, migrants, members of national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, and people living with HIV, including by strengthening active labour market policies and social protection systems;

Urges Member States to provide specific programmes and mobilize financial resources and technologies to support women to return to economic activity, including access to decent work, training and financial services, strengthening their economic empowerment and autonomy, and to protect and promote the right to work and rights at work of all women, facilitate women’s full and equal participation in the labour market and ensure the equal access of women to decent work and quality jobs in all sectors and at all levels;

Calls upon Member States to protect labour rights, promote decent work and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers, in particular women migrants, and those in precarious employment, and recognizes that the positive contribution of women migrant workers has the potential to foster inclusive growth and sustainable development in countries of origin, transit and destination, underlining the value and dignity of their labour, in all sectors, including in care and domestic work;

Urges Member States to show greater solidarity, especially during times of emergency, to strengthen international cooperation to enhance the protection, well-being, voluntary and safe return and effective reintegration into labour markets of migrant workers, and to ensure that in combating and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic no one is left behind;

Encourages Member States to implement policies that ensure women’s economic empowerment by supporting the full and productive participation of women in the labour market, including women with disabilities, and those living in poverty and female heads of household, and to promote equal pay for equal work or work of equal value, the equal sharing of responsibilities between parents, access to childcare facilities, work-family balance, including, inter alia, while caring for children, older persons, persons with disabilities, and by promoting their full, equal and meaningful participation in the economy and in decision-making processes at all levels;

Calls upon Member States to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, and ensure non-discrimination, racial and cultural diversity and inclusion, and equity by developing and implementing an integrated and comprehensive approach through the entire life course, by removing barriers that prevent women from accessing, remaining and progressing in the labour market, such as gender stereotypes, all forms of violence, including gender-based violence, discriminatory laws and practices and the unfair division of unpaid care work, by closing gender pay and pension gaps and by further realizing equal pay for equal work, including care work;

Highlights the importance of developing and implementing policies and programmes to support entrepreneurship, especially for women and youth, and emphasizes that the role of entrepreneurship, including social entrepreneurship, and micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises in social and economic development is more critical than ever in the post-COVID-19 recovery and beyond;

Encourages Member States to undertake the necessary adaptations to foster an enabling business environment for the promotion of inclusive and sustainable economic growth, decent work and decent job creation, as well as entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainable enterprises, through the enhancement of international cooperation and partnership with the private sector, including improving access to credit, particularly for micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises, and adopt public policies to combat unnecessary bureaucracy and corruption, as well as illicit financial flows, and strengthen good practices on assets return and recovery;

Also encourages Member States to enact family-oriented and gender-responsive policies that support the creation of decent jobs in new, sustainable and growing sectors, including the sustainable economy, digital economy, care economy and, as appropriate, social and solidarity economy, through, inter alia, appropriate investments in flexible and accessible skills and qualification development policies designed with the support of social partners that are tailored to the needs of these new sectors, policies that promote an environmentally sustainable and digitally empowered just transition that is fair and inclusive, legislative frameworks that determine the employment status of digital platform workers and protect their rights, and policies that ensure their effective implementation;

Further encourages Member States to respect, promote and realize the right to work and to prevent and eliminate unequal division of domestic care, violence, abuse and sexual harassment, while recognizing that violence and harassment are a threat to equal opportunities, are unacceptable and incompatible with decent work and may prevent women from accessing, remaining and advancing in the labour market;

Acknowledges that the exacerbation of poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an increase in child labour, and urges Member States to take immediate and effective measures to secure the prohibition and ensure the elimination of child labour in all its forms, by 2025 at the latest;

Recognizes that nationally appropriate universal social protection systems for all address multiple, often interrelated and complex causes of poverty and inequality by easing the burden of certain expenditure during periods of unemployment, contributing to health-related goals, gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, and decent work, and facilitating the full inclusion of persons with disabilities and older persons;

Also recognizes that nationally appropriate social protection systems make a critical contribution to the realization of human rights for all, in particular for those who are trapped in poverty and hunger, and that promoting universal access to social services and providing nationally appropriate social protection floors can contribute to reducing inequality and poverty, addressing social exclusion and promoting inclusive economic growth, and in this regard takes note of the Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202), of the International Labour Organization;

Encourages Member States to invest in building national social protection systems that are, as appropriate, universal, risk-informed, gender-responsive and family-oriented, that combine social insurance and non-contributory (tax-financed) schemes, to ensure that everyone has access to comprehensive, adequate, progressive and sustainable social protection over the life course, through design and implementation features that support the inclusion of those in vulnerable situations who are often left out of social protection systems (including unpaid caregivers, the “missing middle” and informal workers), and contribute to just structural transformations by responding to social protection needs, including those stemming from the growth of the sustainable economy and the digital economy, and enable the increased responsiveness of programmes to disasters caused by hazards of all kinds, including through public and private investment in disaster risk reduction;

