Alice Hood
More details are emerging about the likely scale of local government job cuts and the impact on the most deprived areas of the country. The Local Government Association has today revised its estimate of the number of jobs likely to be lost in the next year, raising the figure from 100,000 to 140,000. The LGA says that this is because of the way that the cuts are being front-loaded towards the first year of the four year spending review period.
Nigel Stanley
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) are now organising a new round of Britain’s largest employment relations study.
The Workplace Employment Relations Study (WERS) reaches 3,000 large and small businesses to gauge and explore the current employment relations climate by giving a picture of working life in Britain. The 2011 study will be the sixth since 1980.
The good thing about WERS is that it gives a rounded picture of today’s workplace. Interview are held not just with managers, but also employees and union reps.
Richard Exell
Volunteering England (which researches and provides information on best practice in volunteering) is consulting with UNITE on plans to make 31 of its 55 staff redundant. The government has announced that the Office for Civil Society will cut its “strategic partners” from 42 to 15 and make sure that no partner gets more than a quarter of its funding from OCS. Volunteering England’s Chief Executive, Justin Davis Smith, says the organisation faces cuts of 60 per cent of its funding.
Richard Exell
A report published today says that road safety cameras save 800 lives a year. The Effectiveness of Speed Cameras: a review of evidence, written by Prof Richard Allsop of University College London for the RAC Foundation, brings together the existing research plus new data from road safety partnerships to show that the benefits of cameras aren’t limited to the sites where they are placed – they make the whole road network safer.
Richard Exell
On the whole, today’s main economic figures are positive. Firstly, the figures for UK output, income and expenditure confirmed last month’s first estimate for GDP in the third quarter: GDP rose by 0.8 per cent from the previous quarter, 2.8 per cent from the third quarter of 2009.
It is still reasonable to worry about the extent to which this growth depends upon a massive surge in construction that is unlikely to be sustained. But there has also been good progress in business services and finance (which accounts for about three quarters of the economy) and, best of all, strong growth in manufacturing.
Tim Page
I didn’t expect to enjoy the article in the latest edition of ‘The Economist’, entitled “Speak softly and carry a big chainshaw”, about tackling the US fiscal deficit. Indeed, the macho rhetoric of the article’s title sums up my reservations. But I found this paragraph revealing:
Alice Hood
Ten days ago I reported on work by the GMB to track the numbers of job cuts being announced in councils as a result of the 28% cut to local government funding announced in the spending review. The figures are frightening and are rising fast, with almost 50,000 job cuts in 43 local authorities now identified by the union.
Paul Sellers
I was shocked to find out that British ship-owners can still get away with paying some Indian and Filipino seafarers rates of around £2 per hour, even when they work solely on domestic routes such as ferries between two UK ports or vessels supporting the UK offshore oil and gas industry. This does not seem much reward for those at sea who have to brave the winter gales.
Discrimination at sea should have been outlawed long ago, as articles 18 and 45(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union prohibit discrimination on the basis of nationality. In the UK, the Race Relations Act protected most workers but a loophole meant that seafarers were exempt. The RRA has recently been superseded by the Equality Act 2010 but protection has still not been extended to seafarers on UK ships. The TUC, RMT and Nautilus International today called on the UK Government and the European Union to act quickly to end this discrimination.