Labour leaders to call for jobs, income equality

   
As global CEOs arrive in Davos for the annual World Economic Forum, labour leaders from across the world, including the US, plan to press for immediate steps to generate new jobs and end income inequality to reboot the global economy.

Trade union leaders from Indonesia, USA and the UK, along with the International Trade Union Confederation, plan to ask the business and political leaders to keep jobs and growth at
the centre of plans to reboot the world economy.

   
Ahead of the five-day World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2012, beginning on Wednesday, Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said the pervasive economic challenges have led to a situation wherein young people are unable to find their first jobs, parents are struggling with rising inequality and elders are battling to survive on dwindling pensions.

   
"Over the past three decades, income inequality has risen in 17 of the 24 OECD countries for which data is available.  With growing unemployment and stagnating wages, we are sitting on a social time bomb," said John Evans, General Secretary Trade Union Advisory Council to the  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a grouping mostly industrialised nations.

   
 "In Davos this week, we will be pushing to put people back into our economic system. Because it is workers in work that will drive the global economy out of the crisis," Burrow said.

The labour leaders said they would call for five principles to spur growth -- jobs, social protection,
sustainable demand and decent work, financial regulation, fair and progressive taxation and climate action.