Encourages Member States, when designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating social protection programmes for social development, to ensure gender mainstreaming throughout this process;

Recognizes the important role that families can play in combating social exclusion, and highlights the importance of investing in inclusive and responsive family-oriented policies and programmes in areas such as education, training, decent work, work-family balance, health-care services, social services, intergenerational relationships and solidarity and targeted cash transfers for vulnerable families, in order to reduce inequality and promote the well-being of all persons of all ages, as well as to contribute to better outcomes for children and other vulnerable family members in vulnerable situations and help to break the intergenerational transfer of poverty;

Acknowledges the vital role that sustainable social protection systems play in the COVID-19 pandemic response, and encourages Member States to ensure that recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic provides a policy window for the countries concerned to address their significant gaps in social protection coverage by making progress towards universal, adequate, comprehensive and sustainable social protection systems, by including, in accordance with their national legislations, basic income, child benefits, maternity benefits, sickness benefits, disability benefits, unemployment benefits and old-age pension, and that these social protection systems should identify and close coverage gaps, especially for those who are in vulnerable situations, including informal workers, migrants and unpaid carers;

Encourages Member States to provide universal age-, disability-, gender-responsive and family-oriented social protection systems, which are key to ensuring poverty reduction, including, as appropriate, targeted cash transfers for people and families in vulnerable situations, such as when headed by a single parent, in particular those headed by women, and which are most effective in reducing poverty when accompanied by other measures, such as providing access to essential services, high-quality education and health-care services;

Stresses the need to better coordinate social protection policies and measures with poverty reduction programmes and other social policies to avoid excluding people in informal or precarious jobs, and recognizes the need to promote transitions towards the formal economy, expanding and upgrading existing social assistance programmes by increasing benefit level and coverage to informal workers, including seasonal and casual labourers in rural areas;

Encourages Member States to consider supporting the implementation of the Global Accelerator on Jobs and Social Protection for a Just Transition, including through the promotion of decent work and sustainable and universal social protection systems;

Also encourages Member States to develop long-term, risk-informed, inclusive and prevention-oriented social development recovery plans that will improve people’s capacities and well-being, through investing in social services and quality, reliable, sustainable and resilient infrastructure, including basic school infrastructure, and health-care services, safe drinking water and sanitation, affordable housing, ensuring decent employment, adequate social protection coverage and affordable and reliable digital technology, Internet access and connectivity;

Further encourages Member States to facilitate the effective and meaningful participation and empowerment of those in vulnerable situations, including those most affected by the pandemic, those working in the informal economy and those living in poverty, in the design, implementation and monitoring of COVID-19 recovery plans;

Urges Member States to address multiple causes of poverty, hunger and inequality, through decent work and job creation; increasing resilience; improving coherence between social protection, food security and nutrition policies; providing targeted cash transfers; promoting digital and financial literacy and inclusion; ensuring equal opportunities and access to healthy diets from sustainable food systems; ensuring access to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities without discrimination; combating all forms of discrimination; empowering all people and facilitating the social inclusion and participation of those who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination; and prioritizing investment in early childhood education, nutrition and care to break intergenerational poverty;

Reaffirms that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, remains deeply concerned that all countries, particularly developing countries, are vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change and are already experiencing an increase in such impacts, including persistent drought and extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, land degradation, desertification, sea level rise, coastal erosion, ocean acidification and the retreat of mountain glaciers, further threatening food security, water availability and livelihoods, recognizes the substantial risks posed by climate change to health, underlines the need to address the economic, social and environmental impacts of climate change, and emphasizes the need for action at all levels, including through mitigation and adaptation efforts, to build resilience that can contribute to eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions and ending hunger;

Recognizes the efforts at all levels to establish and strengthen social protection measures and programmes, including national safety nets and social protection floors, for those in need and those in vulnerable situations, inter alia, food and cash-for-work, cash transfer and voucher programmes, school feeding programmes and mother-and-child nutrition programmes, and affordable housing, and in this regard underlines the importance of increasing investment, capacity-building and systems development;

Urges Member States to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by guaranteeing equal access to opportunities and social protection for all, in particular for those in vulnerable situations, including by mainstreaming a gender perspective in labour market participation, division of care work and in food security programmes, especially for those women and girls who experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and violence, considering that the empowerment of women and girls in diverse situations and conditions will make a crucial contribution to progress across all the Goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda;

Calls upon Member States to adopt policies, programmes and other measures to recognize, reduce and redistribute women’s and girls’ disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work and the feminization of poverty, which is exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, including through poverty eradication measures, labour policies, public services and gender-responsive social protection programmes;

