28 January, 2009"The measured success of the policies adopted today will be in actions that will generate stable employment and encourage redistribution of wealth rather than a return to the volatility of markets and short-term profit-taking," argues IMF general secretary Marcello Malentacchi in his latest opinion column.
GENEVA: "The present crisis should be the wake-up call that forces the world to rethink our economic and social models," says IMF general secretary Marcello Malentacchi in his latest opinion column published today (January 28). "We need to reshape the agenda of economic and social organisation to give priority to more security for working people and to bring humanity and an ethic of solidarity into play," Malentacchi added.
"It is scandalous that it took only a couple of weeks for Governments in the rich parts of the world to collect more than 2,000,000,000,000 US$ (that's right, two thousand billion US dollars) to bail out banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions on the brink of bankruptcy when we know that ten years ago when the UN asked for a tenth of that amount to halve the poverty afflicting the world's poor hardly anyone moved a finger to collect that money," notes Malentacchi.
Malentacchi points out that the trade union movement has a great role to play in overcoming the current global economic crisis, "through collective bargaining we can begin to renew the dialogue that leads to fairness, reward and justice for the people who have been forgotten in the rush to shore-up the creaking apparatus of globalisation," Malentacchi says, adding to make sure that "the right to organise and the right to bargaining are the foundation stones of a new economic and social structure that will provide us with the means to ensure that we are never again held hostage by slick and shady global marketers."