CIVIL SOCIETY: RENEWAL AT WORK REDE LECTURE GIVEN BY PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
CIVIL SOCIETY: RENEWAL AT WORK REDE LECTURE GIVEN BY PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY ON 2 December 1996
I am particularly pleased to return here because Cambridge University has such warm and important memories for me. During my first year as President of Ireland this University conferred on me an honorary Doctorate of Laws. It was in June of 1991 and even in that crowded year, when so much was new to me, that occasion stands out as one where public honour was mixed with personal courtesy and kindness - both supplied with exceptional grace - and I appreciated both.
The fact that this lecture was endowed by Sir Robert Rede, Chief Justice to Kings Henry VII and Henry VIII, reminds us again of the enormous span of time during which this University has been a place of learning and reflection. It is that second word I want to emphasise. I like to think that this institution has been tolerant for many centuries of people thinking aloud, discovering their thoughts, posing questions and not always finding answers. That it is associated with a sort of magisterial patience as all those questions are left behind and the questioners go on their way, enriched by the encouragement they have had to ask, and reflect, and ask again. I want to respond to your invitation to deliver this year's Rede lecture not with a legal theme, as was the initial temptation, but by thinking aloud about a subject that concerns us all: about work and worth and the human link between them.
I suppose in doing this I am aware of having had a special vantage point for six years from which to engage with and look at a civil society. I have been present when sports centres were opened, when lifeboats were launched, when a neighbourhood finally opened the community centre it had dreamed of and struggled to afford. I have observed the organisation, the structure, the marvellous architecture of human effort which goes into making a civil society and noted how much is done by voluntary effort.
I am of course very conscious of the pressures on modern European societies not only to secure existing employment levels but to compete for new jobs in a fast changing and mobile global market. A few days ago I received at my official residence the members of the Council of Presidents of UNICE. This body, representing the heads of the employer organisations in twenty five European countries, meets regularly in the member State which holds the rotating Presidency of the European Union in order to formulate a submission to the European Council. The theme of the current submission, their president, Mr. Francois Perigot, informed me, is competitiveness, which they will emphasise with a new urgency to the Dublin Council next week.
And all this leads me to ask some of the questions which trouble me. I want to stand apart altogether from the political choices and policy options that arise, and pose reflective questions about the values which underlie our perceptions of employment and the often unpaid work that enhances community life. Are we in the grip of a truly out-dated way of defining quite separately the considerations of economic competitiveness and wealth creation of a paid job and all that unpaid work which enriches a community? Have we taken enough account of the importance of work in connecting the individual to society? Are we to an extent becoming work blind? In other words we are able to see and count the work that is done and paid for, simply because it is paid for. Whereas the voluntary and community work, and work done in the home, can become quickly invisible, and therefore the values it originates from remain similarly invisible and uncounted.
This leads on to how we find a language for the way we define progress in a society. If we measure a country's GNP, for instance, then we normally include as growth such costs as those which result from environmental damage, from services for children in care and all the social costs involved in the public response to disadvantage. They are part of growth because they are counted. But if we take that word and think of growth as a real index to human progress then we will focus on the community work done in and beyond the home which nurtures a society and enables it to thrive in all those ways which are still below the horizon of how we currently define progress. My core question is: how do we change that horizon?
Now may be the opportune moment. The ending of a century, and of a millennium, prompts a period of unsettling assessments, of stocktaking, even of bridge building to new approaches. The realities of a post Cold War world, the rapid technological advances of the information society and the influences of global trends have accentuated this mood of change and uncertainty. They also invite assessment of the potential for renewal, hence my choice of title: `civil society: renewal at work'.
I believe I have witnessed a valuable process of renewal in a variety of projects at local level in Ireland, all of which have the common ingredient of making a fresh connection between people and work. The broad impact of these projects has been noted in the 1996 OECD report "Ireland - Local Partnerships and Social Innovation", but the essence is in the small detail and so I will tell two simple stories to illustrate:
The first occurred in Portlaoise, a town in Ireland's Midlands. It is a crossroads through which some of the major transport arteries of the country pass. I visited it recently to open an exhibition showing work done by a range of local groups and organisations. Among the people I met were more than 150 who had been unemployed until recently but all of whom were now employed doing jobs which had not existed a short time previously.
These people's story is truly remarkable. They are all participating in a pilot initiative called the Part-Time Job Opportunities Programme. This initiative has succeeded in harnessing the potential of unemployed people, the local community, voluntary organisations and Government, both local and national. In a relatively small pilot area they have created almost 200 jobs, all of which have been filled by people who were long-term unemployed.
I asked one man what difference the programme made in his life. His response was very simple yet very profound: "I have something to talk about with my wife and children at the evening meal", he replied.
This response brought home to me how work influences our most intimate relationships. We relate to each other on the basis of our self image. The self image of a person who feels he/she is making a contribution to the community through his/her work is very different to the self image of a person who is made to feel a burden on the society because they are unemployed.
