On one side of the rope, students, workers, a polar bear, a walrus and Robin Hood stood. On the other side, a series of fancily dressed Wall Street executives.  The tug-of-war was over a proposed half penny tax on Wall Street transactions designed to raise billions of dollars to pay for education, climate change mitigation and the improvement of public infrastructure. That was the scene Thursday when working family activists who are part of the U.S. Robin Hood Tax Campaign rallied at Hotel Palomar in Washington, D.C., where finance and environmental ministers of select developed countries met.

In 2008, with the global financial crisis at its peak and the world teetering on the brink of a second Great Depression, world leaders and policymakers took decisive fiscal and monetary policy actions that bolstered our economies and stopped our financial system from spiraling into chaos and dragging our economies into depression.

But today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the “Trans-Atlantic Agenda for Shared Prosperity” economic summit: 

Our work is far from done, and no progress has been easy. We have had to battle those who wanted to block the fiscal stimulus, which was so critical for halting our economic slide. And we are still battling those same opponents who now want to impose strict fiscal austerity that threatens to sabotage our economy and trigger a new recession, as those same policies have in Europe.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is taking part in the L20’s June 18-19 meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico. Leaders of the 19 nations and the European Union who make up the L20 are discussing the global economic crises.

Yesterday, Trumka introduced International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde, and @AFLCIOLatino tweeted the exchange. Check it out. 

In corporate boardrooms and right-wing gatherings, so-called “free-market principles” are hailed as the keys to a strong and growing economy, and regulations designed to restrain banks and financial firms from driving the economy off a cliff — as they nearly did four years ago — are maligned as job-killers. In reality, according to the authors of a new working paper from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 was worse in countries where financial institutions got the deregulation for which they lobbied—and that’s also true of the United States.

Unions representing workers at IBM around the world are coming together to form a new IBM Global Union Alliance to faciliate cooperative efforts to increase union membership in the company and pursue global agreements to improve working conditions of IBM employees worldwide. They also will support workers facing anti-union actions by the company.

After International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for alleged sexual assault on a Manhattan hotel housekeeper, there was a lot of domestic back-slapping for this country’s superior handling of such cases compared with such European countries as France, where sexual predation often is swept under the rug.

The global union movement came together in Washington, D.C., last week to kick off a joint initiative to help workers at multinational companies join unions.

Members of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the Council of Global Unions met with U.S. union leaders to discuss support for international organizing campaigns. Much of their help is directed at the United States, where workers’ rights now lag far behind other industrialized nations. They also met with senior officials of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

More than 90 trade union leaders from all parts of the world met this week in Washington, D.C., with senior officials of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to push for continuing economic stimulus to jump-start the global economy.