Less social dialogue and more social change
- Andy Stern is the president of the Service Employees International Union. His views are his own -
We are living through the third economic revolution. The first was the agricultural revolution, and it took nearly 3,000 years. The second was the industrial revolution, which took about 300 years. This revolution is going to take 30 years. As we move from an industrial economy based in factories to a knowledge and finance economy that lives on the Internet, no generation of people has ever witnessed so much change in a single lifetime.
And this revolution is televised, it’s Googlized, it’s digitized, it’s in your face, on your screen, 24/7. It is relentless and it’s unending and it’s far from over.
The problem is this revolution is not working for the vast majority of the world’s citizens.
Despite the exponential increases in productivity and profits that have resulted from the globalization of our markets and economies, nearly half the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 per day. The richest 20 percent of the world’s people earn 86 percent of the income, consume 80 percent of the resources, and create 83 percent of the waste.
This is an unsustainable model, and we are seeing the cracks in the system each day.
It is a humbling and mind-opening moment for those whose wholesale embrace of a privatizing, deregulating, free-market-worshiping ideology has put us on the fast track to global financial collapse. Financial manipulation, greed and deregulation have led to economic havoc.
