Today, I attended this conference, “Employment and Decent Work for Inclusive and Sustainable Development”. A little nugget and perhaps an obvious revelation came midway through the conference.

Mogens Jensen, Demark’s Minister for Trade and Development Cooperation, was speaking on the second panel. He made what seems to be such an obvious point forgotten by virtually the entire world of talking heads, politicians and all the others who talk scratch their heads trying to figure out how to improve economic growth:

You can have high labor standards, high wages and at the same time have economic growth.

He also said the obvious: there is no use creating jobs that wear people down because, then, you expend resources in the health sector trying to repair broken people.

At first, it was a breathe of fresh air coming from a government minister. And it all made sense when I chatted with the Minister briefly after the session. He said, with pride, that long before he was a Minister he was a union leader for 13 years.

Aha! You mean, he got to speak the truth.