Nigel Stanley

Jeremy Warner has an interesting piece in today’s Telegraph in which he says:

the trickle-down effect that is meant to spring from wealth accumulation has not worked as it should have. Flexible labour markets have delivered big time for bankers and shareholders, but failed to improve the lot of ordinary workers in the same way. In Britain, growth in consumption was funded not by real economic advancement, but by the fool’s paradise of ever-increasing debt.

Now, the excesses of the system have brought fiscal ruin, and the worst economic crisis in 80 years. Yet the bankers have recklessly and arrogantly taken their windfall gains from the massive state support that resulted and paid them out in bumper bonuses. People are angry and getting angrier. And even as ordinary employees are being asked to suffer wage cuts and job losses, executive pay is continuing to rise. Never has the multiple of a chief executive’s remuneration to that of his most lowly employee been so high – in some cases, 400 times the amount.”

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Owen Tudor

The Financial Times’ front page this Saturday morning has a startling headline: “Bankers in favour of paying global tax”! But it’s not as good as it looks. The news from the World Economic Forum in Davos is that several leading global bankers have decided that they need to accept a lesser tax to head off pressure for tougher measures such as breaking up the big banks or levying a tax on financial transactions. But it shows they’re worried!

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Nigel Stanley

It has been interesting to watch how different people have reacted to the new equality report, produced by John Hills and his team.

Of course there has been much confusion about whether we are talking about narrowing inequality of outcomes or inequality of opportunity. These are both desirable and considerably intertwined, but not the same thing at all.

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Nigel Stanley

Alex Brummer spent many years at the Guardian before moving to become city editor of the Daily Mail. He often writes good sense in a paper where I do not always look for it. His latest column for the New Statesman has some insight but is mainly pure essence of Daily Mail - perhaps not surprisingly as it is about pensions, and  public sector pensions in particular.

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Vicki Peacey

At single parent charity Gingerbread, we’ve been researching how single parents’ incomes and spending patterns compare with families with two parents. Our new report ‘Family Finances’ shows that lone parents’ poverty and struggles to get by can’t simply be blamed on bad choices about money.

In doing the research for this report, we were interested in finding out whether single parents were lacking key financial products, and what patterns there were in their attitudes towards money and their ‘financial capability’. We also wanted to know what their priorities were for Government action to improve their financial situation, and how they thought banks and building societies could help.  The report presents the full analysis but here’s some of the highlights.

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Nicola has written for Left Foot Forward about the response from parts of the business lobby to the Government’s introduction of legislation to make the six months of maternity leave transferrable between parents. She disputes that new rights will impose ‘enormous costs’ on employers, and asks:

“If de-regulation is so necessary, why are so many other successful economies surviving with better protection for people at work? If regulation is such a key determinant of economic success, why have the US and the UK suffered so badly in the downturn? The truth is that some of the world’s most productive economies combine good rights at work, strong trade unions and low unemployment. The idea that wealth creation only comes about when few have rights is simply wrong in a modern knowledge economy.”

Read her full post over at Left Foot Forward.

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Nicola Smith

Today we have published our 15th Recession Report.  This will be our penultimate edition – in recognition of the recovery we will be moving to monthly Labour Market Reports and bi-monthly Economic Reports from March.

While a recovery in the labour market is a long way off, there are some positive signs. The claimant count has fallen for two consecutive months and vacancy levels  have now been on the increase since the August to October rolling quarter. And where new jobs are being created, this is happening in both the public and private sectors. Between June-September private sector employment grew for the first time since the first quarter of 2008, with a quarterly increase of 29,000.

But while the headline labour market indicators are more positive than had been expected, there are still causes for concern.  Full-time employment is still falling, and long-term unemployment keeps going up – 631,000 people currently have now been out of work for over 12 months.

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Brendan Barber

The final report of the National Equalities Panel (NEP), “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK” is out today – you can download the full thing or exec summary from the Government Equalities Office website. It’s an exceptional piece of work, describing in graphic detail just how unfair and unequal our society has become thanks to ‘market knows best’ policies.

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Owen Tudor

Mervyn King is at it today in the Financial Times, endorsing a global bank levy rather than splitting up the banks or a financial transactions tax. He describes the latter as the least likely outcome of global discussions and he may be right. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t, or won’t, get such a tax.

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Tim Page

Job satisfaction has dropped to a record low, with a particularly sharp fall among young people, according to a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development that is reported in today’s FT.

The report  blames the pressures of the recession, including job insecurity and stress. These factors will undoubtedly have taken a heavy toll on the morale and even the health of workers, although the CIPD highlights a lack of consultation over change, and pay freezes or cuts, as other, contributory factors to this phenomenon.

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