To participate in this Congress, entails for me and the Minister of Labour, Employment and Social Security of Argentina Dr. Carlos Alfonso Tomada, whom I represent, a profound gratitude both for your efficient and generous organisers, and for the members of the Congress, whom have allowed us to share both valuable and enriching experiences.

However, I need thank even more, the opportunity to get acquainted with the experience of the Chinese Popular Republic, with which I mean not only the drive of its productive, technological and scientific activities, but also very especially the theoretic process and the intellectual audacity, which undoubtedly preceded and now accompanies these surprising material achievements.

The implementation of a socialist market economy, implies a difficult exam for the daily management of such a complex process, and also, the firm decision to face an apparently utopian task, which undoubtedly the Chinese people will know how to realise. That is to say, a sober and dynamic society partly based on work, and partly on social justice, that overcomes models where production can only grow at the detriment of solidarity.

We have also had to adopt crucial decisions in my country regarding these matters as we have been the victims of the frustrating results of an agenda dominated during one decade by economic policies based on financial speculation and on the unavoidable aftermath of an unbearable indebtedness, the dismantlement of productive activities, unemployment, informality, exclusion and social rupture.

The promise of an unrestricted and unilateral opening of the economy that would spill over wealth increasing the quantity and quality of work, has leaded in reality to precarious labour conditions and to the lack of finance for the social security system, accelerating the process of not only the people’s degradation, but also that of public and private institutions based on solidarity principles.

Currently, my country has almost 35 million inhabitants, of which, 15 million constitute its economically active population, and 2 million are unemployed. Regarding the remaining 13 million, 10 million work in the private sector, 2 million in the public sector and 1 million participate in diverse Official Employment Programmes.

At the commencement of his mandate, our President Dr. Néstor Kirchner in his address to the Nation′s Parliament warned about this situation, saying: ′We want to recover the values of solidarity and social justice that shall allow us to change our current situation to move forward to the construction of a more equilibrated, more mature and fairer society. We are aware that the market organises economically, but does not articulate socially, we need that the State equalise where the market excludes and abandons′.

To achieve this, entails a redefinition of roles and values of the society on the whole, especially those relating to the essence and the function of the State, which has been converted during a decade to a minimal factor, more inclined to complicity than to justice and that we need recover in order for it to have, without oppressing private activity, the requisite agility to install equity at the core of economic development.

We need, in other words, shift from a speculative economy to a productive economy, substituting for a formula where employment is the principal and determining element of public policy instead of the eventual and ancillary result of financial variables.

This, implies a considerable institutional effort, to repair or substitute tools of social intervention that were dismantled and that we need rebuild endowing them with quality and efficiency.

In our case, departing from such a profound crisis that many had foreseen as terminal, we aim at active policies that would allow us to ensure economic growth with equity, develop the internal market, promote a salary policy that would gradually improve the distribution of wealth and forge a training and professional formation system that would restore lost aptitudes after years of unemployment.

Similarly, we endeavour as a priority to take care of the main victims of that process, which driven by exclusion end up as beneficiaries of assistance programmes, by paving the way for them to productive work and education.

We are not alone in these tasks, the countries of the region have experienced similar processes in different ways. In all of them, poverty, unemployment, lack of social protection and child exploitation increased. That is why, the governments have committed themselves to the integration of economic and social policies that would consider decent labour as an articulating axis of growth.

This concern took shape at the Buenos Aires Consensus, signed last September between our government and Brazil’s, at the Iberoamerican Summit of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and at the Conference of Monterrey. It was re-asserted in the Copacabana Act in March of the current year and very recently at the MERCOSUR Regional Employment Conference held in Buenos Aires on April 15 and 16, with the technical support of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

The Final Declaration of the Ministers of Labour of the MERCOSUR propose, among other things:

• The integration of State policies (macroeconomic, commercial, productive, relating to infrastructure, migration, education, social security) aimed at quality employment, evaluating its occupational impact and its consequences in the labour market.

• The promotion of specific policies for the development of productive networks or schemes whose expansion, densification, and increased competitiveness shall contribute to the growth of private investment and employment.

• The promotion of specific policies for the development of labour-intensive sectors.

• The promotion of specific programmes and policies for micro and small companies, extending effectively to the sector, technical assistance services, micro-credit, labour formation and inter-mediation.

• The reformulation of unemployment protection policies, pursuant to the criteria for labour re-insertion of unemployed workers and improvement of their employability conditions.

• The promotion of systems and services of quality professional formation, articulated with educational, employment and economic policies, increasing investments in professional formation, both through the public budget and the commitment of the private sector, aimed at promoting the productivity of companies and the employability of persons.

• The substantial reduction of the gender gap, promoting the diminution of the existing disparities between men and women in the labour world, and forging the co-ordination of equal opportunity policies and the combat of all forms of labour discrimination.

• The promotion and harmonisation of State policies with a view to the elimination of child employment in all its manifestations.

• The strengthening of the social dialogue in the regional block, in order to deepen the tripartite construction process of the social dimension that would commit the governmental and social actors to a development model with equity.