“Focusing on transitioning workers from fossil fuel jobs, a largely male dominated sector, is not sufficient for a just transition” said Mills. "We need to take a close look at how the labour market is structured as well as the changing climate we are working in. 

The only thing to do [..], is to put more value on care and more value on a transformative and equitable just transition.

 We need governments to continue to focus on how we achieve a human sensitive approach in terms of care and in terms of investments in care, in public health care and in social care.  The only thing to do as we merge from Covid and the pandemic, is to put more value on care and more value on a transformative and equitable just transition. Governments must take a long-term view to figure out a more ambitious and expansive plan of action with a broader application in terms of revaluing women’s work, putting care centre stage and producing the social transformation of care that should have a real impact for women in equal access to opportunities and to decision making.

Governments need to have the resources to make those transformational changes and put in place those solutions, so we are demanding the realization of the commitments that were made at the Generation Equality Forums in 2021, where members States committed to investing in care to achieve SDG targets by 2026 in terms of the creation of millions of decent well paid care jobs.

This must happen now. We want to see the money coming forward, we must  see investments in human care, human welfare, human wellbeing, and public social care systems.  We cannot wait and we are not expecting this to be done on the cheap. It cannot be done by exploiting the more vulnerable and marginalised groups in our society, in particular women.

We want to see new priorities that will build our public and social care systems and accelerate action to ensure that we have resilient, sustainable and robust healthcare and public care systems. 

To achieve this we need decent jobs for women. We do NOT need precarious jobs. We need decent, sustainable, well-paid jobs with pensions based on equal pay for work of equal value.

We must call on the UN Secretary General to stand by his commitment and push governments to create the 400 million new green and care jobs needed by 2030.

Finally there is a need to extend social protection floors, but we also need to have the funds to be able to achieve, this can only be done  by protecting ILO international labour standards, the guarantee of the universal adequate compliancy to social protection systems that we are fighting for."