Held in January 1997 at the ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the three-day Symposium on Multimedia Convergence intended to discuss the social and labor issues arising from this process. The industry-centred debates focused on three main concerns: (a) the information society: what it means for governments, employers and workers; (b) the convergence process: its impact on employment and work; and (c) labor relations in the information age. The purpose of these debates was "to stimulate reflection on the policies and approaches most apt to prepare our societies and especially our workforces for the turbulent transition towards an information economy." One of the participants, Peter Leisink, an associate professor of labor studies at the Utrecht University, Netherlands, explained: "A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry showed that proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as home-based teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment, not as a first- choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations and redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized workers, rather than as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend on only one publishing house for their work." Wilfred Kiboro, managing director of Nation Printers and Publishers, Kenya, made the following comments: "In content creation in the multimedia environment, it is very difficult to know who the journalist is, who the editor is, and who the technologist is that will bring it all together. At what point will telecom workers become involved as well as the people in television and other entities that come to create new products? Traditionally in the print media, for instance, we had printers, journalists, sales and marketing staff and so on, but now all of them are working on one floor from one desk." Formerly, the production staff was keying in the articles, and not the editorial staff. Journalists and editors could now type in their articles online, and these articles went directly from text to layout. In book publishing, digitization speeded up the editorial process, which used to be sequential, by allowing the copy editor, the image editor and the layout staff to work at the same time on the same book. Michel Muller, secretary-general of the French Federation of Book, Paper and Communication Industry (Fédération des industries du livre, du papier et de la communication), stated that, in France, jobs in this industry fell from 110,000 to 90,000 in the last decade (1987-1996), with expensive social plans to re-train and re-employ the 20,000 people who lost their jobs.