EuroMayDay: “Maastricht Rule Straitjacket on Social Progress”
Labour ministers from the Group of Eight wealthy nations and six other major economies are to gather in Rome on Sunday for talks on the “human dimension” of the financial crisis sweeping the planet.
The three-day “Group of 14″ meeting will bring together the G8 leading industrial powers with the emerging giants China, India and Brazil as well as Mexico, South Africa and Egypt at a time when worldwide job losses are sparking fears of social unrest.
The meeting comes before a much-anticipated summit of the Group of 20 developed and developing nations next Thursday in London to discuss recovery strategies for the world economy and reforms to the financial regulatory system.
The G14 “social summit” in Rome will urge the G20 to put “people first,” Italian Labour Minister Maurizio Sacconi said Thursday.
“The concept of economic and financial stability encompasses the concept of social stability,” Sacconi told a news conference.
He said the G14 would advocate a “global pact” to ensure sustainable social protections, investment in people, notably skills development, and job creation, especially in the areas of environmental protection, health and education.
Alex Foti, an activist for the EuroMayDay organisation defending vulnerable workers, said EU governments are prevented by the European Union’s founding Maastricht treaty from implementing such a pact.
The rule by which EU members cannot run public spending deficits of more than three percent of gross domestic product “is a straitjacket on social progress, a major impediment to solving the crisis,” Foti told AFP.
IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned Monday that “dramatic” rises in unemployment around the world would set the stage for conflict.
The world financial crisis could spark “social unrest, some threats to democracy and maybe for some cases, it can also end in war,” he warned during an International Labour Organization (ILO) meeting in Geneva.
“This crisis must not be allowed to become a wasteland of unemployment,” Strauss-Kahn said just days after the IMF forecast that the world economy will shrink by up to 1.0 percent this year.
The ILO in January said the global financial meltdown could claim up to 50 million jobs over 2008 and 2009, while the World Bank warned that the crisis could push 46 million back into poverty.
ILO chief Juan Somavia will stress in Rome “that we are confronting an inter-connected financial, economic and social crisis, and that the attention of policy makers should turn to the three crises at the same time,” his deputy Philippe Egger said Thursday.
An ILO study of more than 40 national stimulus packages “found that resources that governments have put forward to support financial markets are five times that allocated to social and economic matters,” Egger told AFP by telephone from Geneva.
EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia predicted a “hot autumn” of social protest in Europe, in an interview with the Italian daily La Stampa.
France last week saw more than a million workers take to the streets in a nationwide strike to force President Nicolas Sarkozy to boost wages and protect jobs. A protest in Paris left nine police officers injured and led to some 300 arrests.
In Rome on Saturday an Italian student movement plans to protest the G14 meeting, calling for “new rights and guarantees against the crisis,” following a similar protest last week that ended with clashes between students and police.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi meanwhile was accused Thursday of insensitivity towards the jobless after the billionaire media tycoon said the answer to unemployment was to “try and find something else, maybe in sales, or set up (your) own business.”
Nearly 400,000 Italians lost their jobs in January and February.