Unequal growth path dehumanises workers
Tens of thousands of people around the world are taking to the streets today to mark May 1. What else is new? Well, plenty. The continuing economic crisis is hitting workers hardest. It also highlights how policies of the past decades have downgraded the meaning of decent work.
The current growth model considers work a production cost that must be as low as possible in order to raise competitiveness and profits. Workers are seen as being consumers of all sorts of loans, rather than as having a legitimate share through wages in the wealth they help create. Certainly, capital has the upper hand.
Yet, work is a source of personal dignity, family stability, peace in the community and credibility for democratic governance. Labour is not a commodity.
So, this is no ordinary May 1. It comes at a time when deep-rooted interests are pushing to go back to business as usual, arguing that this is just another crisis that can be resolved applying the same old solutions. It is not.
This trend is especially visible in advanced economies and particularly in the euro zone, where policies that are trying to cope with very high levels of public debt are generating even higher social deficits that will also have to be addressed.
When youth unemployment rates hover around 50 per cent in Spain and Greece, it is obvious that we have reached the limits of this austerity-induced recession.
We need a socially responsible approach to fiscal consolidation. In a democracy, it is more important to retain the long-term trust of people than to gain the short-term confidence of financial markets.
Globally speaking, most large companies and the financial system in general have bounced back from the crisis, although some pundits claim that there are still some 'fragile' banks. Governments spent billions of dollars to ensure their recovery. Workers have not received the same treatment. It is understandable that people marking May 1 feel that while some banks are too big to fail, workers are too small to matter.
So what do we do? We need a different type of growth that is environmentally conscious and focused on people. This means a model whose main aim is to increase people's well-being and reduce inequalities, that measures success by the number of good-quality jobs generated, not the percentage of gross domestic product growth. The financial system has to be at the service of the real economy, not playing around with other people's money.
Moving towards a new era of social justice requires co-operation, dialogue and, above all, leadership. Leadership fired by human values - key among them, the respect for the dignity of work and workers.
Juan Somavia is director general of the International Labour Organisation
