Labour 20 Key Messages

To achieve sound, sustainable, fair and green growth, the L20 put forward the following policy recommendations to the G20 Labour and Finance Ministers:

- support aggregate demand and employment in view of the serious slowdown in growth;
- put an immediate halt to austerity measures and corresponding cuts in public spending in areas that provide social support and facilitate productive economic activity;
- invest in infrastructure, education and quality public services including in the care economy;
- support the transition to a low-carbon economy;
- counter the erosion of tax bases and profit shifting by multinationals and achieve reform of tax systems, and support this by shifting taxation from employment to environmentally damaging and non-productive activities;
- ensure that revenue is not lost through tax havens by requiring automatic exchange of information and country by country reporting;
- maintain and increase expenditure on active labour market programmes and implement schemes to promote job retention and job sharing during the crisis;
- cooperate with the social partners to scale up apprenticeships and training programmes and put in place a "Jobs Guarantee" for young people;
- reverse the rise in income inequality by strengthening collective bargaining and set robust minimum wages; avoid a further deterioration of gender gaps in employment and income levels;
- improve the provision of affordable finance to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) and facilitate their insertion into global value chains, while ensuring that they can provide decent work to their employees;
- support the implementation of a global social protection floor and the ratification of the ILO Conventions on social security;
- establish employment targets or indicators to be used in the G20 Mutual Assessment Process for "Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth";
- commission the G20 Employment Task Force with a permanent mandate to carry out regular monitoring of the implementation of past agreements.