Paul Sellers
The debate on flexible working and homeworking has been hotting up this week. The CBI’s Autumn Economic Statement, which was published on Monday, argues that there has been a huge increase in homeworking in recent years. However, according to the official Labour Force Survey, there has been some increase in the number of employees who can work from home but it has been relatively modest.
Adam Lent
On the same day that George Osborne writes an open letter to the TUC urging trade unions join the Tory big tent, he also announces that he will give backing to the Government’s welfare reforms. The depth of union hostility to these reforms is very deep. They mark a major shift towards workfare and as Richard Exell explains in an earlier post workfare isn’t good for the unemployed or for those in low paid roles whose job security is threatened by workfare schemes. The suspicion has to be that the new found Conservative affection for trade unions is skin deep.
Adam Lent
You would have thought that given the fuss over the non-dom tax reforms introduced in the last Budget that the hedge funds had all left long before the August rains. In reality, so few have gone, it’s still front page news in the FT when a hedgie quits for Switzerland. Next time, we hear the City is planning a “mass exodus”, we’ll book a small minicab.
Richard Exell
Chancellor, we all know how fond you are of puppies. This one, for instance. Spot’s such a cute bundles of helplessness, who couldn’t adore him? But if your next Budget doesn’t deliver for children in poverty, Spot certainly won’t be wagging his tail any more …
OK, it isn’t going to happen.
When Alastair Darling starts his speech to Congress I’m not going to leap onto the stage, holding the Andrex puppy hostage.
I guess I just don’t have what it takes to be a proper terrorist.
But I do know that I care about child poverty, more than anything else in politics; care enough to get obsessed.
Nigel Stanley
The CBI cannily time their annual labour market survey to the opening day of the TUC congress. Sometimes it’s what we in the communications trade call a spoiler – an attempt to muscle in on the natural media attention paid to the TUC (and of course sometimes the TUC does the same with the annual CBI conference – so no particular complaints there.)
But they have done it very straight this year and led with claims that employers are getting more flexible. Clearly something is happening if this year’s report shows real differences from last years, and that is undoubtedly welcome.
However this survey is no scientific measure of the UK workplace in 2008. The full report is a little vague about the methodology, but it is clearly a postal survey and the results are based on the forms that are returned, with some weighting to reflect the UK’s economic structure.
It is doubtful whether any of the employers of Britain’s two million vulnerable workers most in need of better legal protection returned survey forms even if they were sent to them and so this is a survey of Britain’s better employers, looking through rose-tinted glasses at today’s world of work.
Adam Lent
Earlier this year, George Bush launched a fiscal stimulus package to get US consumers spending again. It had the full backing of Democrats in Congress. Indeed Democrats (and John McCain apparently) are now pushing for a second round of stimulus but Bush is resisting. By my calculations, the package was worth about £650 on average to 130 million US taxpayers. In practice, a middle earning American family with two kids received a tax rebate cheque for about £1,000.
Pamphlet #4: Do the Super-Rich Matter?
It’s the controversy that is becoming symbolic of a wider debate about the future direction of the UK. Should we be ‘intensely relaxed’ about the super-rich, as Peter Mandelson claimed?
Or are they symptomatic of something fundamentally wrong with Britain? Do the Super-Rich Matter? forensically analyses the impact the wealthiest are having on our wellbeing. It reveals an economy increasingly skewed to serve the interests of a tiny minority and a society losing touch with a basic sense of fairness.
Philip Pearson
Back in the Spring, the TUC’s Budget submission called for a windfall tax on energy companies. According to Ofgem, the energy regulator, the electricity industry will benefit from a windfall profit of around £9 billion from the free allocation of their emission permits from 2008 to 2012. A tidy profit with permits worth 24 euros a tonne. The sector made substantial windfall gains from emissions permits in the first phase of emissions trading that in finished 2007 – one estimate for the former DTI suggested £800m a year.
Given this windfall profit, we believe the electricity industry has a moral obligation to put something back into society. Of the many competing demands for a slice of this revenue, we highlight tackling fuel poverty and investing in energy infrastructure.
Richard Exell
‘Workfare’ is one of those words, like ‘fascism’ that gets used so often that it can be hard to recognise the real thing when you see it. The New Deal isn’t workfare, and the Work Focused Interviews most claimants now have to attend aren’t either, but the Government’s plans for people who have been unemployed for more than two years are.
Claimants who are unemployed for more than two years will have to work full-time in return for their benefits – almost a dictionary definition of ‘workfare’. Its a long time since I was so angry about a new policy.
Philip Pearson
Have we got our policies right on clean coal? This week I attended a seminar with Dr James Hansen, widely regarded one of the world’s leading climate change scientists. He is visiting the UK to hold a series of meetings with UK politicians, NGOs, trade unions and business leaders – and giving evidence at the Kingsnorth trial hearings.
He is warning that coal is the root of the CO2 problem, responsible for 50% of CO2 in the atmosphere now, and 40% of current emissions. Unless we tackle coal emissions head on, global warming will reach the point of no return. Hence his call for a moratorium on building ‘unabated’ coal-fired power stations – including Kingsnorth.
