Richard Exell

Some years ago, a man fell off the top of the Empire State Building. Eyewitnesses in offices on the way down said he had a strangely complacent smile on his face; as he hurtled past, some heard his last words:

“So far, so good, so far, so good, so far…”

Employment statistics are notoriously a ‘lagging indicator’ of what is happening to an economy. Even so, quite a few economists are surprised at the contrast between the growth figures that have dwindled to zero and the figures for the labour market, which continue to show record employment levels and employment rates still just short of 75 per cent – very high, by European standards.

Why haven’t the employment figures started to reflect the downturn that is already affecting sales and investment?

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Adam Lent

This is what makes the current political situation so frustrating.  Reading this week’s editorial in The Spectator, it is clear that the right haven’t got anything coherent or of any interest to say on the economy. The genius who wrote this rejects calls for fairer taxes to revive the public finances.  The alternative: cut government waste and cut taxes on business.  That tiresome old guff won’t win us a sustainable economic revival and, under normal circumstances, it shouldn’t win any votes.

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Adam Lent

Extraordinary intervention by David Blanchflower.  I’ve been thinking what to say about his comments but he pretty much says it all.

Blanchflower is often described as an inflation ”dove” by reporters suggesting that he thinks growth is more important than rising prices.  He rejects that arguing that the Bank’s remit is to prevent inflation falling below the 2% target as well as preventing it overshooting.  He has argued consistently that the UK economy is heading for such tough times that we face a deflationary not an inflationary threat next year and given that interest rate changes take months to have their full impact the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) should be focused on that threat.

He’s been a lone voice on the MPC in recent months but with a slew of very bad news yesterday and today, the views of the other members may begin to shift his way.  If they don’t, the credibility of the MPC in its current form will be severely strained.

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Adam Lent

Here we go again.  Struggling investment fund Hendersons Group is moving its HQ to Ireland to escape the barbaric way we tax businesses in the UK.  That just adds to the vast flow of firms that the City and the CBI repeatedly tell us will quit.  Er, in fact, just three this year.  Maybe they’ll all be on the boat with that fearful crowd of non-dom refugees who seem to be taking a mighty long time to book their tickets to Switzerland.

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Nicola Smith

The World Health Organisation has reported that it is within the possibilties of public policy to reduce health inequalities within a generation. A key part of their proposed solution is ‘Fair Employment and Decent Work’. Given the Conservative Party’s recent interest in highlighting the ongoing inequalities in UK health, I look forward to hearing their committments around this fair employment agenda.

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Adam Lent

The broadcast media this morning are spinning the pay figures from Income Data Services as a sign that inflation is now driving up wages.  They’ve even found some ill-informed and/or self-interested pundits to claim this is the case.  As I posted yesterday, the figures don’t show this at all.  There’s a very balanced report on the Financial Times site which pretty much agrees with my post yesterday.  In fact, The Daily Mail has spun in completely the opposite direction to the broadcast media stating that the pay data shows that workers are “paying the price” for the credit crunch with below inflation pay rises.

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Nicola Smith

Jeremy Paxman is appalled that middle class white men are facing ongoing discrimination in the television industry.  As the Fawcett Society has noted, the problem doesn’t exist in the first place, and unsurpsisingly it is women working in the media who are in the minority. 

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Adam Lent

The latest figures from Income Data Services show that pay settlements between April and July represented a 3.5% rise in salaries. Hardly inflation busting.

The figures also show how diverse and responsive the UK’s pay bargaining process now is, with some sectors, such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals settling at around 4.5% while retail and the not-for-profit sectors are sticking at a belt-tightening 3%.  As IDS point out, there are inflationary pressures on pay but these are being held at bay by the slowdown.

So while the Bank of England holds interest rates fearful of runaway inflation and ministers bang on about the need to avoid that wage-price spiral, in the real world pay is holding steady well below price rises.  It’s probably now time to wake up and start stimulating the economy through interest rate cuts and other measures and stop panicking over home-grown inflation which still remains highly elusive.

Of course, we have to prevent inflationary expectations taking off as well.  But the Government could do its bit here by not raising spectres of the 1970s spiral while using inflation as an excuse to hold down pay in the public sector.

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Nicola Smith

Women are more likely than men to be paid less than the minimum wage, and migrant women the most likely of all. As The Guardian has reported, research we published last week leads us to believe that around 35,000 newly arrived women accross the UK are facing illegal poverty wages. This isn’t surprising – evidence of mistreatment is strong. However, the Government’s strategy for proactive, preventative employment rights enforcement is not.  

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Nigel Stanley

Welcome to the ToUChstone blog. This is an informal blog by TUC staff about policy issues that are in the news, or that ought to be.

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