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20 September, 2010
The conference held in Oslo, Norway, on 13 September by the ILO and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided rhetoric giving economic redress to the great financial crisis, but it must now be followed up with prompt action on job creation, according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
The conference, entitled “The Challenges of Growth, Employment and Social Cohesion,” produced plenty of well-intentioned talk toward developing policies that promote job-creating growth, but the ITUC – one of the participants at the conference – stressed the importance of the ILO and IMF acting jointly and immediately on a job-centred recovery to pull tens of millions of the world’s citizens from impoverished conditions.
“The ILO should be fully integrated into the G20’s Mutual Assessment Process,” stated ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow, adding that national policies must adopt progressive taxation, quality public service agendas, expanded collective bargaining and better workers’ protections, and respect for the world’s core labour standards.
ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow
She also said that it is crucial that wage increases keep pace with growing productivity in order to stop the income decline of working people.
“In the face of the persisting global employment deficit, the IMF should encourage countries, including those that borrow from the Fund, to adopt and maintain job-intensive stimulus policies until recovery is self-sustaining and unemployment is falling to pre-crisis levels,” said Burrow.
The IMF’s General Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was pointed in his remarks at the conference. “The labour market is in dire straits,” he said. “The Great Recession has left behind a wasteland of unemployment, and this devastation threatens the livelihood, security, and dignity of millions of people across the world.”
A joint ILO-IMF report said 30 million jobs had been lost due to the crisis, 75% of which occurred in developed nations. The IMF admitted that the percentage of workers laid off for long terms has grown with each economic downturn for decades, but that figures for such from the recent financial crisis have surged even more dramatically.
The Oslo conference, hosted by the Norwegian government, was attended by four heads of state – Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, Liberia President Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, and Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg – as well as seven national ministers and 25 trade union leaders.