A/HRC/35/26 as basic State functions, such as prisons, education and security. In some States, even the justice system has been partly privatized, whether through onerous court fees for the poor or the channelling of consumer and other complaints into private arbitration. 5. For its part, the human rights community has had all too little to offer in response to the profound challenges associated with deep economic insecurity. The human rights to an adequate standard of living, to work and to social security have been very low on the list of priorities of the major human rights groups and of the principal international and regional human rights organizations, with the exception of the International Labour Organization (ILO). The reasons for this include long-standing arguments that economic issues belong on the agenda of economic rather than human rights bodies, a perception that human rights specialists are not qualified to engage with issues that are presented as technical matters of economic policy, a preference to avoid addressing issues involving redistribution of income or expenditure from a human rights perspective, and the assumption that if civil and political rights are protected, respect for economic and social rights will automatically follow. 6. A related problem in the context of the Human Rights Council is the “siloing” of issues, whereby food, health, education, water, and other rights concerns are dealt with in separate silos that stand side by side but are rarely integrated. The Council debates the reports of the individual special procedures mandate holders sequentially and each mandate holder focuses on one particular piece of a large jigsaw puzzle. But there is rarely an occasion to examine the overall picture. 7. There is a strong risk that when confronted with the challenge of addressing economic insecurity the human rights system will proceed in zombie mode. It will keep marching straight ahead on the path mapped out long ago, even as the lifeblood drains out of the enterprise. Its supervisory and monitoring organs will address themselves ever more insistently to State actors that have made themselves marginal, and they will continue to demand respect for standards that have long since been overtaken by the grim realities of global supply chains. For the most part, the human rights machinery is cumbersome, lacking in agility, and poorly placed to develop new thinking in such contexts. But it will need to do so if it is to remain relevant. 8. The present report is premised on the view that the human rights movement needs to address and respond to the fundamental changes that are taking place in economic and social structures at the national and global levels. These include, among others: (a) The increasingly precarious nature of employment in the age of Uber, Airbnb, outsourcing, subcontracting, zero-hours contracts and the like; (b) The fact that traditional forms of labour market regulation are becoming ever less relevant to the emerging economy, and that an insistence on their continuing normative validity, however strongly justified, is increasingly impotent in the face of the evolution of global supply chains and other developments based on worker insecurity; (c) The likelihood that vast swathes of the existing workforce will be made redundant by increasing automation and robotization, accompanied by the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the technology elites and the owners of capital; (d) The rapid and seemingly unstoppable growth in inequality across the globe, captured by Oxfam’s statistic that the richest 1 per cent of humanity already controls as much wealth as the remaining 99 per cent,5 and by the detailed national-level economic analyses of Thomas Piketty and others;6 (e) The ascent of a new neoliberal agenda, which involves further fetishization of low tax rates, demonization of the administrative State, deregulation as a matter of 5 6 Oxfam, “An economy for the 99%”, briefing paper, January 2017. Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Distributional national accounts: methods and estimates for the United States”, National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series, Working Paper No. 22945 (2016). 5