The response that man in Portlaoise gave also encapsulated the sense of involvement of the family in the work and their connectedness to society through this work. If work is missing, the connection to society is greatly weakened.
A school principal spoke with passion about the three classroom assistants she had received through the programme. Her teaching staff - who were apprehensive initially - now say that they would find it difficult to teach without their help. Children who had learning difficulties were now, because of the individual attention they receive, able to participate fully in class. A mother told me about the difference she noticed in her son's attitude to school. He had gone from a position where he had an almost daily excuse for staying at home to a situation where he would be very upset if he had to miss school. The principal told me that she had work for another five classroom assistants.
Among the creative projects to promote inclusion in the community I was shown the `Talking Newspaper'. People were employed to edit the local newspaper onto a ninety minute audio tape. The tapes are delivered every week to visually impaired people. Not only was this service keeping people informed about community activities it was also making a big statement about the commitment of this community to include the visually impaired.
Modern technology was used creatively in projects which gave people a sense of place. One man had done an extensive study of a local mountain range. With the aid of computers and maps he had plotted out Neolithic sites. He was one of a group working on heritage initiatives. They were networking with local educational institutions, and development groups with a view to protecting and conserving their heritage and enhancing their environment. Their enthusiasm was infectious. I was conscious of a local group who had in a very short time brought about a cultural, socio-economic, life-giving renewal of their village which was palpably connected to their past and full of enthusiasm for the future.
A characteristic of this renewal is that it is not insular. This was illustrated in a very significant way in Portlaoise where the biggest project, employing over thirty people was focused on Third World development. One of the workers explained her involvement. During her time as a volunteer in Central Africa, she saw the negative effects of decisions taken thousands of miles away in a richer part of the world. She realised that if Third World communities are to be effective in solving their problems decision makers in the more powerful countries need to be more sensitive to the consequences of their decisions for weaker nations. She is now actively involved in educating groups about development and the interdependence of our world structures.
My second story is about an area quite near my official residence on the northside of Dublin. Some years ago I visited a pilot project in nearby Coolock which has now developed into the Northside Partnership. The area is considered to be one of the worst unemployment blackspots in the country, with a current rate of 31%. The problems fall into a predictable pattern: neither the educational context provided by their families, their communities, nor their own experiences within the formal school system adequately prepare many of those living within the area to enter the labour market, so local residents tend not to be hired by firms on the industrial estates in the area. I have observed the strategies the Northside Partnership has developed to overcome this reluctance to hire the local long term unemployed. What struck me was the commitment to a very personalised, even tailor made, effort to fit people to jobs and jobs to people.
The overall approach is to look at the two sides, the perspective of the employers and the unemployed, and to work as a bridge to both. The groundwork on each side is impressive in its sheer detail, from surveys of attitudes of employers and the `filters' used to screen out job seekers, to the preparation of prospective employees including filling the gap of lack of job experience and motivation. This led to the setting up of a subsidiary company to undertake normal commercial work, pay industrial wages and enable the unemployed to get real life commercial experience but in a supportive and encouraging environment for a six-month contract period. The discipline greatly enhances the prospect of job placement. This two-sided approach of a personalised counselling and preparation service for the unemployed together with acting as an interface between them and employers through networking and contact points on opportunities has had a dramatic impact in encouraging people from welfare dependency to the world of work and economic independence.
An equally sustained push by the Partnership to developing enterprise initiatives has borne fruit. As experience shows elsewhere, women have been particularly keen to start a business when they have access to training, to mentor schemes and special facilities allowing long term unemployed to set up enterprises, retaining their social welfare benefits for an initial period.
The strength of the partnership is that it is area based, now one of thirty eight such area partnerships in Ireland, and that it harnesses the resources of the area in a structure involving statutory agencies, central and local government and voluntary bodies, helped by European Union funds allocated for local development. The Partnership action plan 1996-1999 gives new emphasis to discovering ways of supporting children to remain in education, knowing that the longer they stay in education the better the chances of a job.
What I have been describing about these projects will strike an immediate chord in this country, and in other developed societies, where an impressive range of schemes and projects seek to redress the corrosive effects of unemployment on communities in the areas most affected. I recall with pleasure a meeting in London last June with volunteers and representatives of companies involved in projects under the Prince's Trust. I had been invited by the Prince of Wales to attend the celebration of 25,000 Prince's Trust volunteers, and I listened to similar stories of personal achievement and of commitment to building up local community.
But are we listening enough? Are we gathering in this local experience and mainstreaming it? Are we conscious of how to develop the potential of the social economy to provide the link that includes more people through their participation in worthwhile work and builds a broader sense of community?
As part of our stocktaking let us remember that in the history of the human race the emphasis on the paid job being the norm in society is a relatively new phenomenon. The industrialisation process of the past two centuries has had a major impact on how modern society views work. Society set itself the production project so that a modest level of goods and services would be available to everyone. Serving this production project came to be seen as the most important and honourable contribution a person could make to society. The activities which served production were seen as the "real work". People were rewarded financially and socially for participating in this process. Gradually work was equated with the job for which there was financial reward. The hierarchy of values placed on jobs is determined by their remuneration. It is useful to evaluate this hierarchy, if only to remind ourselves that childcare is generally poorly paid while money care - financial services - is highly paid.
