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ILO Director General Guy Ryder called on unions to grow and to fight inequality during a speech at the UNI World Congress in Cape Town.

In front of a packed Congress hall, Ryder backed UNI’s Including You push for an inclusive economy.

“Today, the struggle for social justice, for fairness at work, for decent jobs still requires that we show that same perseverance and the same determination to include everybody. And that is the challenge UNI picks up by “Including You” in the movement and in the world of work we want to create.

“With more than 200 million people unemployed around the world, many more under employed or working informally, with the global economy struggling still to emerge from the cataclysm of the financial crisis, the challenges are formidable.”

Last week, the ILO published its Global Wage Report which showed that real wage growth continues to slow and productivity is still outstripping wages so that more of the income in our countries goes to profits and less to workers.

“And that is why our societies have reached alarming levels of inequality. Yet even historically high levels of profit are not kick-starting the investment need for growth and jobs. The demand is not there,” Ryder said.

Ryder echoed the labour movement’s mantra “the world needs a pay rise,” and called on G20 leaders to make growth and quality jobs their highest priority.

Unions can play their role, Ryder said, by working to strengthen bargaining power. “We know that too often conditions have continued to erode membership – globalization, technology, politics, structural transformation of the economy – but that only reinforces the imperative of the organizing agenda that the ITUC has put at the centre of its work.”

You can Livestream the Congress at www.uniworldcongress.org and join in the conversation on social media by using #UNI2014