Articles
Another debate on basic income
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Beware of semantic confusion, but we urgently and most seriously need a good debate on pro's and con's of basic income and of social protection.
Here, a debate on Al Jazeera in which I participated last Sunday:
Hacking
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Dear readers,
dear friends,
In the passed month, the website of Global Social Justice has been repeatedly hacked.
We are searching for a permanent solution and hope to find it soon.
We already want to thank you for your loyalty towards our initiative.
Francine
ITUC's May Day Declaration
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Today is a day to celebrate the achievements that through generations union men and women have won: peace, democracy, rights and decent work for millions of people.
Is Jim Kim Destroying the World Bank or Saving it from Itself?
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In a shantytown perched in the hilly outskirts of Lima, Peru, people were dying. It was 1994, and thousands of squatters — many of them rural migrants who had fled from their country’s Maoist guerrilla insurgency — were crammed into unventilated hovels, living without basic sanitation. They faced outbreaks of cholera and other infectious diseases, but a government austerity program, which had slashed subsidized health care, forced many residents to forgo medical treatment they couldn’t afford. When food ran short, they formed ad hoc collectives to stave off starvation.
A Catholic priest ministering to a parish in the slum went looking for help, and he found it in Jim Yong Kim, an idealistic Korean-American physician and anthropologist. In his mid-30s and a recent graduate of Harvard Medical School, Kim had helped found Partners in Health, a scrappy nonprofit organization whose mission was to bring modern medicine to the world’s poor. The priest had been involved with the group in Boston, its home base, before serving in Peru, and he asked Kim to help him set up a clinic to aid his flock. No sooner had Kim arrived in Lima, however, than the priest contracted a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis and died.
Kim was devastated, and he thought he knew what to blame: the World Bank. Like many debt-ridden nations, Peru was going through “structural adjustment,” a period of lender-mandated inflation controls, privatizations, and government cutbacks. President Alberto Fujimori had enacted strict policies, known collectively as “Fujishock,” that made him a darling of neoliberal economists. But Kim saw
calamitous trickle-down effects, including the tuberculosis epidemic that had claimed his friend and threatened to spread through the parish.
Read more: Is Jim Kim Destroying the World Bank or Saving it from Itself?
One worker every minute dies of occupational cancer
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Sharan Burrow, ITUC General Secretary, said: "Over two million workers die needlessly every year because their workplaces are dusty, dirty and dangerous. The risks are as obvious as they are preventable, whether they are falls from height, crippling workloads or chemical exposure. Every single death represents an employer’s failure to act."
Occupational cancers alone kill at a rate of one worker every minute worldwide, Burrow says. "Yet pressure from corporate interests means that even asbestos, one of the worst industrial killers, is banned in only a minority of countries. This is not legitimate business activity – it is criminal behaviour."
Read more: One worker every minute dies of occupational cancer
