Reminding the politicians about poverty

Stand up against poverty

By Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary

17 October 2009

Today is the International Day for the Eradication of Global Poverty and people all over the UK will be visiting MPs and potential MPs as part of the biggest ever global political lobbying operation.

The global recession has reminded us all that poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere. Inequality between and within nations is a key cause of the global imbalances that caused the recession. As well as being divided between rich nations and poor nations, we are divided into net importers and exporters, savers and borrowers, producers and consumers.

Objectively low wages in China made the Chinese economy susceptible to the decline in world trade - but comparatively low wages in Germany, where German workers have failed to benefit from productivity growth over the last decade, also left that economy susceptible. In the US, declining wages for the poor (while bonuses boomed in the board rooms) created the conditions for the sub-prime disaster that set the whole recession off.

The workers I represent in the UK are suffering - but the poor in Africa, Asia and the Americas are suffering more, not least because they don't have access to the social security safety nets that feature so strongly in Europe.

This is not a competition - they are all the victims of the same global system. And we all face a catastrophic future if we don't address the challenge of climate change which threatens to make global poverty permanent.

Earlier this year, when the G20 leaders came to London, Put People First brought together unions, development charities and climate change campaigners who argued and demonstrated for no return to business as usual. I took a similar message to the G20 leaders' summit in Pittsburgh in September, when unions from around the world managed to put jobs at the centre of the debate.

This autumn, both Gordon Brown and David Cameron committed their parties to meet the target set by the UN for overseas aid - 0.7% of Gross National Income - and we need all politicians to understand that such spending is not a luxury, but a necessity, if we are to make poverty history and protect everyone from its devastating effect.