Touchstone blog is no longer publishing new content, as we’ve moved the TUC’s new policy blog content to our main website. You can read new blogs from the TUC at www.tuc.org.uk/blogs. Thanks for being a Touchstone blog reader over the years and we hope you will also find our new blogs…Read more…
Struggling workers are skipping meals to make ends meet
Imagine you get home from work today and something’s broken. It doesn’t really matter what it is. Something’s up with the car, or the fridge isn’t actually keeping anything cold, or maybe the ceiling’s leaking. Regardless, something needs sorting and it’s going to cost you £500. Do you reckon you’d…Read more…
Science after #Brexit needs action, not just aspiration
Fifteen months on from the EU referendum, the government will today set out its aspiration to continue contributing to EU science programmes. As the entire STEM community has repeatedly asked for clarity of direction, we can all be pleased about this. …Read more…
Why the new world of pension freedom won’t solve the old problem of retirement income
There’s been a lot of talk about the ‘new world’ of pension freedom. But there’s nothing novel about what people need when they retire. Most require an income to replace their wage, just as they always have. So-called pensions freedom is one of ex-Chancellor George Osborne’s great gifts to the…Read more…
McDonald’s workers’ requests are reasonable – they deserve to be met
We are not asking for a lot. We are asking to be treated with respect, have guaranteed hours, and to be paid a decent living wage of £10 that we can afford to live on. It’s all very reasonable when you actually think about it. These are the words of Lewis Baker, one of the…
The post…Read more…
Enough about highly-paid footballers, let’s focus on the low-paid workers
The transfer window finally came to a close last Thursday. As ever, it was charactertised by a lot of headlines about wages. At the TUC, we’re a fan of wages being in the news – but in Premier League football, it’s not low wages that are making headlines. Real wages have been falling for…Read more…
Let’s help families achieve the balance that works for them
Working Families and workplace solutions expert Bright Horizons track key issues for working parents in our annual Modern Families Index. In 2016, we highlighted how millennial parents are feeling at work (prone to burn out and desperate for a better work-life balance); and in 2017 we warned the…Read more…
3 employment rights that aren’t working for young mums and dads. And 2 rights that they should have.
Today we’re publishing the findings from our research with over 1,000 young mums and dads. We wanted to know what young mums and dads thought about the workplace rights which are supposed to help them manage their childcare. We asked them: If they are aware of three key existing employment rights…Read more…
A missed opportunity – the government’s corporate governance proposals
I have in a blog in The New Statesman, entitled Workers on boards was an enlightened idea – Theresa May should have stuck to it , which sets out the TUC’s comments to the government’s corporate governance proposals, after our initial response described the proposals as feeble. And in…Read more…
Tory peer says Brexit is good for young workers…because they’ll have fewer rights
Once again, a hard Brexiter has let the mask slip on workers’ rights. Speaking to the BBC yesterday, Lord Harris – a multi-millionaire, retail tycoon and Tory peer – claimed that Brexit would ‘give younger people more opportunity’ because they could work longer hours in his shops….Read more…
What’s going on in the economy? Five key charts for September
It’s been a challenging summer for the UK economy with growth slowing, demand declining, business investment stalling and the UK’s balance of trade deteriorating. In happier news employment levels are at a record high, although real wages have continued to decline. So what’s going on in the…Read more…
Over-regulation is not the problem a post-Brexit Britain would face
Yesterday’s report The Economy After Brexit by Economists For Brexit includes a section by Tim Congdon on EU regulation, essentially blaming all the evils of the British economy on excessive red tape and inferring that our economy could do so much better if it were unshackled from it all. The…Read more…
‘Economists for free trade’ contradicted by today’s GDP data
In a provocative piece this week (‘From Project Fear to Project Prosperity’), Professor Patrick Minford made a number of claims about the post-referendum economy. Apparently “the devaluation brought on by Brexit is acting as a powerful stimulus to the economy …”. Here’s how: … switching demand away…Read more…
Cartrouble? sub-prime auto lending hits the real world
Have you ever had a ride in a light blue car? Have you ever stopped to think who’s the slave and who’s the master? Have you ever had trouble with your automobile? Have you ever had to push push push push? Car trouble oh yeah. Adam Ant For those of a certain age, it turns…
The…Read more…
Rising employment shouldn’t distract from the living standards crisis
Recent headline job numbers tell a welcome story of rising employment but they mask a growing living standards crisis. The latest figures show employment has reached a new record of 75.1% and the unemployment rate is just 4.4%. But workers are feeling …Read more…
Why on earth have social care workers not been getting the National Minimum Wage?
Enforcement of the NMW for sleep-ins temporarily suspended in social care Last month the government announced it was waiving historic financial penalties and temporarily suspending enforcement of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) for workers required to ‘sleep-in’ on their employer’s premises…Read more…
Why we should still be worried about zero-hours contracts
The ONS release on the number of zero-hours contracts yesterday showed that there has a been a fall of 20,000 over the year. This is the first fall we have seen in the data series. However, at 2%, this is a drop in the ocean. There are still around 900,000 of these controversial contracts. Numbers…Read more…
From North to South, no community deserves to be abandoned
Where you are born should have no say on how your life pans out. But the reality of today’s Britain is different. Regional inequalities persist from birth to childhood, to working life and beyond. The North / South divide is not a myth… Your life is likely to be shorter if you’re from the…Read more…
Workplace pensions work: three lessons from today’s ONS stats
More older workers retiring today benefit from decent workplace pensions than ever before according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics. But changes to pension provision mean these gains are in danger of being reversed, and there…Read more…
The government’s decision to privatise enforcement puts profits ahead of security
PCS has launched a campaign to halt the Conservative government’s latest attempt to privatise sensitive work in our justice system. On 1 August, civil servants employed as civilian enforcement officers (CEOs) were told that the work they do enforcing financial fines for the criminal courts, will…Read more…