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Union leaders from around the world came together this week in Pittsburgh to lobby G20 leaders to take coordinated action to fight unemployment and end the business-a-usual practices that sewed the seeds of the global economic crisis.



The US trade union center AFL-CIO hosted the trade union summit in Pittsburgh and newly elected AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka gave his thoughts on the key role for the global union movement:



Obviously the key role and the key issues are jobs and the creation of jobs. Secondly it’s to make sure that the G20 countries realize that just because they are seeing some positive sign doesn’t mean they ought to cut off the stimulus. The danger of that is that they’ll slide right back into the recession. This recession won’t be over until we’re creating jobs and people are back at work.



The other thing, of course, is to change the economy. The economy that produced this mess is still looming out there and would love to come back. So we need new regulation worldwide we need a global transaction tax to make sure [the finance sector] contributes to the job creation that we need.



No one country can lead us out of the global recession. It’s going to take the coordination of all the G20 countries staying with this until jobs are created. We have a record number of people unemployed worldwide and that’s a tragedy because we do have the resources to employ them. We need to get them back to work.