Global trade union leaders and economists have charted a new direction for the world’s economy in a just-released book, “Exiting From the Crisis,” which outlines how to create more equitable and sustainable economic growth.

The focus of a new direction must be to develop family-supporting jobs. Governments, including the United States, are retreating from their pledge at the 2009 meeting of the G-20 in Pittsburgh to make job creation a priority. Instead, they are pushing austerity, deficit reductions and cheaper labor. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, says:

In other words, governments are being counseled to adopt many of the policies – “austerity” and “labor market flexibility”–that created the imbalances that produced the economic crisis in the first place.

In the preface to “Exiting From the Crisis, which was released at the AFL-CIO last week, Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz says:

We may have pulled back from the brink at which we stood in the fall of 2008, but we cannot claim victory until unemployment is brought down to where it was before the crisis, and until the real incomes of workers have made up for the losses that have been suffered in the interim. We can do it—but only if we correct the mistakes of the past, change course and keep in mind the true objectives for which we should be striving.

 Some of the key proposals in the book include:

•  Measuring economic growth in terms of how well it serves the needs of citizens.
• Building sustainable, responsible corporations that recognize their duties to the workers they employ and the communities in which they operate.
• Using fiscal and monetary policy to achieve full employment and raise living standards and making sure workers’ income keeps pace with increases in productivity.

Click on the book title to download a copy of Exiting From the Crisis.

The book is the product of the Global Unions Taskforce on a New Growth Model, a joint project of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the OECD, the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) and the Global Union Research Network (GURN). The task force involves more than 30 global trade union economists from a wide array of advanced, emerging and developing countries.