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	ITUC Global Rights Index names worst countries for workers by International Trade Union Confederation   June 2015   Human and trade union rights , Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights.   The Gulf States are among the world’s worst countries for workers’ rights, while workers under European austerity measures endured the starkest deterioration of standards, according to the 2015 Global Rights Index.   The ITUC rights index ranks 141 countries against 97 internationally recognised indicators to assess where workers’ rights are best protected, in law and in practice.   “Workers in the Gulf States where the draconian ‘kafala’ system is widespread endure many of the violations which make the Middle East and North Africa the world’s worst region for fundamental rights at work,” said ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow.   “But in a worrying trend, European workers have witnessed the starkest deterioration of their rights in the last 12 months due to widespread government-imposed austerity measures taking effect.”   The International Trade Union Confederation has been collecting data on the abuse of trade union rights around the world for more than 30 years. This is the second year the ITUC has presented its findings through the Global Rights Index, offering a snapshot for government and business to see how their laws and supply chains have deteriorated or improved in the last 12 months.   The ten worst countries for working people are Belarus, China, Colombia, Egypt, Guatemala, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland and United Arab Emirates.   Other countries ranked lower but had worsening conditions this year in a clear negative trend for workers. These nations were Burundi, Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, Iran, Georgia, Russia, United Kingdom and Spain.   “Workers in Colombia and Guatemala have been murdered for trying to negotiate better working conditions, while in Qatar and Saudi Arabia migrants continue to endure forced labour and labour law exclusions which amount to modern slavery.   “In 73 of 141 countries, workers faced dismissals, suspensions, pay cuts and demotions for attempting to negotiate better working conditions, while in 84 countries employers adopted illegal strategies to deny or delay bargaining with representative trade unions.   “While a handful of countries have attained perfect scores compared to last year, there’s been an increase across the board in the number of countries where conditions have worsened, including nations such as Cameroon, Hungary, Spain and South Africa,” Ms Burrow said.   The reports key findings include:   Out of a total of 141 countries, the number where workers faced arbitrary arrest and detention increased from 35 to 44, and included countries such as Spain and Brazil.   In almost 60 per cent of countries, certain types of workers are excluded from their fundamental labour rights.   Unionists were murdered in 11 countries, one up from last year, including 22 deaths in Colombia alone.   Seventy per cent of countries have workers with no right to strike.   Two thirds of countries deny workers collective bargaining rights.   More than half of countries in the survey deny workers access to the rule of law.   In the past year, unions have reported violent crackdowns on peaceful protests in Cambodia, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Ukraine; in Qatar around 100 migrant workers striking against poverty wages were arrested last November, while in March this year a Filipino union organiser became the 18th case of extra-judicial killing since 2010.   “International labour standards prescribe access to fundamental rights for all workers,” Ms Burrow said. “Yet as corporate power and inequality grows internationally, these results show governments and employers in almost every country around the world must improve their treatment of workers and arrest the increase in workplace violations.”   * Access the report via the link below. Visit the related web page
	Why wait 100 years? Bridging the Gap in Global Education by Rebecca Winthrop and Eileen McGivney Center for Universal Education - Brookings Institution   June 2015   In the last 200 years, the number of children attending primary school globally has grown from 2.3 million to 700 million today, covering nearly 90 percent of the world’s school-age children. But the gulf in average levels of education between rich and poor countries remains huge.   Without a fundamental rethinking of current approaches to education, it''s going to take another 100 years for children in developing countries to reach the education levels achieved in developed countries. Something needs to change.   Global education enrollment and attainment: Unequal access, unequal outcomes   Who would have guessed in 1763 that the Prussian government’s decision to provide broad access to schooling would be the first step in a mass schooling movement that would spread across the globe? In the beginning of the 19th century, a sum total of 2.3 million children were enrolled in primary school around the world. Today, more than 700 million children are now enrolled in primary school. The spread of schooling around the globe remains one of the most widely successful "going to scale" stories to date. Two hundred years ago, it would have been inconceivable in any country or cultural context that a central feature in a child’s upbringing and preparation for adulthood would be his or her regular participation in classroom lessons and school life.   Of course, education existed long before—and indeed for millennia has been the primary way in which humans have passed down knowledge across generations—but for the vast majority of young people it took very different forms, such as through the family, songs and the arts, cultural and religious institutions, community work, and apprenticeships in arts and trades.   Today, not a single country in the world is without a schooling system, and for most of the world’s youth the education they receive in school—or lack thereof—has a major bearing on their prospects in adult life.   