"The global employment situation is gloomy (惨淡) and will become still gloomier". General Director Michel Hansenne of the International Labour Organisation said in September 1998. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) represents 125 million organised workers in 145 countries. While women make up 39 per cent of this rank and file, only ten per cent of the board (董事会) members are women. In April 2000 the ICFTU Congress changed its statutes so that women are expected to increase their representation at the next Congress in 2004. The global labour force includes half of the world’’s population, numbering about three billion people. --Half of all jobs are in agriculture. A significant proportion of these jobs are seasonal in the developing countries. --Almost one third of those employed work in the service industries. --40 per cent of working people are women. Women are in the majority in subcontracting (转包合同) and temporary jobs, part-time and temporary employment and in the informal sector. 250 million children are involved in working life. Of these, 110 million are girls aged 5 to 14 years. A majority of the labour force in the developing countries work in the informal or grey sector (灰色行业,指不正当行业) of the economy, in which employment is not regulated by collective agreements and even legislation has little impact. One billion people suffer from lack of work. The labour supply greatly exceeds its demand. There are 150 million unemployed and about 750 to 900 million underemployed worldwide. A situation in which roughly one third of the global labour force suffer from lack of work perpetuates (使继续) a serious imbalance in the labour market. For the employers this offers an effective means to pressure employees to accept substandard working conditions. The lack of work is greatest in the developing countries. Very high unemployment rates are common all over the third world. In the European Union the general unemployment rate was just under ten per cent at the beginning of the year 2000, while in the USA and Japan it was four to five per cent. Of the unemployed 60 million are aged 15 to 24 years. Highly skilled jobs are concentrated in the industrialised countries, while those demanding fewer skills are in the developing countries. This gap is not narrowing. The demand for unskilled labour is continuously decreasing in the affluent countries as the emphasis moves ever more towards production demanding highly skilled labour. In the 1980s and 1990s the parallel change in the developing countries was slower than in the economically developed countries. In some developing countries vocational skills barely developed at all. People in working life have noticed the increased competition in the form of growing demands made by employers. Often these demands are inordinate. According to a report published in Helsingin Sanomat in June 2000, Finnish President Tarja Halonen described the consequences of excessive demands made by employers at a seminar organised by the Social Insurance Institution — KELA in the following terms: "There are rather many burned out or overburdened people at workplaces nowadays, and in many ways work exceeds its frame of reference to affect leisure time and family life so that people lose the ability to cope with working life". This stress has been augmented by a loss of job security and, especially in the public sector, by the increased prevalence of temporary jobs. Employers apply pressure on their employees by threatening to transfer their work to subcontractors or to other corporations offering services for hire. Efforts to protect individual employment in Finland have led to uncompensated overtime work in many industries. In the 1990s this phenomena also became more common in the municipal sector. It represents an exacerbated (加剧的) example of how fiercer competition increases the pressure to undermine working conditions. The more employee groups concede (让步) in the face of such pressure, the more difficult it is for others to defend their working conditions, and the race to the bottom accelerates (加速). The system of collective bargaining gives the best protection to wage and salary earners. Collective agreements offer the most effective means of pring "the race to the bottom". The Finnish public is well aware of this, as was clear from a survey made by the SAK organisation in late winter 2000. 73 per cent of those interviewed considered that employees are in a weak position when wages, salaries and other working conditions are entirely negotiated at the workplace. 79 per cent of wage earners and 78 per cent of salaried employees concur with this view. 63 per cent of those in managerial positions are of a similar opinion. 54 per cent of entrepreneurs consider it important to settle working conditions by collective bargaining. However, one third of the Finns are of the opinion that employers must have the right to employ people at whatever conditions job applicants agree to. There are no collective agreements of generally binding character in the municipal sector. In school cleaning, for example, two different agreements may be applied if part of the work is commissioned from a private company. The pay and the other benefits for the same work may differ substantially, which tempts employers to choose the cheaper alternative regardless of the outcome of the work. This is a hard challenge for municipal staff. The arrangement has been exacerbated by an increase in the number of bids made by unorganised employers and of those who hire out labour in competitive tendering for public services. This limits the prospects for defending appropriate pay levels and decent working conditions. The European Union trade union movement is calling for the inclusion of the basic rights of wage and salary earners in the EU charter. In the first half of the year 2000 the trade union organisations stepped up their lobbying of EU policymakers in this area. The Core standards for working life must be the starting point everywhere. Defending core labour standards is a fundamental principle in the strategy of the international trade union movement. In 1998 the Member States of the International Labour Organisation — ILO specified what they meant by core labour standards. Their goal is: -- to secure the right to organise and the right to collective bargaining, --to pr discrimination based on gender, race or religion in recruiting (征召) and pay, --to limit the participation in working life of minors and completely stop child labour in the worst jobs, and --to bring an end to forced labour. There is no country where women are not victims of discriminated in the labour market. The extreme case is Afghanistan. Appealing to the Koran, its hard-line Islamic leadership has forbidden women from participating in working life. As far as business enterprises are concerned, discrimination in recruiting and promotion is an oddity, as it means under-utilisation of the skills and know-how of women. As such, this also hampers the development of society as a whole. In all cases discrimination against women has been inherited from the past when women were responsible for work in the home, while men worked outside the home. In the last decades of the 20th century, however, female participation in working life increased at an accelerating pace so that by the beginning of the new millennium 40 per cent of the global labour force was female. Many growth industries have a female majority in the labour force. By increasing the proportion of women in its leading bodies the trade union movement will become stronger and its ability to promote organisation will improve. This has been stressed in several official decisions of trade union committees. The trade union movement in Finland believes that it can solve this problem by ysing the consequences of the alternatives for the position of women when it prepares its decisions. Trade union organisations in several other countries have adopted a similar approach. However this method of mainstreaming has not been fully applied in any country. The developing countries suffer more greatly from unemployment than the developed countries.