Workers around the world are still paying the price for policy failures that led to the 2008 financial crisis. The underlying structural problems that caused the crisis are still with us: a fragile and still largely underregulated financial system, depressed wages and widening income inequalities, and trade imbalances between debtor and surplus countries.
This issue of the IJLR, mostly drawn from presentations at the 2010 Global Labour University conference on "Labour and the Global Crisis, " reflects the ILO's commitment to define new and better paths for macroeconomic policy. The contributors-young trade union activists and a new generation of academic researchers-attempt to distill the lessons of the financial crisis for the labor movement and define alternative ways forward.