While there has been global convergence around enrolling children in primary school, stark education inequality remains between developed and developing countries. When it''s shown as an average number of years in school and levels of achievement, the developing world is about 100 years behind developed countries.   These poorer countries still have average levels of education in the 21st century that were achieved in many western countries by the early decades of the 20th century. If we continue with the current approaches to education, this century-wide gap will continue into the future.   This 100-year gap, while variable across regions and education levels, is sufficiently large and persistent to demand a response. To better understand what we can do to address such deep levels of global education inequality we first have to understand how we got here in the first place. How did mass schooling develop? What is the nature of the 100-year-gap today? What are the possible future trajectories for global education? These are crucial questions to answer before we can land on a solution to the problem.   The four forces behind the emergence of mass schooling   It may come as a surprise to learn that over the last 200 years, both flourishing democracies and autocratic regimes have consistently placed a great deal of importance on schooling, just as countries with robust and expanding economies invested in schooling as eagerly as countries with stagnating GDP figures.   In fact, the gains in schooling from 1950 to 2010 were nearly equal between the most and least corrupt countries, the most and least democratic, and those with the largest and smallest levels of economic growth.   In other words, the spread of mass schooling cannot be dismissed as merely ancillary to global economic growth or to the increasing prevalence of more representative forms of government. Instead, mass schooling has been a global movement spurred on by multiple forces, often interrelated and mutually reinforcing.   Underlying the development of mass schooling over time, four fundamental forces stand out as having been especially influential in driving the movement: the university, the industrial revolution, nationalism, and human rights.   The university as knowledge holder   The role of the university in the mass schooling movement is often under appreciated. But as David Baker eloquently argues in his latest book, “The Schooled Society,” it has been fundamental in laying the groundwork for the spread of schooling. The Western university, in particular, has had a profound influence on the way in which societies around the world have come to understand knowledge itself. Eight hundred years ago, when the first Western universities were established in Europe, from Paris to Bologna to Oxford, schools were not seen to be the arbiters of knowledge that they are considered to be today.   However, over the centuries the idea inherent in university scholarship that knowledge and truth is open to discovery by anyone has taken hold so firmly in most places around the globe that we hardly question it anymore. Even in parts of the world where strong alternatives to this understanding exist, such as cultural or religious doctrines, they usually exist alongside each other ("traditional" sources of knowledge versus "modern" sources of knowledge, for example).   Today, the university''s role in organizing, validating, and legitimating knowledge has wide influence, including on schooling as the main pathway to reaching university. We see it when the university degree signals to employers a level of competence, despite the fact that many young people forgo actual work experience to attain the degree. We see it in the massive effort parents expend to ensure their children succeed in school, including the nearly $100 billion parents are spending worldwide on tutoring. We see it in the media when the act of leaving school early—"dropping out"—is described interchangeably with failure and social dysfunction.   This widely accepted understanding that accessing knowledge and truth is open to anyone and that the university is the main arbiter of knowledge in society has proved to be powerfully rich soil in which the seeds of mass schooling have flourished.   The Industrial Revolution, technology and the workplace   Within this larger social phenomenon of universities sanctioning the type of knowledge deemed worthy, there developed a pressing economic need for schooling. As technology improved throughout the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, societies and economies shifted from agricultural and skilled-craft trades into manufacturing societies. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe the changes to skills supply and demand in America in “The Race Between Education and Technology.” Their analysis finds that with the advent of new technologies that shifted work from highly skilled trades to manufacturing, there was initially a decrease in the demand for skills. Take automobiles, for example. Early automobiles were built in large artisan shops by highly-skilled craftsmen.   However, with advances in technology, the industry demanded assembly-line workers who were largely unskilled, putting the trained and skilled craftsmen out of business. As technology continued to evolve, though, manufacturing again required highly skilled workers who could work in the increasingly automated plants.   This pattern captures an important dynamic in the economy that promoted the spread of mass schooling not just in the United States, but everywhere. While education had largely been provided through apprenticeships and passing down skills through families, this system began to break down as many of those trades were automated. Instead, general schooling more akin to the schools we see today became the norm and apprenticeships fell out of favor.   In turn, those skills allowed workers to better work with technology and be even more productive. This was true for blue-collar workers who used heavy machinery as much as it was for the growth in white-collar jobs that required literacy, numeracy, and the ability to work with new office technologies.   Schooling came to be seen as the primary institution through which young people could gain the proper training for these higher-skilled positions, and so a rapid increase in schooling came on the heels of rapid technological change.   