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Today Is World Day for Decent Work |
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Today is World Day for Decent Work, and union members in more than 100 countries are mobilizing to address the global economic and employment crisis and demand fundamental reform of the world economy.
The deepest global recession since the 1930s has led to a jobs crisis with millions of people out of work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) predicts that as many as 50 million more workers could be kicked out of jobs worldwide in the next year and could lead to a dramatic increase in the number of working poor.
Live online coverage of the activities around the world, including videos, photographs and messages from events in every continent, will be broadcast on a special website, www.wddw.org, which will be updated via a 24-hour live feed.
At its recent convention, the AFL-CIO strongly underscored its support for decent work for workers in the United States and around the world by unanimously passing a major resolution, “A Labor Movement Agenda for a Stronger, Cleaner and More Just Global Economy.” The resolution stressed the need for the global labor movement to promote the ILO’s Global Jobs Pact to help coordinate government efforts to respond to the employment crisis.
Following the convention, the newly elected AFL-CIO leadership traveled to meet with working families around the country, leading up to the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. At the G-20, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) General Secretary Guy Ryder, along with other international trade union leaders, met with President Obama. They stressed the elements of the June 2009 ILO “Jobs Pact” and the importance of enacting coordinated policies to create decent and environmentally sustainable work to combat growing unemployment, enact comprehensive and effective regulation of financial markets and promote the inclusion of key international labor standards in all assistance programs of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
The economic crisis is far from over and the global stimulus packages will not be enough to keep joblessness from growing at a steady pace, according to a new report by the ITUC. The report, “Jobs—The Path to Recovery,” was released to mark World Day for Decent Work. It shows that only 1.8 percent of financial rescue efforts have been dedicated directly to employment.
The report highlights trade union actions to fight the crisis around the world and explains the steps needed to achieve a decent work-led recovery and build a fairer and more sustainable world economy for future generations.
The G-20 summit, which ended recently in Pittsburgh, made progress in some areas but failed to completely address the overwhelming need to create new jobs now. “The current situation needs mending,” says Ryder:
Trade unions are raising their voices across the continents, to keep up the pressure for fundamental change, for justice and equity.
They face tremendous resistance from those who have profited from the exploitation of others in the past. Trade unions are determined to confront and defeat that resistance, and to ensure that governments everywhere get the message that they must deliver the results that working people demand.
Click here to read the full report, “The Path to Recovery: How Employment is Central to Ending the Global Crisis.”
Nowhere is the need for decent work more obvious than in the sweatshops of Asia, where workers toil long hours for little pay and few, if any, benefits to make apparel and other items for export that they could never afford to buy themselves.
Today, in New Delhi, India, and in cities in the United States, United Kingdom and throughout Europe, workers will launch a campaign for a living wage called the Asia Floor Wage.
In rallies, workshops, meetings with government and business leaders, public lectures by prominent human rights supporters and press conferences, they will promote a new strategy for global economic growth based on protecting workers’ rights and guaranteeing a living wage.
With so many of the world’s garments and other products being manufactured in Asia, corporations have exploited the workers there, forcing them to work long hours with little pay and few benefits. The campaign challenges this race-to-the-bottom by calling for raising the minimum wage in all major garment producing countries.
In the United States, Jobs with Justice is teaming up with the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), the Asia Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) and the AFL-CIO for an educational campaign with our members and allies.
To learn more about the Asia Floor Wage campaign, click here.
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Chris Nyland wrote the following in 1986:
“Traditionally worktime has become a major political and economic issue at times of high unemployment. During periods of economic crisis the labour movement invariably puts forward the argument that standard times should be reduced to spread the available work amongst as many individuals as possible. [emphasis added]”
Nyland predicted that demands from organized labor would intensify as decay of the capitalist economies proceeded. As we now know, that didn’t happen. Nyland was right that previously worktime had become a major issue during times of high unemployment. He was almost right that the argument was “invariably” put forward by unions. “Usually” would have been a more judicious word. But his extrapolation from past experience that demands would intensify was falsified by the course of events — at least in North America and in other English-speaking countries. The question is “why?”
There are any number of facile answers to that question. The Sandwichman has heard them all. But there are no well thought out answers forthcoming — most conspicuously from organized labor itself. My two candidates for possible explanations come from Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Virno.
The Marcuse excuse would be that the balance between work and leisure have reached a tipping point where any substantial increase in leisure would move work out of its privileged central role in everyday life. This is something “the authorities” cannot and will not tolerate.
The Virno gloss proceeds from the observation that the boundaries between work and non-work have become permeable and imprecise and thus leisure, work and unemployment cease to appear as clear-cut contraries or alternatives. For example, why should those who are paid for “leisurely” work (that is to say knowledge work with a high social content) seek to exchange it for more “arduous free time” (isolation and amusing-ourselves-to-death entertainment)?
What those two explanations have in common, I suppose, is the notion that a great deal of the paid work that is done today is superfluous, “treadmill” work. This is not to say that it is superfluous to the individuals who have to perform it and rely on income from it. On the contrary, the objective nonnecessity of much work makes it all the more subjectively precious. Because… the wolf of unemployment lurks just outside the cubicle. The nonessential thus presents itself as a “matter of life or death.”
Under the existing capitalist economy, capitalist profit and wealth accumulation takes priority over meeting the dire economic needs of working people.
Here below is a socialist perspective to end global capitalism and transition to a socialist economy.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/jobs-o07.shtml
Obama offers no relief to growing army of jobless workers
By Jerry White
7 October 2009
In the face of the mounting unemployment crisis, the Obama administration has no plans to offer serious relief to the 15 million workers out of work and the millions more facing job losses and economic ruin in the coming months.
Despite official claims that the economy is recovering, the Labor Department reported last week that a higher-than-expected 263,000 workers lost their jobs in September, with another 571,000 workers dropping out of the labor force after giving up looking for work.
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The administration has rejected out of hand the only means to provide immediate employment for jobless workers—a large-scale federally funded public works program. Obama has continually insisted that the private sector, not the government, is the “engine for economic growth.”
At the same time, he has awarded the private sector “engine” trillions of dollars in government bailouts, while insisting that the resulting explosion in the budget deficit be reversed by drastically cutting social spending.
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The defense of jobs and living standards is the task of the working class itself. If workers are to prevent their destitution, they must take the initiative to launch a struggle against plant closings, mass layoffs and the wiping out of public service jobs.
Work place occupations, mass strikes and demonstrations should be launched independently of and in opposition to the trade union apparatus. Such actions must be the beginning of a political movement to unite workers in the US and internationally to put the major industries and banks under the public and democratic ownership of working people.
There are pressing social needs that must be addressed—new schools, hospitals, housing—and millions of unemployed workers ready and able to meet them. The argument that there is no money to put the unemployed to work is belied by the trillions the administration has spent to bail out the banks and continue the colonial wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan.
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