- What are the priorities of the American labor movement today?
Jon Hiatt. The stagnation of workers’ wages and incomes is becoming an issue for all of us in the labor movement that dominates so much of what we do and so many topics we are involved in. This is also true for our counterparts throughout the world. In our view, unions and collective bargaining are the major part of the answer to address income inequality.
I’ve noticed this incredibly obvious change in the last years: now there is much more acknowledgment by the IMF, the OECD or the World Bank that income inequality is a real issue. It doesn’t mean that their policies have changed. It remains to be seen what kind of policy changes they pursue.
Seven years have passed since the great economic crisis that began in 2007 and is not over yet. We often treat the crisis – which we are still living through – as something that just happened, as if it were an accident.