Philip Pearson

Please forgive this delayed reaction to a PM news item last Friday 8 January. It could have come straight from the climate change deniers’ brigade. I’ve had to check my facts. Presenter Eddie Mair reported that 70,000 new jobs would be created following the Government’s announcement of nine new offshore windfarms, requiring 6,000 massive wind turbines.

“70,000 jobs? A tricky one”, Eddie told us. He then asked Tim Harford, aka the Undercover economist, and presenter on BBC TV of “Trust Me, I’m an Economist” to comment.

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Nigel Stanley

The TUC are big supporters of the new pensions settlement due to start in 2012. Ten years ago TUC policy that employers should have to contribute to the pensions of their staff was seen as a way-out demand. Now it constitutes a cross-party consensus backed by employers, unions and much of the pensions industry, thanks to Lord Turners’ Pensions Commission and some smart campaigning by unions and the wider consumer movement.

It is right therefore to mark two more milestones on the road to the implementation of the reform package.

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Adam Lent

A month ago I wrote about how the bitterness seeping in to the Irish economy and its politics in the wake of their ineffective and unnecessary austerity budgets offered a glimpse into the UK’s future.  Today, I’m afraid, the future has begun. 

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Nigel Stanley

Last Sunday I wrote a critique of a Sunday Times article about public versus private pay.  Frankly I do not expect very much from the Sunday Times. What really irritated me was the claim that its facts had been validated by Straight Statistics – an organisation whose aims I admire and whose work I have quoted in the past.

I assumed that they had probably been done over by the Sunday Times, so I was scrupulous in drawing my piece to the attention of Nigel Hawkes and inviting him to reply.

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Nigel Stanley

The Guardian reports today:

City sources believe that the biggest employers will absorb the cost of the tax rather than cut the size of the bonus pools they amass throughout the year. This will mean that while proceeds from the tax could top £2bn – more than four times the £550m estimated by the chancellor in the pre-budget report.

Earlier in the week we also learned that city rents are set to soar because of demand for office space from the finance sector.

Yet at the time of the pre-budget report we were continually told that the Chancellor’s modest tax on bonuses would drive finance away from the UK. Indeed we have been subject to this lecture every time the tiniest tax increase or increase in regulation is proposed.

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• Tax Research UK ” The banks are staying in London”
  If banks and hedge funds are moving off shore why is the City property market so bouyant?
• The fourth sector
  Chris Dillow skewers the lacuna in Tory praise for voluntary groups: unions are the biggest voluntary group
• Stumbling and Mumbling: The big political story
  Chris Dillow wonders why Waitrose beat M&S when it chied is paid much less and it’s a kind of co-op.

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Owen Tudor

European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) General Secretary John Monks told Nicholas Sarkozy’s ‘New World, New Capitalism’ conference yesterday that

“we have done better that we did in the 1930s. But …the global economy is very fragile and in many countries problems will get worse before they get better.”

He said that there should be no return to business as usual, that young people needed a European jobs guarantee, and that Governments should not abandon their crisis interventions until growth was well-established. The financial sector still needs major surgery, including a financial transactions tax. His speech is brief, but pretty much says it all.

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• ACA calls for Pensions Commission « Connected Research
  Calvin has a good post on pensions

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Nicola Smith

Read the TUC Recession Report for January 2010

Today we have published our 14th Recession Report, which looks at the labour market data for the period August to October 2009 (with November data for some indicators).  As was widely reported in December, the release showed that claimant unemployment had fallen by 6,300 between October and November – a result of a reducation in in-flows (new claimants) and an increase in off-flows (people leaving JSA). Inactivity data were also better than we could have expected they would be at this point in the downturn. Although levels of economic inactivity increased over the year, this was as a result of a rise in students – the number of people economically inactive for other reasons actually saw an annual reduction. And while ILO unemployment is still rising, the speed at which is increasing is continuing to slow.

But although this is good news a full labour market recovery is a long way off. Indicators of ongoing fragility include large proportional increases in the numbers of workers who are inactive becuase they can’t find work and have given up looking, sharp reductions in the number of full-time jobs and fast rising levels of long-term unemployment. The number of people out of work for over 12 months is now a matter for major policy concern – and the findings from the second section of our report, which focuses on the health impacts of unemployment, show why.

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Owen Tudor

Well actually that’s not exactly how they put it in their feature on pay disparity this morning, but it might as well have been. What they actually said was “Middle-class workers richer than they think”. But it does depend what you mean by ‘middle class’ – what they mean is people who start their careers on more than most people earn, and keep getting richer, which is a strange use of the term “middle”. But it is a reflection of just how unequal our society has become since the 1970s (inequality rose fastest in the 80s, less fast in the 90s, and the last decade has seen ambiguous data but no reverse in the trend). Given that brief historical summary, it is surprising that the FT concludes that it is difficult to say why inequality has grown in this way, and why it has grown more in the US, UK and New Zealand than in countries like France and Germany. Er, it’s because growing inequality was the policy of UK governments in the 80s and 90s (as well as in different times in the US and New Zealand) and constraining that growth in inequality has been government policy in France and Germany, isn’t it?

All this has been explored in greater depth and with greater erudition in TUC Touchstone pamphlets like Life in the Middle, but it’s all worth revisiting – what we need is Government policies aimed at restoring equality in earnings, and non-Governmental tools like stronger trade unions and more collective bargaining to back them up.

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