During the session, which took place on Tuesday 7 July, Eric Manzi brought forward trade unions and workers’ call for a New Social Contract and an SDG8-driven recovery and resilience.
Manzi stressed that the SDGs SDGs The Sustainable Development Goals were one of the outcomes of the Rio+20 Conference. The members States launched a new set of future international development goals, which will build upon the Millennium Development Goals and converge with the post-2015 development agenda. are today more relevant than ever in the wake of the dramatic impact of the pandemic. And in this perspective, he underlined that Goal 8 is particularly key to build a human-centred recovery and has a strong leverage effect on the other Goals.
For trade unions and workers, an SDG8-driven recovery and resilience requires the following five actions:
- Investing in climate-friendly jobs, with Just Transition measures negotiated through social dialogue with social partners.
- Scaling up social protection as to reach universal coverage. This would also include establishing a Global Social Protection Fund to support the poorest countries in this respect.
- Strengthening equality through promoting employment opportunities for women and youth, investing in care, paying equal pay for work of equal value and minimum living wages, and eliminating gender-based violence in the world of work.
- Ensuring these policies can be financed. This can be done by strengthened development cooperation, debt relief, progressive taxation, as well as ending tax evasion and illicit financial flows.
- Establishing a new model of global governance that is inclusive, multilateral and brings social partners on board through social dialogue.
On global governance, Manzi added: “This is the only way to achieve global resilience. And right now, the moral imperative of global governance is to ensure universal access to Covid-19 vaccines”.
To conclude, Eric Manzi reiterated the international trade union movement’s commitment to keeping engaging with UN Member States to live up to the challenge of building a world that leaves no one behind.
Eric Manzi’s intervention can be watched here