Adam Lent
The rise in the minimum wage announced today is small but it is a rise. The strenuous megaphone lobbying by the business associations to freeze the minimum wage (covered elsewhere on this blog) was faced down. An extra £2.45 per week for a full-time minimum wage worker isn’t a lot but the mean-spirited and economically myopic bunch at the CBI and British Chambers of Commerce would have had it at £0.00p. So a small glimmer within the gloom.
Adam Lent
The City are spreading their usual rubbish about hordes of talented financiers leaving the UK because of the outrageous insertion of fairness into our tax system. If this really is an effect of the new tax rate then we should applaud it. I say this not because I think these people unethical, elitist or even because of their role in the debt mania of the last few years, but because they are dinosaurs.
Owen Tudor
David McNair of Christian Aid has a post on Comment is Free, saying that Obama’s crackdown on tax havens won’t do anything for developing countries. Aside from the observation that it wasn’t meant to, David’s wrong. Any crackdown on tax evasion is a step towards a better global economic system.
What Obama has done throws into sharp focus the issue of tax evasion by major corporates. The precise shape of his measures are defined by the need to do something at national level only. It would undoubtedly be better for developing countries if such measures could be taken multi-laterally, but even so, the impact of Obama’s package will be huge because of the size and global reach of the US economy.
John Wood
Our campaign on LabourSpace.com for minimum tax rates to counter excessive tax avoidance is going round a second time now, and we’ve just had some nice feedback on the page from Ed Miliband:
Nicola Smith
The problem of false self-employment can sound technical. But for those affected it can be catastrophic. Workers who are falsely classified as self-employed can be denied access to the most basic of employment rights, including the minimum wage, holiday leave and pay and sick pay. In addition, nominally self-employed staff are far less likely to be provided with training or to benefit from union representation, leading to poorer health and safety. The problem is particularly prevalent in the construction sector where it is complicated by the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS), which has been shown to provide employers with tax incentives to classify dependent workers as self-employed.
Owen Tudor
I’m blogging from the ILO 90th anniversary event in Admiralty House. A year ago, the ILO was facing a mixture of hostility and indifference from some Governments and employers. Now, with the economic crisis at full throttle, the ILO is back on the global agenda. It has been given a distinct job in the London Summit communique to formulate what is effectively a ‘plan for jobs’.
This echoes the key role the ILO played in the recovery plans after the First and Second World Wars, in combating the economic crises of the 1930s and 1970s, and helping to create free trade unionism in the aftermath of the Cold War.
In these moments of crisis, the value of having the ILO is clear, and it gets given an appropriate role. But in between these crises, some people argue that its work is irrelevant, its Conventions outdated. Maybe if people paid more attention to the ILO outside of crises, those crises could be avoided, prevented or at least mitigated.
Adam has a guest post up on LabourList.org today. The political group blog has turned into UnionList.org for a few days, and has been hosting guest posts from trade unionists to mark May Day, last Friday. In his contribution Adam suggests the Labour party and wider labour movement may be missing a trick in terms of the debate around a new economic vision for the UK. Read it over here…
Owen Tudor
The World Bank has given up attacking workers’ and union rights, and decided to promote ILO conventions instead! This staggering about-turn results from years of lobbying by trade unions and progressive politicians (special respect to Congressman Barney Frank, a personal hero for all sorts of reasons – and now one more.) It is a serious and practical blow to the Washington consensus, because as well as abandoning the rhetoric that stronger workers’ rights and stronger unions are bad for business, the World Bank has told its country offices to stop advising Governments to water down such rights – this was always a bigger issue than what the World Bank said publicly.