Labor Strategies for Global Recovery

Another useful document is the ITUC Report of March 2009 entitled A Recipe for Hunger: How the World is Failing on Food, which analyses the growing hunger of the world’s poorest billion people as a denial of their fundamental social and political rights in favor of governmental subservience to agribusiness interests.

Finally the Worker’s Forum of the Americas, representing unions with 50 million members in North and Latin America issued a Declaration at the April Port of Spain summit of the political leaders of the Americas that linked the economic, environmental, food and energy crises to the absence of “distributive justice.”

A century ago we might have expected leaders of the Socialist International to issue such declarations, and that they would be echoed by the socialist trade unions. Today leaders of the international labor movement project a pragmatic democratic socialist vision, but generally lack sufficient power to mobilize members of their own affiliated unions and their potential supporters to demand change in the streets.
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