ITUC press release – 31 March 2009

Trade union leaders from around the world are converging on London this week to press their case at the G20 Summit on the global economic crisis. Meetings with the Summit host British Prime Minster Gordon Brown today (Tuesday) and Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd on Wednesday will round off dozens of similar meetings with heads of governments, organised by national union leaders in their home countries since the beginning of last week.

Summit-eve discussions with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck took place on Monday.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) is urging the G20 to take strong and concerted action to turn the global economy around and avoid future crises, pushing a package of detailed measures spelt out in their London Declaration, drawn up by the ITUC and the OECD Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC). The package calls for action in five main areas:

* a coordinated international recovery and sustainable growth plan to create jobs, ensure public investment and tackle world poverty,
* help for insolvent banks and new financial regulations;
* action to combat the risk of wage deflation and reverse decades of increasing inequality;
* far-reaching action on climate change; and,
* a new system of global economic governance, involving reform of the global financial and economic institutions (International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and World Trade Organization (WTO)), and a central role for the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

Meetings with IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and WTO Director General Pascal Lamy will also be held in London, while talks with ILO Director General Juan Somavia, OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria and labour ministers from the G8/G14 countries took place in Rome at the weekend.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘The world’s unions are united. We are all calling for a bigger fiscal stimulus through a green new deal, a tough new regulatory system to stop finance threatening global stability ever again and action against inequality both within and between countries.’

ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder said: ‘We are covering every possible base in alerting world leaders to the depth of anger and frustration felt by working people everywhere at the complete failure of unregulated capitalism.

‘People are paying for this disastrous failure of governance with their jobs and livelihoods, and nothing less than a complete overhaul of the system can meet the urgent needs of this moment.

‘However, we are deeply worried that G20 governments are not yet ready to show the necessary leadership. Every moment they delay taking the far-reaching decisions needed means more jobs lost and more people falling into poverty.’

Tens of thousands of demonstrators braved cold and wet weather for the Put People First march and rally on the streets of London at the weekend, in a broad civil society demonstration addressed by ITUC President Sharan Burrow and co-organised by the TUC, which is coordinating the series of London meetings this week with the ITUC. Some 70 national and international union leaders will attend the London meetings.

March 31st, 2009 TUC