Labor & Employment Law

Global Union Leaders: G-20 Need to Focus on Jobs

By James Parks

More than 100,000 people marched in Brussels, Belgium, last month to demand a priority on creating jobs.

The finance ministers of the world?s top 20 economies (G-20) should stop catering to the same banks and financiers who caused the global economic crisis and start focusing on the millions of people who are still losing their jobs and suffering from cuts to public services, global union leaders said yesterday.

The world economy is not out of the woods yet, and the cuts in public expenditure being announced by many of the G-20 countries have made the risk of a deeper recession more likely, said International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) General Secretary Sharan Burrow.  

The finance ministers, who met in South Korea over the weekend, showed no evidence of governments working together, except to reinforce their apparent determination to achieve ?fiscal consolidation? to appease the financial markets, Burrow added.

?The interests of working people must be at the heart of planning the recovery,? said John Evans, general secretary of the OECD Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC).

The G-20 should be establishing a broad-based task force on jobs that includes all social partners instead of developing a cozy relationship with business elites that gives them a fast track to press for more of the labor market deregulation that led to the rising inequality before the crisis.

Last June, G-20 union leaders called on their governments to keep in place stimulus measures that focus on jobs and growth and support measures that put jobs based on decent work at the center of the post-crisis policy. A top-level international delegation of trade union leaders will press those same issues in meetings with G-20 leaders at their Summit in Seoul next month.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on October 26, 2010 (boomark / email).