At the same time, the egalitarian nature of mass schooling coupled with more labor market opportunity outside the home spurred a whole new set of workers. Women took on jobs in manual labor and also white-collar jobs as they gained higher levels of education and the need for office workers increased. Schooling and work for women changed the structure of families and households, so that schools have become increasingly relied upon as child rearing services, further increasing the demand for mass schooling.   Fostering nationalism in the classroom   In addition to the drive for higher-order skills in the labor market, mass schooling was also seen as an important political tool in cultivating citizens identification with the nation-state in which they happened to find themselves. The philosopher Benedict Anderson described this kind of connection to the nation as an “imagined community,” a community in which the members will never meet each other but nevertheless have a “deep, horizontal comradeship” based on shared values and their nation.   Schooling has long been used to build these communities to strengthen a nation’s power. It’s no coincidence that surges in the spread of mass schooling often followed significant military defeats, when governments most needed citizens to be united.   Particularly for newly independent countries in the post-World War II era, this was a very strong driving factor in the global expansion of mass education along with a desire to appear more modern. In one study, an analysis of enrollment data before and after 1940 found that the enrollment spike in the post-war period came primarily from former colonies driven to establish a national identity and be seen as part of the modern world. This was a much more significant predictor of increased enrollment than any country’s economic conditions, urbanization, race, or religion.   The universal right to an education   One of the most important forces driving mass schooling remains the social movement around universal human rights. The notion of rights dates back centuries, but the concept of rights universally enjoyed by all people—regardless of sex, color, ability, or caste—was both profound and catalytic and only really took root in the mid-1900s.   In 1948, following the devastation and atrocities of two world wars, all the countries in the world came together under the auspices of the newly minted United Nations and articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a set of rights and duties for all people. This included the right to education, an education that is to be free and compulsory at the elementary levels and “directed to the full development of the human personality."   This right to education was further elaborated in the second half of the 20th century in subsequent human rights treaties, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, and globally agreed upon goals for education, most notably the Education for All and Millennium Development goals in 1990 and 2000, respectively.   The right to education movement helped to profoundly change expectations around schooling in societies around the world. No longer would young people, parents, and community leaders be satisfied with policies that specifically aimed to educate a small section of society. It was now expected that all children, no matter who or where they lived, should have the chance to go to school. This new set of social norms was a crucial driver of the surge of enrollments after the mid-1900s, particularly in the developing world.   The 100-year gap: A tale of schooling inequality   Hidden within the data on the rise of schooling as the pervasive global form of education for young people is a story of deep inequality. Throughout history there has been an approximately 100-year gap between schooling opportunities and outcomes for young people in the developed and the developing world.   In some ways, this is understandable as mass schooling historically emerged first in Europe and North America and then spread across the globe. However, given the technological social advancements of the 21st century, it is simply not morally acceptable that this gap continues to exist today.   Examining a range of global data sources, it is clear that the 100-year gap persists today, particularly for children in the world’s poorest countries. And perhaps most worrisome, it is not projected to close in the future if we continue with the same education policies and approaches that we are using today. We trace this gap over time using data on children''s enrollment in school, the number of years of school adults have completed, and children''s learning outcomes on literacy, numeracy, and science.   While these indicators are important, we also acknowledge that they might not be the most important indicators of how successful education systems are. We know that the goals of education systems are much broader than simply increasing the volume of those attending school, and we know that there are skills and competencies like problem-solving and perseverance that may be just as important as literacy and numeracy.   Unfortunately, we don’t have very good measures to be able to assess how well schools are serving their students in these regards, so we have chosen the best indicators that are available.   Developed versus developing countries   Throughout this essay we refer broadly to developed versus developing countries. While there are many other possible classifications to use, we chose this ultimately for simplicity. To compare schooling data over time, we chose to use the broad definition of “developed” and “developing” regions classified by the United Nations. By this definition, developed regions include Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, which in historical studies are often termed “Europe and its offshoots,” while “developing regions” are essentially the remainder of the world—Latin America, Asia, and Africa.   We also break down the data when possible into smaller regions to show how widely varied educational progress has been, and how the gap may actually be more than 100 years when we look at countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia.   