Global Unions: Put Jobs First at G-20

by James Parks, Sep 22, 2009

At the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh this week, the world’s leaders need to focus on the urgent need to create millions of new jobs and reform the global financial and trading system.

More than 50 trade union leaders from around the world, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, will meet with the G-20 leaders to press the case for a coordinated global economic strategy to stimulate new jobs to ensure a real recovery. 

 With 59 million people expected to be unemployed worldwide by the end of the year, Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), says:  

Governments must do much more to arrest the plunge in jobs as tens of millions of people, especially young people and those in precarious jobs, find themselves facing a future without work. Coordinated global action to maintain and create jobs is required, and this has to start with the Pittsburgh Summit. Any talk of recovery has little meaning until people are getting back to work. 

In a Pittsburgh Declaration prepared for the G-20 summit, the ITUC and the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC) call for G-20 governments to spend at least 2 percent of their nation’s gross domestic product on addressing the crisis. Currently, most European nations are spending no more than 1 percent. The union declaration urges a coordinated international recovery and sustainable growth plan to create jobs.

In addition, the global unions propose new global governance measures and urge the G-20 to guarantee decent work and to support the International Labor Organization’s (ILO’s) Charter for Sustainable Economic Activity, which includes workers’ rights, employment and income opportunities, social protection and social security.

“The G-20 must move on several fronts, quickly and with determination,” says John Evans, general secretary of the TUAC.

Jobs must be the first priority, but action on jobs will be undermined without reforms of the financial system, action for development in particular in the poorest countries, and concrete steps to create green jobs and ensure a just transition to a low-carbon future.

The Pittsburgh Declaration also highlights the corrosive nature of the huge bonuses paid to executives of the institutions that caused the global financial crisis. In the United States the nine largest banks which received altogether about $175 billion in taxpayer-funded bailouts, in 2008 paid a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses, mostly to top executives. The declaration points out that the $33 billion is equal to the total debt of the world’s most heavily indebted countries, and could have covered the education needs in 68 of the world’s poorest countries for three years.

Ryder says the G-20 is an opportunity for the world’s leaders to show they care about what happens to workers:

Jobs and incomes must become the central focus for the global economy. Economic growth must be driven by productive investment and employment, rather than another bubble and bust cycle led by financial speculation. Even in the depths of this crisis, some bankers and company CEOs are setting new records for greed by paying themselves massive salaries and bonuses. The seeds of another crisis are already being sown, and political leaders need to do much more than just condemn this kind of behavior. They need to show the world that they are prepared to govern in the interests of all.

You can read the Pittsburgh Declaration here.

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