Just as the coming of the industrial revolution was a very significant moment in human history we are now at another turning point. The production project has been a great success. With the development of science and technology we can produce anything we desire. The fact that millions live in absolute poverty in our world is not a production problem, rather it is a distribution problem. So what is the project for the new century? I believe it is about changing the horizon of what we value as contributing to society. One of the ways we would show this is by welcoming and valuing everyone's work and the importance to them of having work. Can we take a fresh look at work that needs to be done in our society? Can we put a true value on this work?
A key element of the success of the pilot initiative I saw in Portlaoise is its ethos. It places the person at the centre and recognises that work is crucial for the person's development. At the same time it acknowledges that the world of work is changing rapidly and there are not enough jobs to go around. It goes further, however, and recognises that there is so much work that needs to be done in almost every local community. It combines this recognition with an acknowledgment that much of the work done by so many people in local communities and in a variety of other contexts is not, in fact, acknowledged as work because it is not paid employment. Yet much of the social cohesion of communities would break down if this work ceased to be done.
People on this programme are paid the going hourly rate for the job and work the number of hours needed to earn them the equivalent of their social welfare payment and a small top-up payment. The work they do is of real social value. It benefits themselves, the organisation or group who employ them and their local community. It is a voluntary programme in that there is no compulsion on the participants to take up these jobs. The experience of the programme organisers, however, is that there has been no problem with creating these new positions and there has been no problem with filling them.
Concerns are voiced about the growing culture of dependency within civil society. Our societal structures have tended, in some instances, to make people dependent. Decisions are made for people and they sometimes feel they have little real say in shaping these decisions. They feel left outside the system. This in turn produces a situation where people do not feel responsible for the consequences of many decisions. This can have a negative impact on the local community as people opt out of participating. It is a truism that if people are to be responsible they must be given responsibility. Which is why the Northside Partnership model interested me particularly. There is a process of organic growth generated within that area, encouraging local involvement and harnessing all the resources in an integrated way. This reinforces a sense of community.
The reality of unemployment, its attendant poverty and exclusion, combined with the rapidly changing nature of our societies, present a major challenge to all of us at the end of the twentieth century. We would all claim that we desire and work for progress. Yet the growing divisions which characterise so many Western societies raise serious questions concerning the success of our efforts in this regard. Can we really say that the whole society is progressing while so many people are not working, while poverty persists despite our growing wealth, while so many people are excluded from participating in the mainstream of society through no fault of their own? Often, those who benefit from economic growth do not feel better even though commentators say they should. The economy may be thriving but many people feel left out.
New indicators and indices of progress are required so that a society's health and progression can be measured in a more comprehensive way than heretofore. It would be very important that all sectors of society be involved in identifying what would constitute better indicators of progress than those we have at present. Work has been done on this issue in some international fora and among some local level organisations. Perhaps this could be worked on by national governments in preparing for the millennium. Identifying genuine progress indicators and using them to measure progress might well be a key component in the renewal of civil society as we enter the twenty-first century.
One initiative which is finding some favour at present is the proposed production of a `satellite' set of national accounts for countries. These would include the value of activities such as caring, and voluntary and community work which are currently not counted. They would seek to estimate the value of unpaid work done in the home by so many people, most of them women. `Satellite' accounts would also subtract the costs associated with disasters, with resource depletion and the like. Developing `satellite' accounts such as these would make a contribution towards measuring real progress. This is only one initiative which might be of value in this area. There are many others.
The difficulty in measuring progress in civil society is reflected in the conclusions of the Report on the local area partnerships in Ireland, prepared by Professor Charles Sabel of the Columbia Law School under the Local Economic and Development (LEED) Programme of the OECD.
The assessment, nevertheless, is remarkably positive:
"A small country, in extremis, determines to find a way to reconcile economic growth with social equity when a long history of cautious pessimism and a recent past of discord might have counselled a more timorous strategy. The delegation of authority to local partnerships charged with connecting economic development with assistance to vulnerable groups reveals that the new, decentralised economy is more pervasive and more accessible to the vulnerable than had been assumed. But having overturned expectations and institutional routines, the partnerships have yet to fix their innovative activity in a form that both allows them to learn from what they do and renders them accountable to those they serve. To accomplish that, they and allied institutions would have to apply to relations among themselves, and to their projects, the same disciplines that they have learned through association with the local economy, and in which they are currently instructing firms and trainees. Whether and by what means this can be done is uncertain. But whatever its ultimate outcome, the Irish experiment in socially inclusive localism has, like all truly successful experiments, reassured its originators by demonstrating that there was something to find where they were looking, and bewildered them - and onlookers, too - by the promising complexity of the findings."
It is this "promising complexity" which provides a tantalising glimpse of a new horizon for civil society in the next millennium.