-     Developing and adopting social indicators should result from a transparent process that engages all stakeholders, including developing countries, which could benefit from the use of indicators as a means of addressing poverty issues. Workers and trade unions must be part of such a process to ensure that there is confidence and acceptance of adopted indicators as well as the eventual trade-offs they might imply;

-     No single approach to defining social indicators appears to be adequate in terms of ensuring that issues like health, education, freedoms, real incomes, equity or social cohesion get properly addressed and measured.  Developing proper “frameworks” for social indicators would be useful, in terms of rendering indicators more understandable and meaningful to the day-to-day reality of workers and trade unions. Such frameworks might incorporate principles for integrating social indicators with economic and environmental indicators, harmonizing methods and pointing to useful tools, such as peer reviews and social  impact assessments, to measure and report on the progress for implementing the social dimension;

-     Social indicators must be made to work in concert with the regulatory process and must not serve to undermine or replace government roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, their uses must not serve to disguise ‘business-as-usual’ sceneria. The OECD’s definition of “openness to imports” and “private retirement income” as the only two social indicators within its country peer review process was considered of extremely limited value in terms of the overall need to implement the social dimension;

-     Social indicators must be clearly understood as a means to an end and of their role with respect to the notions of human and social capital as they relate to the interaction of the three pillars of sustainable development. It is also necessary to identify how aggregation / dis-aggregation exercises affect the measurement of factors relating to gender, vulnerable groups and of the maintenance of social standards.  Trade-offs must be made in transparent ways;

-     Developing “single issue” indicators may appear useful as a starting point but their limitations must be well understood prior to using them as a tool for implementing the sustainable development social dimension. As well, these must be made to interact in acceptable ways with the current work of several countries and intergovernmental bodies relating to “headline indicators” and “performance indicators”;

-     Stakeholders must accept the challenge of developing social indicators which could apply to promoting corporate accountability. Trade unions need to be involved fully in the GRI process and in the implementation of the OECD Guidelines on Multinations;

-     The continuing work of OECD to develop indicators must be promoted and it must be encouraged to cooperate in this endeavor with other intergovernmental bodies (like ILO, UNEP, CSD, UNDP and the UN Statistical Commission) already doing work in this area, and to jointly seek common and mutually supportive sets of indicators;

-     Social cohesion, governance and institutional issues appear to point to the need for a set of social indicators, which incorporate industrial relations, collective bargaining, and core labour standards and such indicators must be made to work within the context of labour law.