Quotes from Sharan Burrow

We know an organised workforce cannot be enslaved, but when governments fail their citizens and allow corporations to escape the rule of law, slavery can flourish.

I've had an enormously privileged working life.

My job is to represent working people.

There's not much more of an honour - to work for, and with, working people.

Global supply chains are founded on a Darwinian model that rewards employers who treat working people as less than human.

Climate impacts hit working people first, and with extreme weather events, changing seasons, and rising sea levels, whole communities stand on the front lines.

Market-led globalization is leading to a race to the bottom, where efficiency and profit matter more than a fair share for working people.

We may be living in a world of disposable electronics, but working people are not disposable commodities.

Disproportionate corporate power over governments is giving license to the greed that denies workers even minimum living wages. It is also seemingly a license to allow the sheer brutality of treatment of working people at the base of the supply chains.

Securing a sustainable future will take all of us working together.

Illicit trade corrupts corporations and governments alike, allows dictators to survive, and obscures oppression, including modern day slavery.

It seems evident that the IMF has learned nothing from its inequality-inducing policies during the 1980s debt crises in Latin America nor from its recession-deepening response to the East Asian crisis of the late 1990s. In both regions, the IMF has become synonymous with making bad situations worse.

Large swathes of people losing faith in democracy is a dangerous thing. Conflict, desperation, totalitarianism are the products of that loss of faith.

If people do not have jobs, they do not have a secure income, and they do not have a sense of security.

Many communities are already devastated by poverty. Increasingly, that poverty is born of the greed of a global trading system.

Work has always been influenced by technology and will continue to be.

Creating a Financial Transactions Tax would go a long way to curbing short-term speculative trading, including high-frequency trading.

If you put stimulus into an economy, you know there is a time lag in terms of depending where you invest it. If it's family transfers, it might be quick. If it's infrastructure, it might be two, three, five years.

Programs that reduce energy and water use and increase green agriculture and transport have huge job-creating potential.

We know how to build economies. It requires investment in jobs. The biggest medium-term multiplier is infrastructure.

We need economic growth, yes, but growth can be jobless, so a sustainable development framework for employment must include a job creation strategy.

When work is not underpinned by social protection, people risk falling into poverty traps.

A new model of business and economic development must ensure everybody's sons and daughters are treated as we would expect for our own.

Labour is not a commodity.