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26 March, 2026Every year, behind closed doors in Washington DC, a small group of union representatives sits down with the most powerful economic institutions on the planet, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These institutions decide, in ways that most people never see or hear about, the conditions under which billions of workers live and work.
By Kemal Ozkan, assistant general secretary, IndustriALL Global Union
The interest rates that determine whether a government can afford hospitals or must cut them. The debt frameworks that shape whether a country invests in its people or services its creditors. The labour market prescriptions that tell governments whether to protect workers or deregulate them.
I was in those rooms in early March. What I witnessed made me angry. But anger, for those of us who lead workers’ organizations, is not enough. Our job is to understand, to challenge, and to organize.
So let me tell you what I saw, and why it matters to every worker, from a garment factory in Bangladesh to a mine in South Africa.
The world is run in towers disconnected from workers
The decisions made in Washington’s grand institutions flow outward into the real world with extraordinary force, yet the people most affected by those decisions have almost no voice in making them. That is why organizations like IndustriALL are there, to carry the ground realities of workers from the Global South and Global North into rooms where they would otherwise never be heard.
And what we heard in those rooms this year was troubling. What we are witnessing is not just a failure of policy. It is a regression.
Those of us old enough to remember the 1980s will recognize the language, deregulation, austerity, the primacy of markets over people. That ideology never went away. It is back, redesigned and more aggressive, reshaping global governance in ways that are shrinking the space for democracy at every level.
The numbers tell the story, and they are damning
The evidence is not in dispute. The G20 Extraordinary Committee report on global inequality, led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and commissioned under South Africa’s G20 presidency, found that 83 per cent of countries have high income inequality. Between 2000 and 2024, the richest 1 per cent captured 41 per cent of all new wealth created globally, while the bottom half of humanity captured just 1 per cent. The richest 1 per cent saw their average wealth grow by US$1.3 million over that period. Someone in the poorest half of humanity saw their wealth grow by an average of US$585.
The labour share of national income, the share of what an economy produces that goes to workers rather than capital, has fallen in 56 per cent of countries since 1990. Between 2019 and 2024, average global CEO pay increased by 50 per cent, while average worker pay rose by less than 1 per cent. (ILO Global Wage Report 2024-25)
These are not abstract statistics. They describe a world in which the system is working exactly as designed, and it is not designed for workers.
The debt trap and what it means on the factory floor
One of the most powerful moments in Washington came from Zambian trade unionists. Zambia was the first African nation to default on its sovereign debt in 2020. But Zambia is not alone. More than 70 countries, particularly in the Global South, are caught in a debt crisis that is suffocating their economies and their workers.
How did so many countries end up here? In large part, by following the prescriptions of the very institutions that now manage their debt. And when the crisis comes, those institutions return, not with new thinking, but with the same conditions: austerity, spending cuts, guarantees that debts to large financial institutions and rich creditor nations are serviced first. The result is not prosperity. It is the hollowing out of public services, the collapse of investment, and, on the factory floor and in the mine, job losses, worsening conditions and wages that cannot cover the cost of living.
Today, 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest repayments than on education or health. (UNCTAD, 2025) That is not a financing problem. It is a justice problem.
Measuring jobs, and why it matters who counts
In our discussions with the World Bank, we challenged their approach to measuring job quality. The Bank uses average earnings as a headline indicator of progress. We pushed back hard.
Here is why this matters. When a government is told its economy is creating jobs and average earnings are rising, it sounds like success. But averages hide everything. They obscure the explosion of precarious, informal and platform work. They say nothing about whether a wage is a living wage, whether it is enough to feed a family, pay rent, afford healthcare. They say nothing about whether workers have the right to organize, to bargain collectively, to refuse unsafe conditions.
There is a wage crisis in the world today. In many countries, wages do not cover basic needs. The bottom of the human needs pyramid, food, shelter, safety, is out of reach for millions of people who work full time. When the institutions that shape global economic policy measure success by indicators that cannot see this reality, the reality never changes.
We are demanding that the World Bank change its methodology. We are demanding an end to austerity prescriptions that cut public sector wages and dismantle the social services workers depend on. Decent work, with fundamental rights, social protection and social dialogue at its centre, must be the measure of economic progress, not a footnote to it.
Taxation and the theft of the future
The labour share is falling. Wealth is concentrating at the top. And the tax system, which should be the mechanism for returning some of that wealth to society, is failing, deliberately.
Globally, billionaires pay an effective tax rate equivalent to just 0.3 per cent of their wealth. (Zucman, Blueprint for a coordinated minimum effective taxation standard, EU Tax Observatory/G20, 2024) The average statutory corporate income tax rate across all OECD and Inclusive Framework jurisdictions fell from 28 per cent in 2000 to 21.1 per cent in 2021. (OECD Corporate Tax Statistics, 2024) And in January 2026, the OECD’s global minimum corporate tax deal, already a compromise, was weakened further, with US multinationals exempted from key provisions of the 15 per cent minimum rate. (OECD Side-by-Side Package, January 2026)
This is not a technical adjustment. It is a political choice that tells workers in Indonesia, Zambia and Brazil that the rules of the global economy will continue to be written by and for the powerful. Every dollar that flows untaxed into the accounts of corporations and billionaires is a dollar not spent on schools, hospitals, infrastructure and the public services that workers depend on.
Wealth inequality is now worse than income inequality, and if the global tax regime does not change, the inequality figures will never change either.
Democracy is the thread that connects everything
AI, debt, taxation, social protection, these look like separate issues. They are not. They are all symptoms of the same underlying failure: a global governance system that is not democratic, that does not represent the majority of the world’s people, and that has been captured by interests that are not theirs.
We see this most clearly in this year’s G20. The Trump administration’s US presidency has removed labour, employment and inequality from the G20 agenda entirely. South Africa, which drove genuine progress for workers during its 2025 presidency, has been disinvited. The Labour 20 has not been recognized. Only the Business 20 remains at the table.
This is not a procedural matter. It is an attack on democratic institutions and on the basic principle that those affected by decisions should have a voice in making them.
The deregulation agenda being pushed through the G20 is not about freeing economies. It is about removing the protections that workers fought for over generations, safety standards, labour rights, environmental rules, to benefit a small elite.
This is shameful. And it will not stand.
What we will do
What I heard in Washington made me angry. What I saw made me outraged. But as leaders of the union movement, our job is not to cry or simply to speak out. Our job is to understand, to educate and to mobilize.
The global union movement will not wait for an invitation from a G20 presidency that has made clear workers are not welcome. We will mobilize our forces. We will build our alliances with civil society. We will carry the labour and social agenda, already established through years of work under previous G20 presidencies, into every platform and every future presidency that will listen.
The United Kingdom’s G20 presidency in 2027 must hear us clearly.
At IndustriALL’s last Congress, we adopted a slogan: organizing for a just future. That slogan was not chosen for a moment. It was chosen for a struggle that will not end. A new generation of workers will carry it forward.
Hope is our capital
We never lose hope. Hope is our capital. But hope alone is not enough. It must be combined with knowledge, energy, solidarity and organized power. That is what IndustriALL brings to those rooms in Washington. That is what we will bring everywhere the decisions are made that shape the lives of working people around the world.