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Global unions are backing a proposal that would levy a small tax on financial transactions on a global level to provide resources for public spending or finance development and pay for any further clean-up of the industry.



The tax proposal would raise billions of dollars by imposing a tax of half of 1 percent of the value of any financial transaction. The unions are proposing this tax at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh this week.



This “Financial Added Tax,” or FAT, would add social utility to the trillions of dollars in financial transactions taking place around the world. The tax would help pay for any further bailouts or clean-up of the finance industry. This way the world’s workers will not be paying again for the mistakes of finance companies.



“We are calling this the ‘FAT’ tax,” said UNI Global Union General Secretary Philip Jennings, “because it would trim some of the fat profits that the finance industry reaps from the trillions of dollars of global transactions it is involved in. Compared to the fees the industry takes on deals, this is an extremely modest tax.”



The union leaders from around the world are pushing for an overhaul of the Financial Stability Board, or FSB, which is the group of central bankers tasked with overseeing global financial stability. Despite its failure to prevent the global financial crisis the FSB is still in charge of the recovery and they have provided a very small amount of information about their meetings and their work, cloaking almost all of their proceedings in secrecy.



“The FSB is not the ‘financial stability board,’ it’s the ‘financial secrecy board,’” Jennings said.



The global trade union movement is calling on the FSB to open up fully to public scrutiny with formal consultation processes, publication of documents for comment and other basic democratic institutional governance.



Union leaders from around the world are in Pittsburgh to meet with the leaders of the world’s biggest economies who are gathering for the G20 Summit. The trade union leaders will push for major reform in global economic policy and job creation policies.



The Trade Union G20 Pittsburgh Summit on the Global and Economic and Financial Crisis began yesterday and continues today. At the meeting, trade union leaders are discussing their global response to the crisis and meeting with their heads of state as well as other political, trade and banking groups to push for real reforms that benefit workers.