Introduction

This chapter looks outwards from the ILO and asks and demonstrates how the SPF became a rallying point for the struggle for global social policy synergy, that is, for the struggle to try to ensure that all UN agencies, including the World Bank and the IMF, sung from the same songbook and lined up behind tackling the shortcomings of marketdriven globalisation with a plan to construct a social floor under the global economy. It shows how the ILO influenced the UN initially through UNCEB; how it influenced the G8 and then the G20 under the French presidency of 2011; and how as a consequence it came to be able to try to influence the World Bank and the IMF. It ends by explaining how the ILO was able to play a major role, alongside UNICEF and the UNDP, in ‘almost’ bringing it all together in the form of a new UN Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B).

In the period of intense activity inside the ILO, described in the last chapter, between June 2011 after the ILC had decided that the ILO would promulgate an SPF Recommendation and the appearance of the first draft formulation of the SPF as a Recommendation to the ILC sent out in March 2012, the ILO was also busily selling the idea of the SPF outside to the world in the form of the Bachelet Report published in July 2011 (ILO, 2011d) and in interventions in the G20 in the run-up to the Cannes summit of November 2011. A division of labour in effect emerged between Michael Cichon, head of social security, who had all the eyes of his Department focused on drafting the Recommendation and subsequently on how countries were responding to the draft, and Vinicius Pinheiro, the social security advisor in the director-generals Cabinet who, reflecting the preoccupations of the director-general, had all his eyes looking out to the UN, to an upcoming meeting of UNCEB and to Cannes and the G20 process.

The story of the development of the SPF is, as I suggested earlier, at least two stories each with many stages.