Strange times bring strange bedfellows. On the same day that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling were putting the finishing touches to their plan to bail out the banks with up to £500bn of public money, the international labour movement marked the first ever world day for decent work.
Events in more than 100 countries across five continents made it a genuinely global occasion, yet fears of imminent recession and accompanying job losses put any celebrations on ice. Instead the day was spent in sober reflection on the role decent work has to play in rebalancing the global economy and addressing the root causes of the crisis now threatening to spread across the world.
For with the ink barely dry on the government's immediate rescue plans, attention is already turning to the underlying economic problems that have allowed the current financial crisis to develop. Even now, the recognition is growing that fundamental changes are needed to the global economic system far beyond the reach of recapitalisation packages or injections of liquidity, however large.
Increasingly, too, there is an understanding that rebalancing the relationship between capital and labour will be a central element in any long-term solution. Put simply, decent work forms an essential part of the macroeconomic restructuring needed to address the roots of the current malaise.
The basic definition of decent work is productive employment for women and men in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity. The moral case for such rights has been clear ever since Engels wrote his classic account of the working class in England in 1844, and there is still much to do today to ensure that all workers in Britain enjoy decent pay and working conditions. While the minimum wage posted its latest rise this month, to £5.73 an hour, many employers still break the law by not paying it. Women migrant workers are those most at risk.
Yet many of the worst sweatshops relocated long ago to the low-cost labour markets of the developing world. The media has been filled with stories of workers producing goods for the British high street in abominable conditions in countries such as Bangladesh, China and India.
Consumers have expressed outrage at news of women being forced to work around the clock for a few pence an hour under the threat of constant abuse and humiliation. As long as there are no legal requirements that companies must guarantee all workers decent conditions and a living wage, such scandals will continue.
The UN has also stressed the importance of decent work for poverty reduction. Achieving full employment and decent work for all has been enshrined in the millennium development goals adopted by world leaders at the start of the century.
UN agencies confirm that productive employment is the link that can translate economic growth into long-term development, enabling people to work their way out of poverty rather than just deeper into debt. Without decent work opportunities for the many, growth simply concentrates the benefits of economic development in the hands of an elite few.
Yet decent work is no longer just a moral imperative. The financial crisis has underlined the systemic dangers to the wider economy of ignoring workers' rights. For while the crisis may have manifested itself in the convulsions of the financial markets, its roots are to be found in the imbalance which has been allowed to grow between corporate power on the one hand and a disempowered labour movement on the other. "Light touch" globalisation has brought multinational corporations vast new freedoms as the regulations governing their operations are dismantled in country after country. By contrast, workers have found their rights, wages and working conditions increasingly undermined.
As a result of this imbalance, multinational companies have amassed huge profits in the globalised economy, notably through relocating to or sourcing from labour markets such as China where pay and conditions are kept low. Working people have been largely excluded from the feast, as shown by the decline in the share of national income enjoyed by wages and salaries over the past three decades. The UK and US credit bubbles were inflated to record levels in order to make up for this shortfall in working people's pay packets, and it is the bursting of those bubbles that echoes all around us today.
By the same token, decent remuneration of workers is now necessary both to avoid driving us deeper into recession and to restore a broader macroeconomic balance. Darling's suggestion just last month that public-sector wages must be kept low to stave off the threat of inflation now sounds as if it came from another world.
This rebalancing of relations between capital and labour is especially important now that recession is looming, not least because it is working people who will again be hit hardest by the economic downturn. As demand weakens and businesses find credit harder to come by, the pressure on jobs will build.
The first signs of this are already appearing in Britain, where official figures show the largest rise in unemployment in 16 years. The UK jobless total is forecast to pass the 2 million mark in the coming months for the first time in over a decade.
In many of the world's poorest countries the impact will be even worse, and it will again be women workers who are most affected by the downturn. When the economies of south-east Asia collapsed under the financial crisis of 1997, the feminisation of employment which had been heralded as one of the achievements of the Asian economic miracle turned into a feminisation of unemployment almost overnight. Thousands of Thai and Indonesian women were forced into prostitution as a result of losing their jobs.
Today's financial crisis opens up the debate over what sort of economic system we wish to create for the future. Now that the merits of free-market capitalism have been exposed as a dangerous mirage, the world has the opportunity to develop a fairer system of international economic governance and to redistribute the spoils of globalisation.
Preserving the current model, with all its failings and injustices, will simply perpetuate the imbalances which have led to today's crisis. A global economy based on decent work and a living wage for all women and men offers a real chance for a new beginning.
