WASHINGTON, DC– AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka articulated the causes of the ongoing global economic crisis today, and delivered a vision for creating a fairer and more universally prosperous global economy.
Trumka spoke at an economic policy conference held jointly by the AFL-CIO, the Freidrich Ebert Foundation, and the Hans Böckler Foundation. The event focused on the continuing fallout from the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent recession, as well as exploring new pro-worker solutions.
Trumka’s remarks examine the root causes of today’s crisis, spanning well over a decade, and the political impact it continues to have. Excerpts from President Trumka’s speech can be found below, and the full version can be found here: http://www.aflcio.org/Press-Room/Speeches/At-the-What-Have-We-Learned-from-the-Crisis-and-What-Remains-to-be-Done-Conference
- The 1990s might look like prosperity on paper, but it was fake debt-fueled bubble prosperity, and meanwhile financialization, corporate-oriented trade policies and weakening worker bargaining power eroded the foundations of shared prosperity. It was the kind of prosperity you ultimately pay for with a financial crisis and a collapse.
- Economic elites seem to have learned that they can go on as they did before the crisis, accumulating wealth others created. Some politicians seem to think that they can keep carrying water for economic elites and still get the votes of the majority whose incomes keep falling. That, it seems to me, was Eric Cantor’s mistake.
- There should be no room in a global community for tax havens, or little principalities where dictators and hereditary monarchs torture workers who demand a living wage, or huge global economic powers that build the wealth of their national elites on impoverished and silenced workers—and by the way, I want you to think carefully about what countries I might be talking about in that last category.
Contact: Anthony DeAngelo (202) 637-5018