The U.N. developing regions classification is not perfect, but comparing countries over long stretches of time provides a number of complications. Presently, researchers and policymakers are more likely to use World Bank classifications of high-, middle-, or low-income countries that use per-capita income to determine the development level of a country. This classification would significantly complicate calculations over time because a country’s income level can change and shift it into a new category, and the income level definitions can also change over time. This means that in the U.N. classifications many of the countries in developing regions are actually no longer developing and have reached high-income status, but historically were less developed than Europe and North America.   In any case, this means some of the comparisons here may be conservative and actually underestimate the 100-year gap, given that “developing regions” does not comprise only the poorest countries today.   The gap in enrolling children in school: The historic lag of mass education   In many ways it is not surprising that there is a 100-year gap between developing and developed regions’ education systems, because historically the mass education movement blossomed in Europe and North America in the mid-1800s but it was not until the mid-1900s that it began to spread widely across most of the developing world. In Europe, “many schooling systems … were solidly in place by 1870,” while in developing regions mass schooling was largely a post-World War II phenomenon. This can be shown by looking at some key dates in the establishment of mass schooling.   The same historic lag we see in compulsory schooling legislation can be expressed in terms of primary school enrollment rates. Looking at historic data on gross enrollment, shows that children in developed regions were beginning to enroll in school in large numbers as early as 1870. Enrollment was just over 60 percent in northern Europe and its offshoots, including the United States, Canada, and Australia, while in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) enrollment was just 3 percent.   Taking 60 percent as the threshold from developed region enrollments in 1870, a century later some developing countries in Latin America and Asia had surpassed this level, but sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region had not yet caught up, with rates of 50 and 55 percent respectively.   The data also suggest that developing regions have since caught up in terms of gross enrollment rates, although this figure doesn’t tell the full story as it looks at total enrollment rather than enrollment of the school-age population. For that, we can look at today’s net enrollment ratios and see that less than 80 percent of school-aged children are in school in sub-Saharan Africa. We know that North America and Western Europe were well past this level at least 40 years ago, even though we don’t have historic data on net enrollment.   Average number of years of school in the adult population   In addition to children''s enrollment in school, the 100-year gap can be seen in how many years of school adults complete on average. Often described as educational attainment, this measure can be thought of as the educational stock in a population, something businesses and economists in particular care about when thinking of the labor force in a country because it can signal how skilled the workforce is overall.   In 1870 the average adult in developed regions completed 2.8 years of education while the average adult in the developing regions finished half a year. As mass schooling expanded, it’s not surprising that the average adult increasingly attained more and more years of schooling. However, a significant gap still exists today —adults in the developed world have on average completed 12 years of schooling and those in the developing world about half of that, 6.5 years.   Notably, even with the major convergence of primary school enrollment across regions we have not seen convergence in educational attainment. This means that while large numbers of children are enrolling in school they are not completing school.   What is even more disturbing is that if we stick to business as usual, it will take another 65 years before developing regions reach the levels of education seen in developed countries today.   Today’s poorest countries will not reach that level until 2100, meaning 1.6 billion people will have to wait 85 years before attaining 12 years of school on average. In the meantime, schooling levels are expected to continue increasing in the developed world, albeit at a slower rate, meaning true convergence is far in the future.   The gap is even larger if you break it down by region. In the above calculations, “developing regions” includes Latin America, China, and Korea, whose progress has been much faster than the poorest regions.   Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are the two regions with the lowest education levels; in 2010, the average number of completed years of schooling was just under five. Looking back, we can see that Europe and its offshoots were already above this level 100 years before. Eastern Europe, Japan, and South Korea hit this level by 1950, and Latin America and China by 1980. The progress in Africa and South Asia has been far slower, and thus the gap between these regions and the most developed countries today is almost eight years.   It would be logical to think that these gaps will close themselves as time goes on. With sharp increases in primary school enrollment should come increased attainment, and as adults become more educated future generations will benefit. But the major issues holding back the least developed regions from catching up in school attainment are related to completion, not enrollment.   For example, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report estimates that at current rates, it won’t be until 2111 when we can expect that all children in sub-Saharan Africa will complete lower-secondary education—96 years from today. Low levels of secondary school enrollment will continue to keep the poorest countries from improving average levels of education.   * Access the full report via the link below. Visit the related web page
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