The plan proposes a radical restructuring of the global economy to ensure fair income for all, achieve rapid decarbonization through renewable energy, and reduce working hours while shifting resources from polluting, consumption-driven sectors toward essential public services like health, education, and energy.

Public service unions are uniquely positioned to engage with, contribute to, and help realise this transformative vision.

Key pillars include:

• Global Income Convergence: Achieving a target per-capita monthly income of €5,000 across all nations, effectively closing today’s 16-fold global income gap.

• Wealth Redistribution: Increasing the bottom 50% of the global population’s share of total wealth from 2% to 30%, while reducing the billionaire class’s share from 6% to just 0.05%.

• Time and Prosperity: Enabling nearly 90% of the world’s population to double their income while working roughly half of today’s labour hours.

• Ecological Sufficiency: Measures which could limit global warming to 1.8°C  by 2100; a stark contrast to the 4.5°C projected under current policies.

• Just Transition: A model that combines rapid decarbonization with reduced labour hours, lower material consumption, and profound transformations in food systems, land use, and forest cover.

• A New Global Justice Fund:  to support massive global investment averaging 10.3% of world GDP annually between 2030 and 2060 (compared to less than 0.4% currently allocated to development aid). This would be financed via a global wealth tax, a world sovereign wealth fund, and a global income tax targeting the world’s wealthiest individuals.

• Democratic Reform: Driving a comprehensive transformation and democratization of the international economic and monetary system to better serve the global majority.

This platform offers offers a concrete alternative to the status quo, demonstrating that a good life for the 99%  can be achieved through coordinated global action and good, progressive public policies.

Matthieu Fayolle of CFDT Interco who attended the report launch with the PSI delegation said: “After years of debate about austerity, budget cuts, and the lack of resources for public services, it is encouraging to hear concrete, positive solutions grounded in social justice.”

Among the policies are expanded taxes on the mega rich and billionaires, such as those proposed by Gabriel Zucman, who contributed to the report. PSI is working with Zucman and FES to advance such proposals with unions across the world.

Fayolle said: The Zucman tax will eventually be adopted in France, unless the far right comes to power, as many billionaires around the world hope, in order to halt progressive movements for social justice and democracy. The debate about wealth redistribution to fund public services is fundamentally a debate about democracy and the kind of society we want to build. As trade unionists, we need to engage with this work because it is about choosing between two paths: a world with greater equality, universal access to public services, and sustainable development, or a world marked by division, rising inequality, brutality, authoritarianism, and repression.”

Public services, unions and workplace democracy are key

The plan includes a massive investment programme to build high-quality public services for lower- and middle-income households, in both rural and urban areas, as the most effective means of tackling inequality The research exposes how rising social inequalities since the 1980s and 1990s have been accompanied in many countries by growing territorial inequalities, particularly between rural areas, small towns, and large metropolises. These inequalities stem from unequal access to public services—notably higher education, healthcare, transport, energy, and other public services—as well as from differences in sectoral and occupational structures and exposure to trade.

Another strategic area is workplace democracy; including a stronger voice for workers and enhanced opportunities to negotiate better wages and working conditions. The Report refers to examples such as the co-determination arrangements in place in Germany and the Nordic countries since the 1950s, under which workers’ representatives hold up to 50% of voting rights on corporate boards in large companies. It argues that similar arrangements could be extended to all countries and companies.

The Report also highlights the case of Sweden, which used to be among the most plutocratic countries in the early twentieth century, but where popular mobilisation and a well-organised labour movement played a leading role in the transition to democracy and the adoption of progressive social policies. Far-reaching institutional transformations and policy changes can occur within relatively short periods when social pressures for change become sufficiently strong. The social-democratic agenda—including the expansion of public expenditure from less than 10% of GDP to around 40–50% of GDP over the course of the twentieth century, the sustained growth of public services, and the gradual decommodification of large parts of the economy—became broadly accepted within a few decades.

The findings acknowledge that this vision can only be achieved by building a powerful citizen movement -including trade unions and and political parties - that are sufficiently organised and effective. Conversely, the plan provides unions and other collective organisations with an actionable policy platform to tackle the glbal challenges of development and climate change, trade and international relations, and, more broadly, the transformation of the global economic and financial system to advance social justice.

How Can This Vision Be Achieved?

This is not a utopian policy plan: the Global Justice Project demonstrates through economic modelling that a sustainable and equitable future is entirely achievable through progressive public policies. By securing national majorities, governments can adopt a dual strategy of pre-distributive and post-redistributive policies. Pre-distributive measures—such as strengthening collective bargaining, establishing living minimum wages, and expanding social security—would ensure fair initial income distribution. Simultaneously, robust post-redistributive fiscal policies would curb extreme wealth accumulation and finance humanity’s common needs and public services, and heal the planet.

A cornerstone of this vision is the creation of a Global Social Justice Solidarity Fund. This mechanism would be financed by capping and progressively redistributing extreme wealth, directing those resources toward collective needs and public goods. Top-end progressive taxation on income and wealth plays a pivotal role, serving a dual purpose: financing new public expenditures and improving modest households' access to housing and credit.

Ultimately, the Global Justice Report  offers citizens, unions, parliaments, and international bodies a factual basis to debate, contest, and determine the trajectory of the coming decades.

The goal is to build the necessary majorities to pass the laws and policies required to implement this transformative plan.

PSI delegation present at the launch

The launch of the report was accompanied by a series of inspiring discussion panels and the presentation of 235 related papers – including some on the critical role the public sector, industrial policies, workplace democracy and democratic ownership can play.  Contributors included Lucas Chancel, Ha-Joon Chang, Jean Drèze, Isabel Ferreras, Jayati Ghosh, Jason Hickel, Mariana Mazzucato, Branko Milanović, Thomas Piketty, Ingrid Robeyns, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lea Ypi, and Gabriel Zucman Piketty, Zucman and Ghosh are members of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), of which PSI is a founder and co-president.

Representatives from PSI staff and from French affiliate CFDT Interco attended the launch and engaged with progressive researchers and speakers. Through their interventions and discussions, they highlighted the relevance of this work for trade unions and stressed the need to further develop its public services dimension. PSI allies including Tax Justice Network and Oxfam were also present.

Speakers outlined ways in which countries can proceed to compress their income distribution include progressive income and wealth taxation, minimum wage policies, pay scale regulations in the public and private sectors, co-determination and workers’ representation on corporate boards, limitations on the voting rights of individual shareholders in large corporations, support for collective bargaining and trade unions, and many other tools.

Daria Cibrario, PSI Senior Policy Officer, said: “This plan gives us hope. It incorporates a labour dimension and aligns closely with our social justice, tax justice, and reclaiming public services strategies. We are interested in disseminating the plan and its findings among our global network of affiliates to stimulate debate and contribute our vision and collective agency to advancing this agenda for social progress.”

Where to find the report and how to engage?

The report is available on a dedicated website that outlines the distributional pathways and climate scenarios.

The Global Justice Project is a collective research initiative developed by the World Inequality Lab. It aims to provide a platform to stimulate research, policymaking, and citizen engagement to shape a fairer, more democratic and sustainable 21st century. The project involves a team of 45 contributors. In addition, more than 200 researchers participated in the construction of the World Inequality Database used in this research (see wid.world/team for the full list). The project also relies on newly assembled sources, including the World Sustainable Economy-Environment Database, the World Human Capital Expenditure Database and the World Historical Balance of Payment Database.

This text contains extracts from the Global Social Justice report.