Owen Tudor
The Global Call to Action Against Poverty elected a new leadership at the end of its two day global assembly which brought together representatives from over 50 countries. Its task now is to turn the 173 million people who took part in last year’s anti-poverty mobilisations into real political influence.
Richard Exell
Cuts in university funding may cause researchers to leave British universities, and there could be long-term damage to the country’s scientific base as a result.
Richard Exell
Today’s leaked news of plans to abolish 180 quangos, merge 124 and substantially reform another 56 has left many people worrying about what is going to happen to the functions they carry out. The BBC has a full list, with a very brief description of what will happen to each. Some especially troubling examples include:
Paul Sellers
Picking up on Phil Flaxton’s post about WorkWiseUK’s National Work from Home Day, I started wondering why the growth of home-working has not been much faster. The CBI can see strong business advantages in using high-quality home working for certain jobs and they have supported WorkWiseUK. Meanwhile, according to the 3rd Government Work-life Balance Survey, another 4.5 million employees (20% of the UK workforce) want to work from home on a regular basis but can’t.
This looks like a simple win-win situation, but there has been considerable resistance from line managers in some enterprises.
Owen Tudor
The Global Call to action against poverty (GCAP) global council spent its first day discussing priorities for campaigning: and the role of civil society in global decision-making. The UN came in for more stick than usual, and unions were central to a shift towards focusing on the economy rather than relations with governments.
The UN is usually held up as a better arena for global governance than self-appointed groups like the G8 and G20, and while that’s still true, participants were certainly not UN cheerleaders. Perhaps it was the recent experience of seeing the UN MDG review summit earlier in the week?
Philip Flaxton
National Work from Home Day, the culmination of Work Wise Week 2010, is an opportunity to reflect on how the nature of work is radically changing. Amongst the biggest changes is the increasing number of the working population who can now work remotely or from home.
It’s becoming more widely accepted in business that besides enhancing work-life balance for workers (with the added health benefits), working from home can significantly improve productivity, helping organisations to reduce costs at the same time as improving efficiency. Adopting smarter working practices is a win-win situation. We no longer need to work nine to five, five days a week to be productive. Research has shown that workers can be far more productive when they work flexibly and work from home, on patterns that suit their home life better too.
Owen Tudor
This week the UN held a summit to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. Many world leaders spoke but civil society organisations are disappointed by the lack of concrete commitments in the conclusions (written before the speeches of course!) The only real step forward, described as a ‘baby step’ by Greenpeace Director Kumi Naidoo, was on employment: testament to effective lobbying by the International Trade Union Confederation.
Richard Exell
The government looks set to announce that all 200 of the new-build schools planned under Building Schools for the Future can go ahead after all – so long as much cheaper “prefab” methods are used.
Owen Tudor
Larry Elliott’s Guardian piece this week was right to be sceptical about why Sarkozy or Zapatero were actively promoting financial transaction taxes at the UN this week. But he is also right that a European Robin Hood Tax is still on the table. Now is the time to step up the campaign.
Elliott points out that European leaders committed to an FTT (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany Greece and now Spain) have not managed to deliver any concrete results. And Sarkozy clearly does want this to be a left front for his re-election plans in 2011 when he will chair the G8 and G20. But progress has been made: a year ago FTTs weren’t even on the table – now, they are featuring on three consecutive ECOFIN (EU finance ministers) meetings – the second and third at the end of September and October.