As political leaders of the world’s 20 major economies – the G20 – meet in Pittsburgh this week, the global labor movement has one word of advice: jobs.
Combating the expected continued rise in worldwide unemployment is crucial not only for humanitarian reasons, but also to assure that the small signs of recovery resulting from government stimulus programs turn into self-sustaining economic and employment growth.
“What has changed from recent summits is, there’s more emphasis on jobs as a key factor,” says John Evans, general secretary of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (TUAC).
Along with the International Trade Union Confederation and the Global Unions federation, TUAC will present its “Pittsburgh Declaration” to the G20.
Governments must continue stimulus programs to avoid hardship and guarantee recovery, unions insist, and G20 labor ministers, unions and business should meet to give higher priority to job creation policies.
Workers must not pay for the crisis they didn’t cause or for the stimulus programs through regressive taxes or public austerity and service cuts, the unions say. Instead, there should be a global tax on financial transactions to help finance recovery, an idea recently supported by top government finance officials in Germany and Britain.
“It’s the issue of who pays for the crisis,” Evans says.
But global labor also wants to make sure there’s no return to business as usual. First, that means re-regulating the financial sector – cleaning up insolvent banks, capping executive pay and bonuses, and progressively reforming taxes.
More fundamentally, it means developing a new, more balanced model for global and national economic growth that addresses the “underlying causes” of the crisis “in fundamental economic and governance imbalances that are the direct result of three decades of neo-liberal economic policies, with the effect that the fruits of growth have not been distributed to workers.”
Re-balancing the global economy involves more development aid without straight-jacket conditions, aggressive action on climate change and green jobs (with provisions for a “just transition” for affected workers), and more balanced trade.
But policies to reduce trade deficits in countries like the U.S. should lead to a higher, not a lower, standard of living for workers everywhere, Evans says.
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David Moberg, a former senior editor of In These Times, was on staff with the magazine from when it began publishing in 1976 until his passing in July 2022. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.
