All the union news that's fit to blog...
The BEIS Parliamentary Committee reports today on its corporate governance inquiry launched last autumn. There is much to welcome in its recommendations, which span workers on boards and remuneration committees, board diversity, executive pay, private companies, directors’ duties and enforcement….
The Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) is the latest trade association to express serious concerns about how Brexit is being negotiated, with a report setting out the measures needed to sustain the industry – which employs many in the UK, as well as abroad – after Brexit. In…
Cleverly harnessing individual inertia to help workers get a workplace pension has been behind the success of automatic enrolment. But government inertia could put its early success at risk. Under automatic enrolment, workers have to actively opt out o…
Today’s figures confirmed what we already knew: that economic growth in 2016 was entirely reliant on the consumer. We also know that workers are in the middle of an unprecedented decline in real wages (at least since Victorian times). So the inevitable result is lower saving and increased growth in…
This week UNISON challenged the government’s employment tribunal fee policy in the Supreme Court. We’ll have to wait a while for the verdict, but when it comes it could have a huge effect on workers’ abilities to enforce their employment rights. Since July 2013, employment tribunals have…
So much has already been written about the triggering of Article 50, firing the starting gun on two years of negotiations about leaving the European Union. And it was only yesterday. For trade unions, it still seems strange that a Conservative Prime Mi…
Today’s NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB) report stands as a sharp rebuke to the government’s public sector pay policy. Though their recommendation is for pay to remain within the cap, their comments indicate dismay at the havoc the policy is wreaking on the health service. In 2011/12, the government…
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister will trigger Article 50 and fire the starting pistol on negotiations to leave the European Union. The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) has already adopted a statement setting out what unions here and in the res…
The Centre for Policy Studies, which proudly proclaims its links to Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph, is perhaps not a natural ally of the TUC. But its latest proposals on retirement income show that on pensions, good policy proposals based on sound …
With Mother’s Day approaching on Sunday, many of us will be trying to find the perfect gift for our hard-working mums or mother figures. Flowers, chocolates and perfume normally fit the bill. But if Ministers were thinking about really rewarding working mums this Mothering Sunday, then they might…
Whatever way you look at it, this week’s inflation figures illustrate the threat to living standards that result from the fall in sterling after the referendum. Headline inflation in February rose to 2.3%. Last week’s average earnings data for January (regular pay) was 2.3%. Real earnings growth is…
The benefits system needs to be reshaped to better aid older workers is an important conclusion of the Cridland review of state pension age to be published later today. The full report will be published later this morning, so we only have the briefest details. And, to be clear, the TUC doesn’t…
Time was when nothing could be done by the Government or the European Union without a rigorously mapped impact assessment. Almost invariably wielded as a tool by deregulatory zealots to show that workers’ demands would lead to unacceptable burdens on business, I can remember exposing many of…
Yesterday the TUC responded to the European Commission’s consultation on its plans to develop a global version of the notorious Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). ISDS is the court system found in thousands of trade and investment agreements that foreign investors have used to sue…
The North East is becoming England’s hot spot for insecure work with two out of three new jobs in the last five years falling into this category. One in nine workers in the region are now in insecure jobs: seasonal, casual, temporary or agency work, including zero-hours contracts and low-paid…
Pay growth down and inflation up means the lowest real pay growth for more than two years, and the sharpest decline on the month since the global recession in 2009. Average earnings growth slowed to 2.3% in January 2017 from 2.6 % in December Inflation…
This morning the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) reported the findings of a survey that 8% of the construction workforce – about 175,000 people – could be lost to the UK economy as a result of Britain leaving the European Union. That could interfere seriously with the…
Employment is at record levels but despite much talk of economic rebalancing and regional powerhouses, TUC analysis has found that employment growth in London has rocketed ahead of the rest of England since the recession. We also conclude that London has had: the highest growth in employee jobs the…
When Prime Minister Theresa May visited newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump in January, Brexit supporters were cock-a-hoop about how post-Brexit Britain would be at the front of the queue for a trade deal with the US Trade Representative (USTR – not that there was one when Mrs…
Last week’s Budget speech by the Chancellor had very little to say about Brexit. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a Brexit angle – you just have to look at what wasn’t there, rather than what was. First, there was very little in the Budget to prepare for the…