Billionaire wealth has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic as companies in the food, pharma, energy, and tech sectors have cashed in. Meanwhile millions of people around the world are facing a cost-of-living crisis due to the continuing effects of the pandemic and the rapidly rising costs of essentials, including food and energy. Inequality, already extreme before COVID-19, has reached new levels. There is an urgent need for governments to implement highly progressive taxation measures that in turn must be used to invest in powerful and proven measures to reduce inequalities.

The new Oxfam report on inequalities!

The handbook is the outcome of a project led by ActionAid International, Eurodad, INESC (Brazil), SEATINI and CEHURD (Uganda), SIKKA (Tanzania), and WEMOS, aimed at exploring ways to increase civil society engagement in the monetary policy arena. It intends to provide the basic tools to economic justice activists and organisations for understanding how monetary policies work and how they interact with the economy.

Take a look at the handbook here. 

In recent decades, we have seen dramatic changes in the landscape of labor rights protection due to the entrenchment of neoliberalism, which has effectively suppressed labor’s collective bargaining power, militant traditions, and solidarity and subsumed them as “allies” of businesses and the state in advancing the bidding of neoliberalism. These trends have exacerbated with the COVID-19 pandemic. From across the Asia Pacific region, workers have borne the brunt of the impact of the pandemic, where they are forced to deal with unfair contract terms, low wages, and unjust working conditions. In this May edition of the Focus Dispatch, we highlight some of the challenges faced by workers across Asia and shed light on the institutions and mechanisms being advanced by social movements to rein in corporate power and strengthen the protection of workers’ rights.

Read Focus on the Global South

“We have sat outside looking in for too long to believe that the West will give us a seat at their table — we must develop real financial autonomy and development that can withstand the attacks of the major powers.“

South Africa and other countries that have abstained from voting against Russia at the United Nations General Assembly in response to the war in Ukraine face intense international criticism.

In South Africa, the domestic criticism has been extraordinarily shrill, and often clearly racialized. It is frequently assumed that abstention means that South Africa is in support of the Russian invasion, and this is either due to corrupt relations between Russian and South African elites, or nostalgia for support given to the anti-apartheid struggle by the Soviet Union, or both.

Nontobeko Hlela (Nontobeko Hlela was formerly first secretary: political at the High Commission of South Africa in Nairobi and currently works as a Researcher for the South African office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.)

In the context of a health emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic, the global availability of and access to vaccines are imperative. This research paper provides an analysis from the perspective of international political economy, of the financing of COVID-19 vaccines and of the market strategies adopted by some of the companies that developed them. It notes that the development of vaccines was supported by substantial public funding from countries that later received preferential access to those vaccines through advance purchases. Despite such public support, the vaccines were not deemed as public goods but remained under the control of their developers.

Read South Centre’s paper

Collective bargaining played a crucial role during the pandemic and can provide an effective means for employers and workers to tackle the new challenges that are shaking up the world of work.

Read the ILO article