Sweeney, Global Unions Call for Stronger Stimulus Measures

by James Parks, Jun 23, 2009

Workers are the innocent victims of the worldwide economic crisis and their governments must take stronger actions to stimulate the global economy, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told the leaders of the world’s top economies today.

Governments should ensure that their recovery measures are big enough to maintain and protect jobs and provide social protections, Sweeney told the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) annual forum June 23-24 in Paris.

Sweeney, who chairs OECD’s Trade Union Advisory Council (TUAC), said the global union movement is “gravely concerned” that the fiscal stimulus packages the industrialized nations have enacted so far are “inadequate in size, imbalanced geographically, insufficiently focused on labor issues and are being implemented far too slowly.”

He called on the 30 nations making up the OECD to immediately add an extra annual stimulus of at least 1 percent of their gross domestic product for the next three years.

This morning, Sweeney and the union leaders in TUAC unveiled a program for global economic recovery that would maximize job creation and provide adequate social security and labor protection for the most vulnerable workers.

A key priority, they said, must be to keep people employed. Programs must be implemented to reduce the risk of unemployment and wage losses, as well as to provide income support. The TUAC also called for the OECD governments to:

• Invest in human capital development through education and training.
• Develop “green economy” investments that can shift the world economy on to a low-carbon growth path and create good jobs.
• Focus on groups most affected by the crisis and take steps to eliminate the gender pay gap.
• Extend collective bargaining and strengthen wage-setting institutions to establish a decent wage floor for workers.
• Expand unemployment benefit programs.
• Ensure full respect of national and international standards on workers’ rights regarding termination of employment.
• Address the problem of hazardous work, which is affecting increasing numbers of workers, particularly women.
• Ensure that employers take their fair share of the pension risk, strengthen existing guarantee schemes and reform pension fund investment regulation.

In his address, Sweeney said failure to take such strong actions could prolong the global recession.

The truth is that we are still in uncharted water and no one knows when the bottom of this recession will be found nor how vigorous the recovery will be. The depth and duration of the recession will be determined by how urgently governments can act together to promote recovery and build the foundation for a more sustainable, more fair and more environmentally responsible basis for global growth.

You can read Sweeney’s speech here.

The OECD provides a setting where governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practices and coordinate domestic and international economic policies. Its members include most of the European nations, along with the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea and Mexico.

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