Quotes from Sharan Burrow

When governments are cowed or simply don't care to enforce fundamental human and labour rights or to ensure corporate tax is paid so that they can invest in social protection and in the health and education of their people, they cede control to corporate greed.

Public opinion must be heard.

You cannot fuel demand, or consumption-led demand, on credit forever.

Globalization can be shaped to ensure that people matter.

Governments that fail to provide jobs to those who are willing and able to work begin to lose their legitimacy and will face the anger of the electorate.

The concept of 'green jobs' or a 'green economy' is often attacked as the work of the Grimm Brothers by those wedded to the grim science of free-market economics.

As economists bandy about terms like 'recapitalization,' 'credit lines,' and 'liquidity,' families are facing brutal cuts to their social services and welfare payments, losing their homes, wondering how their kids will make their way in the world.

When we see the banks get bailed out with seemingly no consequences while ordinary people pay the price with job and wage cuts through austerity measures, who could blame a person for wondering where the loyalties of their elected leaders really lie?

We all need to work together, because there are no jobs on a dead planet; there is no equity without rights to decent work and social protection, no social justice without a shift in governance and ambition, and, ultimately, no peace for the peoples of the world without the guarantees of sustainability.

What Qatar chose is a system where a worker is owned by his employer. When your employer forces you to live in squalor, makes you work longest hours in extreme heat, doesn't allow you to change jobs, doesn't pay your wages on time, abuses you physically and psychologically, you have no way out, you can't leave. You are trapped.

South Carolina is a 'right to work' state - a misnomer of a phrase, as the laws limits union representation of workers. It does does not guarantee workers a job or fair wages and conditions.

There is a great deal of sympathy amongst workers for the Occupy Wall Street movement. We understand their frustration.

You can't deny that if you have, you know, people who think it's okay to talk about women, to disregard the rights of workers, we're in trouble as an inclusive world.

T-Mobile U.S.A. is one company that uses fear and intimidation to scare workers away from union representation.

A binding treaty and mandatory human rights due diligence would clean up slavery in global supply chains. Workers demand it, and consumers demand it.

Growing inequality is exacerbated by the companies who simply treat workers as commodities, and our governments are cowered by their demands to perpetuate this model of greed.

Many governments and corporations take no moral responsibility for the enslavement of migrant workers and freely do business with states built on the back of slave labour. Illicit financial flows and tax evasion are ignored in the interests of some nations and their corporations, stripping the tax base that is so vital for essential services.

If you think the dominant orthodoxy - shrink your economy, render workers jobless, impoverish families, and still grow - is an oxymoron... then you would be right.

Where workers are not free to change employers or leave the country without the permission of their employer, workers are, de facto, in forced labour.

The competitive pressure to produce, buy, and sell to our global multi-national companies is so intense that contractors in supply chains are motivated to pay low wages, intensify exploitative conditions, keep workers fearful with insecure work contracts, or simply sack workers who have formed a union to fight back.

Workers know first-hand how corporate capture of government is undermining their rights and freedoms as citizens.

Workers in Myanmar must have an effective remedy when their rights are violated.

When corporations refuse to practice due diligence by not establishing grievance mechanisms for remedy of abuses against the hidden 94% of their workforce in their global supply chains, they perpetuate a depraved model of profit-making that has driven inequality to a level now seen as a global risk in itself.

There is no doubt that the participation of women in the workforce is a serious productivity boost, but to enable this ambition, there must be investment in care - child care, aged care, disability care, health, and education - which are essential social support structures to enable women to work.