The Global Financial Crisis has engulfed the finance industry across the world and is being seen as the greatest test of our financial system and our economies since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Members of FSU have long warned about the potential for such a disaster, now it’s time that our governments took heed and listened to finance workers about how we best re-build and re-regulate our industry for the future.

In May this year, the FSU conducted an industry wide forum on the then skills crisis confronting our industry. At that time, many businesses across our industry were concerned about how to find the skilled staff they required to fill jobs. The important outcomes of the discussions that day, particularly how we invest in skills and jobs in our industry, must still be pursued.

But six months is a long time in the finance industry, and the Global Financial Crisis has shifted the emphasis from finding people to fighting to save jobs.

As our politicians scramble to find solutions to provide ongoing confidence in the finance system, our employers are looking to short term cost cutting and opportunistic takeovers. We have already seen significant mergers announcements as the big four banks move on their smaller rivals.

It has become a daily ritual of waking up to news that another finance company has announced another restructure that will cost jobs.

Your union has a different vision of where we need to go as an industry and how we will get through the current crisis. It is a vision that draws on long term thinking and experiences of our membership, not short-term cost cutting that is fuelled by a heavy over emphasis on short term reward structures.

What our industry needs now is to clean up its act and invest in its people. We need better practices in our industry that reduce short term thinking, increase the reputation of our industry as a professional one, reward employees and grow employment opportunities.

Now is the time for governments and regulators to overhaul lending standards, to focus activities on customer and community needs and to extract conditions around employment and skill investment in return for the taxpayer dollars that are underpinning our finance industry.

The year ahead will be a challenge for finance workers. But together we can take advantage of the opportunities that this challenge offers.

We can tackle executive short-term thinking, we can tackle offshoring, we can work towards better practices and we can emphasise the need to invest in jobs and take Australia’s financial services to the world.

Finance Sector Union members will need to raise their voices over the coming year to make sure a better industry emerges. There is no more effective way to do this than to make sure we have many, many more voices join our call.

That is why everyone is better off in the union.