Working people are key to global prosperity and stability

It’s an honour to be at this year’s World Economic Forum's 2025 Annual Meeting as the leader of the US labour movement.

I’m here with a delegation of labour leaders from different sectors and industries across North America. Our labour federation represents 15 million workers across our 61 affiliate unions, and more broadly the voice of workers who don’t yet have a union to call their own.

There is no doubt some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world will be in these rooms at Davos. But it’s critical that the voice of working-class people — teachers, nurses, construction workers, writers, flight attendants, and so many more — is represented here too, and that our message is heard: The status quo is not working for working people.

Walking around Davos, you can’t help but be struck by the big questions being tackled: Can we collectively unite to take on the climate crisis? Can we harness artificial intelligence (AI) to bring prosperity to all of us, instead of letting it destroy us? Can we address ever-increasing levels of global inequality? Can democracy across the world hold up against a rise of fascism and authoritarianism?

These are all critical topics to address. But the solution to these challenges hinges on another question we must solve first: Can we ensure every working person in the world makes a decent living, provides for their family, and is able to live with dignity and respect?

Economic justice for every worker on the planet is the foundational step — the one that will provide us with the mass movement we need to take on these challenges. When workers are given a seat at the table on AI and automation, we create guardrails and strategies to make all of us better off.

When workers see opportunities for good-paying, career-building union jobs in the climate transition, they will help lead the movement for a greener planet. And when workers have hope and belief in their future … they will believe in democracy again, too.

This is not a time for despair. We can see all around us the model for how to move forward: governments, business, educational and research institutions, civil society partners — and labour — working together to respond to these great challenges.

We know what works, and what doesn’t. Deregulation and the destruction of a government’s capacity to act for the common good is not a path to growth – it is a path back to the financial crisis of 2008, back to 2020 when we had no personal protective equipment (PPE) and no vaccines.

An information environment where there is no truth and no accountability is not a path to freedom – it is a path to greater despair. And asking unregulated markets dominated by billionaires and giant corporations to solve climate change or inequality or economic insecurity is to leave those problems unresolved – to let them fester and grow as we have so often since the 1980s until they undermine our democracies and the global order itself.

Working people aren’t going to sit back and let others define our lives. In the United States, labour is on the rise. In a deeply divided country that just split an election 50% to 49%, a massive 71% of US citizens support the labour movement — more than support any other institution in American life. Why? Because they see that joining a union means the path to a better life, and a way to address what workers have been demanding for too long.

We want to be paid fairly for our labour and our productivity. We want economic security, health care we can actually access when we need it, and real pensions that provide dignity and security in our old age.

We want training — knowledge, pathways to career growth and economic security in a fast changing world. We want a healthy workplace, and schedules and working conditions that allow us to lead full lives with our friends and families and in our communities.

And, most of all, we want a voice — in the decisions made in our workplaces that shape our lives, and in the decisions that shape our society.

We want to see policies that reflect those goals. We need full employment. We need regulation of powerful businesses of all kinds — but especially finance and platform companies — to ensure they do not exploit workers or consumers.

We need a fair tax system that can fund the public investment necessary to preserve and build civilization — education, health care, transportation and the fight against climate change. And we need rules for the global economy that reinforce these principles, not undermine them. That means labour and climate standards in our trade rules, and the inclusion of workers’ voices in our multilateral institutions at every level.

In no aspect of global society are these principles more important than in addressing the promise and challenge of technological change, and in particular AI. The US labour movement has shown that we can be part of the solution, through our partnership with Microsoft to bring workers upstream in the development of the technology, and our work with Micron in training the workforce that will make the integrated semiconductors of the future.

This work is founded on the very principles I just laid out: worker voice and power to define the value of our work, comprehensive jointly developed training and career ladders, and public investment of the kind we have seen in the US in energy, infrastructure and chip manufacturing.

As we gather here at Davos, we need leadership of the kind that the World Economic Forum exists to promote: in business, government and labour. Leadership at every level that is prepared to fight for democracy and sustainable economies that work for all; and against racism, sexism, religious discrimination and homophobia; hatred and scapegoating of anyone in our global community.

The path to global prosperity and stability is ours to take if we have the courage and the creativity to do so and to resist appeals to hate and fear, greed and ignorance.

More than any specific policy, it is the work of connecting business, government, nongovernmental organizations and the labour movement in the service of making the global economy work for working people that is that path. That’s what the labour movement is here to do.