As multiple crises across the world deepen, PSI and its unions continue to organise and mobilize to protect labour rights and improve universal access to quality public services. Increasing threats require greater solidarity, unity and clarity of purpose. Our job is to protect the workers and to ensure that our communities receive the necessary public services.

Growing trade and military conflicts will increase pressure on government budgets, leading to more austerity measures, degradation of public services and further privatisations. This will impact national and local/regional governments, already financially strained.

Key challenges facing the sector include:

• Austerity policies choking public spending

• Privatisation enabling massive capital extraction from public services

• Climate crisis demanding increased investment

• Reduced and redirected development assistance

• Stagnating progress in water and sanitation access

In the water and sanitation sector, the privatisation started under the Thatcher government in 1989, taken up and imposed on many countries through IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies, has proved to be highly problematic from the perspective of workers and users. Many local authorities terminated or refused to renew private concessions contracts which failed to meet the needs of people and planet. And the UK's privatised water utilities are in deep crisis, with the biggest, Thames Water, defaulting on debt payments in 2024, despite paying billions to shareholders since the initial privatisation.

As a result of increasing political resistance from trade unions and community activists – organised as the Global Water Justice Movement – the momentum of privatisation in the sector was slowed by 2010. Regrettably, the momentum has recently increased, but with some new actors and dynamics. Although the World Bank denies that it supports privatisation, it is driving the global paradigm that says public funds should be used to attract (subsidise) private investors into public services. Hence, some of the biggest private equity funds are availing themselves of public funds to facilitate private takeover of public utilities.

PSI continues to support unions struggling against privatisation. But we need systemic reform of the global systems which allow public services to be undermined. We work on the reform the global tax system which allows the wealthy and big corporations to avoid paying their taxes – the key source of public funds. This process is moving forward, thanks to the member states of the African Union who presented a resolution passed at the UN General Assembly to reform the global tax system under the aegis of the UN. This resolution was possible thanks to the work of unions and civil society allies to pressure all levels of government.

Many countries will also need debt relief, as they assumed massive debts during the Cold War and decolonisation, such that they now pay more in interest to northern banks than they do for many public services. Northern banks and investors continue to resist this demand for debt relief.

Along with supporting unions to resist privatisation, we are helping some of the most downtrodden workers to organise into unions and defend themselves. These are the sanitation workers who empty the pit latrines full of human excrement, often with no tools other than a bucket and shovel, and with no personal protective equipment. Although they are fulfilling a fundamental social need to keep our cities and towns safe, they are discriminated, ostracised and denied their human rights. We are working with the Dutch labour federation FNV, the ILO and many unions to bring our strength to sanitation workers.