Davos: Financial wreckage everywhere
Watch 3 minute YouTube video of UNI's General Secretary addressing the issue of Workers' Rights during Davos events
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzLxx_0-Ns0
Philip Jennings, UNI General Secretary, speaking at the Global Union press conference in Davos, observed that the Davos Forum has gone from the delirium of 2007 to the doldrums of 2008.
He went on the say that having been led to believe that the strongest link in our global economy was the globalisation of financial markets and instruments, it turns out that financialisation has become the global economy’s weakest link. We see financial wreckage everywhere and the drama is still not fully played out.
A toxic cloud from Wall Street has landed on Main Street and has hit jobs, wages and pensions.
We have precarious financial markets on top of precarious labour markets. Five out of every ten workers in the world labour market are employed in vulnerable jobs.
The Davos participants talk about the economic recovery in the United States since the year 2000. For workers, it has been the recovery that never was and American workers are even worse off.
Jennings launched two appeals to the Forum participants: Governments have to get a grip on the global economy and financial markets. They have to learn the lessons of the financial collapse that we’ve seen since 2007. The regulatory holiday has to end. Central bankers have been asleep at the wheel and left financial players to their own devices. We are all paying a heavy price for this abandonment of responsibility.
We have to retool the regulatory system. There are new and powerful actors - hedge funds, private equity and the growing sovereign wealth funds. They should all come under the regulatory microscope. In 2007 the Global Unions put private equity under the spotlight. We will do likewise with sovereign wealth funds, he said.
His second appeal was for serious efforts to be made to bridge the growing inequality gap. The top hedge fund managers now earn in ten minutes the annual salary of an average worker in the United States. American CEOs now earn 364 times the annual salary of an average worker.
Jennings expressed his anger at the European Central Bank President Trichet and called on his to stop his attack on fair wages.
Referring to the stimulus package proposed by George Bush, Jennings commented that Bush had taken very good care of his friends at the top, with little consideration for the little guy. The little guy now needs urgent help. The biggest bang for the buck will only come if the stimulus package makes a difference to the struggling American workers.