What should happen when a company abuses its workers? When, for example, people are injured as a result of working in unsafe conditions, or victimised because they speak up for others? In this country, thanks to the trade union movement, if workers are…Read more…
#TTIP: battle hots up over NHS and workers’ rights
EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom was in London yesterday, and there was a lot of talk about the EU-US trade deal known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). In particular, as has been the case for months, the hot topic wa…Read more…
Germans showing solidarity with Greeks
If you get your news from the papers or broadcasters, you’d think that the dispute over Greek austerity and debt is a national struggle between (primarily) Greece and Germany. In reality, of course, this is simplistic and wrong. The German government – and in particular the CDU members…Read more…
#Show the love… Ask First Minister to act on climate change
Love is in the air this week…love for everything that climate change threatens.
And Stop Climate Chaos Scotland (SCCS) is asking us all to tell First Minister Nicola Sturgeon that we believe a new global climate deal must be agreed at United Nations talks in Paris in December this year.
In the new Show the Love campaign, members and supporters of SCCS members across Scotland, includingRead more…
The Greek election result demands our solidarity
Syriza’s spectacularly successful election campaign was described as being about hope. The Greek people have shown faith in that campaign. Their courage, their defiance and their optimism have given us a true lesson in democracy in the country that invented the system so many centuries ago. They…Read more…
Why is BusinessEurope doing the banks’ dirty work?
BusinessEurope, the body which represents employers’ organisations around Europe (the CBI is its UK member) wrote last week to European Union finance ministers in a last ditch attempt to derail the European financial transactions tax (FTT, aka the Robin Hood Tax) that a group of Eurozone…Read more…
Syriza’s impact on Europe: forget what the ‘serious people’ say
Paul Krugman is apparently bemused by the comparative performances of the US and European economies. The US, allegedly the home of responsible and prudent public finances, has outperformed the EU (and especially the eurozone) by deploying spendthrift, …Read more…
European bankers not pleased at French boost for Robin Hood Tax
On Monday, Finance Ministers from EU member states will meet for the first time since French President Francois Hollande instructed his Finance minister to stop obstructing the Austro-German push for a broad-based financial transactions tax (FTT) , and…Read more…
The 7 Deadly Myths that control the world economy…
Global Justice Now has done a great job in highlighting the 7 arguments that are presented as the deepest wisdom by Global Leaders on why the world economy is the way it is. Like a force of nature or…Read more…
Could the Greeks bring us gifts this Sunday?
This Sunday, the Greek people go to the polls in what must be one of the most important elections not just for Greece but for Europe as a whole. What is at stake is the future of democratic control of the economy, and the European establishment’s love affair with austerity. Nowhere in Europe…Read more…
What more will it take to get corporate courts out of the EU-US trade deal?
This week, the European Commission finally released the results of the consultation forced on it nearly a year ago about Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the EU-US trade deal. While …Read more…
IMF: looking on the bright side, or the ‘right side’?
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) doesn’t have a fantastic reputation around the world for the damage it did to developing and Asian economies during the years of the neoliberal ‘Washington consensus’. Confessing to getting its analysis of the Greek economy catastrophically…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…
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…
Don’t let UKIP panto take the spotlight off low pay and exploitation
In the last few weeks we all seem to have been given tickets to an extended UKIP panto complete with a string of offensive racist/sexist/homophobic/fill in the blank one-liners and a gay donkey. While the papers are having a field day with this silly season, it shouldn’t distract us from the…Read more…
Who’s really in favour of #ISDS?
The investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in the proposed trade deal between the EU and the USA (TTIP) are the most controversial part of the deal. And they appear in all new trade negotiations, like the one between the EU and Canada (CET…Read more…
CBI on TTIP: a policy based on faith and avoiding their critics
The CBI’s top leaders were in Brussels today along with the Prime Minister to help him put ‘rocket boosters’ under the increasingly unpopular Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the USA. They gathered a range of business organisations across…Read more…
Women who flee sexual violence abroad need rights in the UK
This week sees the start of a campaign by the Women’s Asylum Charter whose 350 supporters include the TUC, ASLEF Women’s Committee, GMB, NAPO, NASUWT, NUT, PCS Women’s Forum and Unison. In supporting this Charter, the TUC and its member unions are standing up for the rights of women who come to…Read more…
Italian unions strike: #stopjobsact
Italian unions, led by the TUC’s sister organisation the CGIL, have been taking to the streets – including a general strike on Friday – to oppose reforms of the labour market being proposed by the centre-left government of Matteo Renzi. They say they are defending workers’…Read more…
Italian unions stage General Strike in defence of workplace rights
Yesterday Italian unions staged a General Strike in protest at the Jobs Act which seeks to deregulate employment rights by weakening national bargaining and removing protections against unfair…Read more…