UNGA76: ITUC Supports The Secretary-General’s “Global Accelerator For Jobs And Social Protection”

The ITUC has welcomed the Global Accelerator announced by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres and its target for jobs and social protection.

The policy brief sets out a target to create at least 400 million jobs by 2030, primarily in the green and care economies, and extend social protection floors by 2025 to about four billion people currently not covered by any measures.

The Accelerator was presented during the UN’s 76th General Assembly as part of the Financing for Development in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond Initiative (FfDI), a process in which the ITUC has been involved presenting recommendations on Financing Recovery and Building the Economy of the Future.

“Our demands have been heard,” said ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow, who participated in the launch event. “The targets of the Accelerator will help to rebuild trust and hope with working people, as it can provide concrete answers to the shocks we face today and will face in the future.”

The priorities of the Global Accelerator are at the heart of trade unions’ demands for a New Social Contract to ensure a human-centred recovery and resilience.

“Can we finance this? Absolutely!”

During her intervention, Sharan Burrow stressed that the resources to finance the measures in a New Social Contract do exist but are not used adequately. Five actions need to be prioritised:

• The reallocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) is paramount. Out of the $650 billion in SDRs issued by the IMF, only about $275 billion will go to emerging and developing countries, and only $21 billion will go to low-income countries. Rich countries must support equity swaps.
• Transparent debt relief architecture, with debt restructuring and cancellations, is needed, including middle-income countries and “positive conditionalities” based on the SDGs included in the International Financial Institutions’ lending policies.
• With current liquidity injections in the developed world, official development assistance (ODA) can and should be increased to help developing countries in restoring public goods. We need to scale up and meet the ODA 0.7% commitment, with 0.15 to 0.20% of GNI for the least-developed countries. Equally, the percentage of ODA dedicated to support social protection through a Global Fund for Social Protection is central to resilience.
• Stronger multilateral coordination on taxation is needed. An initial positive step by the G7 on elimination of tax evasion and on a minimum global tax rate on multinational corporations is fundamental, together with national progressive taxation systems and wealth taxes.
• All investments should have an environmental, sustainability and governance lens if we are to deal with the convergence of crises threatening people and the planet.

Trade unions are ready to engage through social dialogue to translate these commitments into concrete progress towards the 2030 Agenda.

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