In 2012 the government closed down the subsidy for the disabled workers in more than fifty Remploy factories around the country. By September 2013 all but three had closed; the GMB estimates that 2,700 workers lost their jobs. Some of those weren’t disabled; the House of Commons library estimates…Read more…
Employers named and shamed for not paying – a warning for retail.
The government has today named another 37 employers who have failed to pay the proper minimum wage. Between them they owed £177,000 to their workers* This brings the total named this year to 92. It is good to see those who don’t meet the legal minimum requirement being publicly named in this…Read more…
Unions join condemnations of Thai prison labour plans
The TUC has joined a coalition of 43 union and human rights organisations condemning the regime in Thailand for a planned pilot project recruiting prisoners to fill labour shortages in the…Read more…
Core inflation is very far from “relatively stable”
There’s a lot of “good deflation” stories in the media today. (‘Almost certainly’ so, according to the FT.) One of the common themes sets the large fall in headline inflation against a rise on the month in ‘core’ inflation (i.e. inflation excluding energy,…Read more…
Wall Street or Main Street? US Democrats plan ‘high-roller fee’
For years we’ve been told that a Robin Hood Tax in Europe or the UK won’t work because the US will never implement one. That day is, admittedly, still a way off. But this week, senior Democrats in the House of Representatives took a massive step forward, with the senior Democrat on the…Read more…
Deutsche Bank U-turn on deflation
At 0.5%, CPI inflation in December fell below the consensus forecast (0.7%) and way below the Bank of England’s November Inflation Report forecast for 1.0%. This is approaching deflationary territory, and I set out my own views yesterday. Understandably the government is desperately trying to…Read more…
Time for energy democracy
How much more coal, oil and gas including shale gas can we continue to burn and still have a 50:50 chance of keeping the rise in global average temperatures below 2 degrees C? The Coalition’s Infrastructure Bill would make it legally binding on government to “Maximise the economic…Read more…
Teachers want for themselves what they give their pupils – frequent opportunities to learn
Dr Mary Bousted is general secretary of ATL and AMiE. Michael Barber recently opined that teachers are ‘semi-professional’. He argued that the profession remains heavily unionised (obviously a bad…Read more…
TUC Aid Appeal for Gaza
Before last years conflict, TUC Aid had supported a project in Gaza at the Beit Lahia Plant Nursery. The idea behind the initiative was to grow fresh food both to enhance the diet of people in…Read more…
19 days pay a year lost through missed lunch breaks
Long live the lunch break – its under pressure and its worth defending. Work would be a more stressful and boring place without it and less productive too. Yet a new study* commissioned by a well-known cheese manufacturer published today suggested that UK workers skipping their lunch break…Read more…
Nous sommes Charlie: Journalists show solidarity in Paris
Visiting the site close to the Charlie Hebdo offices along with NUJ assistant general secretary Seamus Dooley, it was impossible not to be instantly moved by the mounting tributes and memorials to…Read more…
Mark Carney’s letter to George Osborne: What might it say?
When the British economy misses the inflation targets set by the Chancellor, the Governor of the Bank of England has to write him a letter explaining the reasons. It looks like we’re on course to miss tomorrow – for the first time below rather than above target. Here’s what I’ve imagined Mark…Read more…
Hadi Saleh’s legacy, ten years on
Today is the tenth anniversary of martyrdom of Hadi Saleh, international officer of the Iraqi trade union movement and my close friend. The union centre he represented, now known as the GFITU, is…Read more…
Underpaying the minimum wage & exploiting migrants
The shocking news that the number of bad bosses who underpay the minimum wage to young workers has risen dramatically in the last few years has implications for the continuing debate about migration in the UK: here’s why. One of the main concerns that working people have about immigration…Read more…
50 per cent more young people cheated out of minimum wage since 2010 – new government figures shock
The government today published new estimates for non-compliance with the national minimum wage*. These show a shocking increase in the number of employees aged 16-20 underpaid, up from 67,000 in 2010 to 102,000 now, which amounts to a 52 per cent rise. In itself, this figure shows that the TUC was…Read more…
Cameron’s NHS “crisis, what crisis?” moment
In response to the growing and widely reported crisis in A&E across the NHS in England, David Cameron dismissed trade union “scaremongering” and referred to the issue as “short-term pressure”. Let’s recap the issues that David Cameron describes as “short-term pressure”: A financial situation…Read more…
Saving Our Safety Net Fact of the Week: men in the richest areas live nine years longer than men in the poorest areas
If, like me, your New Year’s Resolution was to switch to a healthier lifestyle you may have been thinking a lot about life expectancy. (I wonder how many people had a look at the Death Clock at the start of the year!) And that’s what prompted me to think about poverty and inequality and life…Read more…
Point the pensions horse in the right direction
The festive season may be over but UK pensions policy continues to pull in two directions like a comedy pantomime horse. It seems that Pensions Minster Steve Webb had his eggnog spiked by his market-obsessed Treasury colleagues because his first post-Christmas outing was to propose a new trade in…Read more…
Iraqi unions build protest on jobs, wages and union rights
2015 began with a fresh new wave of industrial action across Iraq (apart from Iraqi Kurdistan) organised by the national trade union centre, the GFITU. The action centred on several demands,…Read more…
Planned future spending cuts return us to the Geddes Axe of the 1920s
On the basis of the OBR projections for future spending cuts, the only more severe consolidation in over a century was the Geddes Axe of 1921-23. That these disastrous policies are the nearest precedent for any prospective economic action beggars belief.Read more…