Income Inequality: Time to Deliver an Adequate Living Wage

Organization(s): ITUC
Year: 2014
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Inequality is growing in almost all nations, and wages are amongst the lowest on record as a share of wealth.

Unemployment is the highest on record and while more than 50 per cent of workers are in vulnerable or precarious work 40 per cent of workers are trapped in the desperation of the informal sector where there are no minimum wages and no rights.

Health, public education, transport and quality public services in general are increasingly denied to those who cannot pay. Tax evasion by large multinational corporations is rampant.

The global financial crisis wrought by the greed of the financial sector might have begun in 2008 but the aftershocks are still imposing instability for national economies and destruction of jobs for working families.

Inequality is both a global economic risk and at the heart of the increasing hopelessness felt by many of the world’s working people. The majority of households in developing countries – more than 75 percent of those nations’ populations — are living today in societies where income is more unequally distributed than it was in the 1990s, according to United Nations Development Programme findings.

A minimum living wage is an important part of the challenge to reduce inequality.

This edition of Frontlines adds to the focus on wages and wealth distribution tools in the fight to reduce inequality. It concentrates on the relationship between a minimum living wage and income inequality.

Social Protection and Human Rights