Owen Tudor

Vulture funds are a particularly ‘unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism’, as Ted Heath might have said. And they’re based on abusing your generosity. An attempt to crack down on these sordid little operations passed its second reading in the Commons on Friday with all party support, but the Conservative front-bench have denied it the easy ride that would see it on the statute books before the election, and they have not promised to reintroduce the Bill if they win the election. The TUC backs the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill, and urges MPs to do whatever they can to get it passed. What you can do is write to your MP, and get your union or branch to affiliate to the Jubilee Debt Campaign who are the main proponents of the Bill.

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Owen Tudor

As the Vancouver Winter Olympics come to an end, attention turns to the next Olympics – London 2012. And trade unionists around the world are turning their attention to the workers’ rights implications. The Maquiladora Solidarity Network worked closely with the Canadian Labour Congress to ensure that the workers who made the clothes associated with Vancouver 2010 were paid fair wages, worked reasonable hours and were protected from injury and disease. For London 2012, the TUC is working with a range of unions, Labour Behind the Label, Anti-Slavery International and War on Want under the banner of Playfair 2012: campaigning for a sweat-free Olympics. We want the multi-national corporations like Adidas, Nike and Pentland (makers of speedo) to guarantee workers’ rights in the supply chains for their sportswear.

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Nigel Stanley

I suppose the BBC thought it was being clever by offering up what it probably sees as limited sacrifices in an attempt to appease Rupert Murdoch and then giving the story as an exclusive to the Murdoch owned Times.

It hasn’t worked. The Times was contemptuous in its response calling the BBC “big, bloated and cunning”.

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Richard Crisp

Government claims that ‘paid work is the route to independence, health and well-being for most people’. But research we carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that poor quality work does not always provide these benefits.

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John Wood

It’s Work Your Proper Hours Day today – in fact it’s nearly over for many of those who will be taking the TUC’s recommendation and making a point of eschewing unpaid overtime for at least one day in the year.

This year we’ve seen an increase in the number of people working what we’ve dubbed ‘extreme overtime’. This is not extra work conducted on jet-skis, but rather people who do in excess of 10 hours a week above their paid contracts), and 14,000 more reported this in 2009, bringing the total close to 900,000.

And despite what many commentators might have us believe about conditions and motivation in the public sector, a higher proportion of public sector workers worked unpaid overtime in 2009 than private sector workers (25.3% against 18.3%).

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Brendan Barber

It’s Work Your Proper Hours Day today. We work it out from ONS’ ASHE and LFS surveys as the day when the average person who works unpaid overtime stops working for free and starts earning for themselves.

One of the features of the recession has been people moving to shorter hours or taking part-time work in order to avoid the dole queue. This has also led to a fall in the number of people putting in extra hours at work. But there has also been a surprise increase in people doing ‘extreme’ unpaid overtime, with nearly 900,000 workers giving away an average of 18 hours of free work a week last year.

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Richard Exell

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Guardian’s “Citizen Ethics” series, including an important article by Julian Glover (“Liberty is equality’s intractable opposite.”) The article is a good example of a certain strand of liberal criticism of the current government, and it’s worth going into why it’s wrong.

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Owen Tudor

The Financial Times carries an editorial today about South African President Jacob Zuma’s visit to the UK next week. The FT says Zuma’s proposal that EU sanctions on the thugs who still share power in Zimbabwe is insufficient. On the contrary, it would be a dangerous mistake, and shows Zuma heading down the same route as his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki.

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Owen Tudor

The Robin Hood Tax campaign is not picky about who introduces a financial transactions tax first. A domestic tax could be brought in by next month’s Budget. The G20 Finance Ministers could agree a global tax at their next meeting in April. Or the European Union could act first.

This week, that last option became a lot more likely. The new EU Commissioner for Finance, Michel Barnier, advocated an EU initiative and the  European Commission has subsequently urged European Union member states to consider the introduction of taxes levied on financial transactions in order to increase their revenue.

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Owen Tudor

Dean Baker, co-director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the influential left-of-centre thinktank, has written in the Forbes magazine (motto: “the capitalist tool”) about the need for a financial transactions tax. In particular, he suggests a 0.25% tax on share transactions – half of the UK level, which could raise $100 billion a year (0.125% on sales and purchases). This would, he suggests, be possible to implement domestically although preferable if globally co-ordinated:

“It is important to realize that while coordination is desirable, it is not essential. There are already large differences in trading costs between countries, with the U.S. being one of the lowest-cost markets. Even with a transactions tax, transactions would still be cheaper to undertake in the U.S. than in many other markets. Furthermore, since investors care about a wide range of services, not just the transaction costs, it is implausible that everyone would move their trades to India to avoid a tax of 0.125%.”

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