Owen Tudor

Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (MPs and Lords) has published a report today (Wednesday 16 December) which looks at how human rights can be improved at the workplace, home and abroad. The Committee criticises the Government for not having a coherent strategy to address the impact on human rights of British business. It is a serious, understated report which makes the case for a long term review of the global human rights impact of British business, but it also makes some immediate points about the domestic scene. It suggests that British industrial relations laws are out of step with our international obligations and, to quote the report, “we doubt the compatibility of the Government’s blacklisting proposals with the UK’s international human rights obligations.” And it says ”we anticipate revisiting this issue.” The TUC welcomed the report.

More broadly, and unambiguously, the Joint Committee notes that

“the right to freedom of association, the associated right to strike, the right to trade union membership and the right to collective bargaining are rights recognised in the international human rights obligations of the UK and overseen by the European Court of Human Rights, the ILO and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the ILO Committee of Experts consider that current domestic law on the right to strike and the right to collective bargaining places undue restrictions on those rights.”

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• Daily Express Readers Support Public Sector Pensions!
  Read all about it! Thanks to Unison East Midlands
• Whose mutualism is it anyway?
  Getting the new mutualism in proportion

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Bob Baugh

The US union delegation to COP 15 is twice the size of our delegations to the previous COPs in Bali and Poznan, Poland. Its growth reflects the growth of our interest and engagement as a union movement in climate change. The focus of our efforts with our union brothers and sisters in Copenhagen resonates with our own efforts to shape domestic climate legislations.

Since the beginning of our interventions, the ITUC and its affiliates has had the goal of injecting a social and economic dimension in what had been an environmental discussion. In simple terms, we want a cleaner planet and good jobs. Over the past year the term “a just transition” came to capture the ideas we were promoting in a climate agreement.

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Nigel Stanley

The DWP has today published three documents looking at the potential of collective DC pensions.

For those not up to speed with pensions jargon, DC pensions are those where the employer and/or employee make a defined contribution each month. The size of your eventual pension will depend on not just how much you save, but how well your investments perform and annuity rates when you turn your pension pot into a regular pension income.

In other words the individual saver bears all the risk, unlike salary related defined benefit pensions where the employer bears all the risk.

The idea behind collective DC is that while the risk is still all borne by employees they share that risk in some way. This not only smooths investment volatility, but can also produce a bigger pension as costs may be lower and the individual saver may be no longer have to give up so much return to reduce risk as they come up to retirement.   

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Nicola Smith

I’ve written a guest post at Left Foot Forward today – looking at what is happening with youth unemployment now compared to the 1980s.

As our press release today showed, while young people’s prospects are poor now, they have been much worse. In 1984 there were over 2 million young people not in work or training several years after the recession had finished.

We think the lesson is clear – if current investment in tackling unemployment was cut we could be looking at a repeat of this social disaster.

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John Wood

Good news from our colleague Philip in Copenhagen. The hard work unions have been putting into lobbying prior to and at this climate conference look like they may be paying off. Stay with me for this as it gets a little wonk-ish, but it’s worth it, and we need your help to lobby Ed Miliband over it now!

Unions in the UK and around the world have been lobbying hard to include a concept called “Just Transition” in the negotiating texts, committing the conference to a fairer outcome for vulnerable people. Today, 15 December 2009, Ministers meeting in Copenhagen will have the chance to seal this fairness into the conference outcome. But it is still hanging in the balance.

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Philip Pearson

As snow falls over the city, suddenly, the gloom lifts! This email has just arrived from co-ordinator Anabella to the ITUC delegation:

Friends,
A new draft text for the final outcome of the whole work of the UN’s Ad hoc Working Group on Long-term Co-operative Action (AWG LCA), and guess what, the Just Transition and Decent Work (JT/DW) wording is in! It is not anymore under the shared vision, but in the preamble of the UN text. This is excellent news!

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Brendan Barber

We’re glad to see the Court of Appeal today uphold an Employment Appeal Tribunal ruling that a council registrar could not refuse to conduct same-sex civil partnerships for religious reasons.

Lillian Ladele had taken the case to the court after controversial rulings at the original Employment Tribunal and first appeal.

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Philip Pearson

I wake at 5am today, recalling the indignation of yesterday and lines from Seamus Heany’s poem, From the Republic of Conscience:

….At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office…

The UN decided yesterday to virtually exclude civil society assembled here from the final closing ceremony for Heads of State, on Friday. Wider inclusion has been a positive feature of previous climate conferences, where the assembly of NGOs provides an atmosphere of accountability and first-hand engagement right through to the finale.

Chaos reigns here, from our standpoint as Observers. We queue eight hours for passes to get into the conference. Progress everywhere seems stalled. At our morning meeting, Anabella Rosemberg from the ITUC summarised that there seems to be a terrible vacuum with many options that have not been cleared up.

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Philip Pearson

Back at work today in the Copenhagen conference centre. Thousands queuing outside for passes the in freezing weather. The UN has now imposed strict limits on numbers at the conference, which will tighten daily. By Friday there will be just 90 passes for the many thousands of us non-government delegates to attend the final closing heads of state plenary. This news has gone down really badly. In better news, the US delegation has shown a constructive willingness to work with our language on paragraph 12 of the Shared Vision text: Decent Work and Just Transition.

At our ITUC morning briefing, Cecilia Alexander and Kingsley Ofei-Nkansah used the national delegation slot to raise everyone’s awareness of the challenges of climate change in Africa.

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