Owen Tudor

The TUC website doesn’t as a rule reproduce material appearing elsewhere on the web: a sensible precaution against both the proliferation of repeats, and the repeating of errors. But it does mean that people who use the TUC website (for instance, British trade unionists) don’t necessarily see useful material produced by the international trade union organisations that they are, through the TUC, paying for. And in a global crisis, that can mean missing a lot of really good stuff. Like what the ITUC and ETUC are saying at Davos, for instance.

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• Jon Cruddas calls for more strategy and fewer initiatives
  - a view not that dissimilar from those expressed here.

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Alice Hood

Interesting to see international insurers and fund managers Aviva (they of the new name….) talking tough about executive pay, warning that there must be a moratorium on directors’pay rises, and criticising directors for paying ‘little more than lip service’ to employee pay and conditions.  They also raise the spectre of excessive executive pensions, urging companies to compare the benefits available to directors and staff.  They must have read the joint statement issued by the TUC and partners last week, and maybe our PensionsWatch report too!

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Adam Lent

It used to be the case that those who engaged in debate about tax havens fell into three categories:  those who thought they were morally indefensible and should be closed down, those who thought they were morally indefensible but didn’t think anything could be done about it, and those who thought tax havens provided a useful service to the wealthy and to the global economy.

It is a measure of how much has changed since the financial crisis in September that this debate has been transformed.  Tax havens are recognised now not just as a moral outrage but also as a key cause of the crisis itself.  The vast bubble in debt trading that has been central to the crisis was fundamentally linked to tax havens with the ‘special purpose vehicles’ which were set up to hold the proceeds of securitisation initiatives being based as a matter of course in locations such as the Cayman Islands.  The important point being that this not only took such trading out of tax liabilities but also removed it from regulatory oversight due to the secrecy that deliberately shrouds financial activity in havens.

So the TUC report today which reveals that four of the five big banks have 1,207 subsidiaries incorporated in tax havens will ring alarm bells across the world. The report could not analyse HBOS because the bank failed to list its subsidiaries or their location in either its annual return or company accounts.  This may be a breach of company law.

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• The white working class; Britain’s forgotten race victims?
  An interesting new Runnymede report asks 8 authors to respond to the growing debate about the white working class.
  (tags: Runnymedetrust whiteworkingclass)
• Policy Network : Rethinking migration: work and welfare in a mobile economy
  An interesting critique of the UK's approach from a 'third way' think tank

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Nigel Stanley

Today’s ICM poll for the Guardian will not make happy reading in Downing Street. While no-one should take much notice of a single poll’s figures for voting intention, it looks like there are some interesting findings in the small print, even if the raw data on which poll junkies like me feed does not appear to have been published yet. (It will no doubt appear on the ICM website in due course.)

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Owen Tudor

The TUC shares the widely held view that the BBC and Sky have taken the wrong decision in refusing to screen the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for humanitarian aid for Gaza, although it’s clearly right that, as Andy Burnham says, it’s a decision that broadcasters should take, not government. But that shouldn’t stop people disagreeing with or publcily criticising the BBC and Sky for their decisions. Avaaz.org have launched an online petition to “Tell the BBC: stop blocking Gaza aid” and the TUC encourages people to support it – we’d also support protests to Sky, but as the main public service broadcaster the BBC is the top priority. BBC unions BECTU and the NUJ have protested as well.

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Nicola Smith

Yesterday The Times reported that women were losing their jobs twice as fast as men. This was on the basis that the most recent labour market data show that from Sept-Nov 2008 the female full-time employment rate fell by 53,000 compared to the male full-time employment rate (which fell by 36,000). In our view this isn’t strong evidence that women are losing jobs at twice the male rate. And there are a number of reasons: an increase in part-time employment among women; a higher male redundancy rate; and a higher male unemployment rate. In addition the broader trend over recent months (as opposed to the rolling quarter in this release) shows that male employment has been falling faster.

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• Pension fund spin
  Tom P has an interesting take on the predictions of imminent pension fund demise
  (tags: pensions)

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Nicola Smith

Read the TUC Recession Report for January 2009

Today we have published our third Recession Report. We conclude that it is very unlikely that prospects for employment will improve before the summer at the earliest, and that compared with a year ago unemployment is higher for both men and women, for every age group and for every region except Northern Ireland.

We also include analysis of the impact that the recession is having on manufacturing, and on how women may be affected by this downturn.

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