Encourages Member States to recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid care and domestic work, particularly by women, and enhance efforts to ensure equal pay for equal work or work of equal value, and to promote work-family balance as conducive to the well-being of children, youth, persons with disabilities and older persons and the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, inter alia, through the improvement of working conditions for workers with family responsibilities, expanding flexible working arrangements, including through the use of new information and communications technologies, and providing and/or expanding leave arrangements, such as maternity leave and paternity leave, and adequate social security benefits for both women and men, taking appropriate steps to ensure that they are not discriminated against when availing themselves of such benefits and promoting men’s awareness and use of such opportunities, for their children’s developmental benefit and as a means of enabling women to increase their participation in the labour market;

Also encourages Member States to facilitate the digital and financial literacy and inclusion of women and their equal access to formal financial services, including timely and affordable credit, loans, savings, insurance and remittance transfer schemes; integrate a gender perspective into finance sector policy and regulations, in accordance with national priorities and legislation, encourage financial institutions, such as commercial banks, development banks, agricultural banks, microfinance institutions, mobile network operators, agent networks, cooperatives, postal banks and savings banks, to provide access to financial products, services and information to women and encourage the use of innovative tools and platforms, including online and mobile banking;

Calls upon Member States to prevent the harmful effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children by mitigating the damaging socioeconomic impacts, including by ensuring the continuity of child-centred services and policies on an equal and attainable access basis, upholding the right of the child to quality education, including early childhood education, on the basis of equal opportunity and non-discrimination and supporting education that is inclusive, equitable and accessible by implementing appropriate measures to ensure supporting families in the return of children, particularly girls and children in vulnerable situations, to school, when it is safe to do so, and access to opportunities to catch up on lost learning and while in confinement, to support school systems, teachers and families in ensuring a reliable source of daily nutrition and using accessible and inclusive distance-learning solutions to close the digital divides, while protecting children from violence, abuse and exploitation, online and offline, and recalling that no child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy and family;

Recognizes that domestic resources mobilization, underscored by the principle of national ownership and supplemented by international assistance, as appropriate, will be critical to realizing sustainable development and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals;

Reaffirms the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, and recognizes the need to take steps to significantly increase investment to close resource gaps, including through the mobilization of financial resources from all sources, including public, private, domestic and international resource mobilization and allocation;

Also reaffirms that international cooperation has an essential role in assisting developing countries, including highly indebted poor countries, least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, small island developing Member States and middle-income countries, in strengthening their human, institutional and technological capacity;

Calls upon the international community to assist developing countries in the implementation of national human resources development strategies, and encourages the international community, including the private sector and relevant civil society actors, to provide and mobilize financial resources, capacity-building, technical assistance and technology transfer on mutually agreed terms and to supply expertise from all sources, as available;

Encourages developed countries to implement their official development assistance commitments, including the commitment by many developed countries to achieve the target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income for official development assistance to developing countries and 0.15 to 0.20 per cent of gross national income for official development assistance to the least developed countries;

Calls upon the international community to support countries to achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors to engage further on the implementation of existing commitments on technology transfer on mutually agreed terms;

Welcomes the contributions of South-South cooperation to the promotion of full and productive employment and decent work for all, and reaffirms that South-South cooperation is an important element of international cooperation for development as a complement to, not a substitute for, North-South cooperation, and commits itself to strengthening South-South and triangular cooperation as a means of bringing relevant experience and expertise to bear in development cooperation;

Takes note of the World Social Report 2023: Leaving No One Behind in an Ageing World, and urges the Secretary-General to continue to provide information that can help Member States to prepare for the challenges that ageing poses to meeting social protection obligations, sustaining fiscal systems and strengthening social stability, especially in countries that are still developing and countries with ageing populations;

Stresses the essential role that official development assistance plays in complementing, leveraging and sustaining financing for development efforts in developing countries and in facilitating the achievement of development objectives, including the internationally agreed development goals, in particular the Sustainable Development Goals, and welcomes steps to improve the effectiveness and quality of aid based on the fundamental principles of national ownership, alignment, harmonization, managing for results and mutual accountability;

Encourages the international community to intensify development cooperation, including through South-South, North-South and triangular cooperation, as well as multi-stakeholder partnerships, to support countries, especially developing countries, upon their request, in building their national capacity for science, technology and innovation for social development, as well as to support research networks that reach across borders, institutions and disciplines;

Calls upon the international community to strengthen multilateral cooperation, by mobilizing resources for an inclusive recovery and making use of special drawing rights and its voluntary channelling allocation to countries most in need, and recognizes the role of the United Nations and of the international financial institutions, in accordance with their respective mandates, and encourages them to continue to support global efforts towards sustained and inclusive growth, sustainable development and the external debt sustainability of developing countries;

Invites all relevant stakeholders, including the United Nations system and civil society organizations, to continue to promote the exchange of information and good practices on programmes, policies and measures that successfully reduce inequality in all its dimensions;

Invites the United Nations system to continue to support Member States, upon their request, in their pursuit of inclusive and resilient recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic for sustainable livelihoods, well-being and dignity for all, and facilitate international cooperation to create full and productive employment and decent work for all as a way of overcoming inequalities to accelerate the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for the common future of present and coming generations.

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