Abstract

Hundreds of thousands of workers in the UK are taking strike action over fair pay and working conditions. Such strikes are not restricted to the UK. Across the world, people are uniting in the streets to protest increasing food and energy prices and to voice their discontent with increasing levels of social and economic inequality.

The Open University Economics Seminar Series is honoured to host Chiara Putaturo (Oxfam), Baba Aye (Public Services International) and Lucia Pradella (King’s College London) as they discuss the driving forces for the on-going wave of protests and strikes. The event will be chaired by Julia Ngozi Chukwuma (The Open University).

In this seminar:

Chiara Putaturo (Oxfam) will discuss the demands of working-class people around the world for a more equitable tax system in the light of rising cost of living and rampant global inequality. As highlighted in Oxfam’s latest report, published in January 2023, over the last couple of years, a small elite at the very top end of the income distribution has become wealthier, thanks to tax cuts at the top, while global poverty has increased for the first time in 25 years.

Lucia Pradella (King’s College London) will tell us more about the roots of the cost-of-living crisis and the contextualise the present movements within the long history of labour movements and working-class struggles in response to inequalities. She will speak to some of the instances where workers have unionised, organised strikes and successfully demanded policy change in their favour or have stood up to injustice and war.

Baba Aye (Public Services International) will share some insights into global efforts and movements, which seek to advance workers’ rights and universal access to quality public services. He will tell us more about how workers around the world organise and protest considering the many crises the world is facing today, from the climate emergency to the cost-of-living crisis.

Register via Eventbrite

Speakers:

Chiara Putaturo

Chiara Putaturo is the Inequality and Tax Policy Advisor at the Oxfam EU office. She advocates at the EU level for a fairer tax system and for the mainstreaming of equality in the EU development cooperation. Before Oxfam, she was at Transparency International in Italy, where she was in charge of research and raising awareness on anti-corruption and transparency in the public sector. Her academic background is in political science and development economics.

Lucia Pradella

Lucia Pradella is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at King's College London, where she is the Vice-President of the UCU branch. She has published extensively on labour, migration, imperialism, and new workers' movements. She wrote two monographs on Marx's Capital and coedited The Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism.

Baba Aye

Baba Aye is the Health and Social Sector Officer of Public Services International (PSI), the global union federation of 30 million public sector workers worldwide. He is also Co-president of the Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2). Baba is an eco-socialist, poet, former Deputy National Secretary of Labour Party (Nigeria) and contributing editor of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE).  

Julia Chukwuma

Julia Chukwuma is a Lecturer in Economics at the Open University. She holds a PhD in Economics from SOAS and works on the political economy of health policy development and implementation, and global efforts to achieve Universal Health Coverage. She has worked with UNICEF’s social policy and emergency teams in Burundi, Mali and Senegal.