Owen Tudor

Workers’ rights to bargain collectively are under attack across the US as Republicans try to take advantage of the fallout from the global economic crisis to slash public sector wages and benefits. Amnesty International have joined the growing chorus condemning those State Governors who are trying to take away a fundamental human right. In a virtual town hall meeting on Thursday 17 March, Vice President Joe Biden and US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis told workers that the Obama administration will stand with them and will stay with them to make sure their rights are protected. The Vice President opened with a quote from President Obama saying that “We can’t have a strong middle class without unions,” then added:

You built the middle class. This fight is not about wages or benefits; it’s about trying to break unions. We absolutely, positively need collective bargaining.

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Sam Gurney

Despite protesting its continued commitment to the principles of Decent Work, and the central importance of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as the UN body charged with promoting job-rich growth globally, the British Government has this week continued its sustained assault on the resources that enable the ILO to do its job.

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Owen Tudor

For several months, people have been asking why Northern Africa has seen huge protests, but similar poverty-stricken dictatorships elsewhere in Africa have not. Now, protests have begun in Swaziland, led today by civil service and other unions. Civil servants, students and trade unionists marched to the office of Prime Minister Barnabus Sibusiso Dlamini in the capital Mbabane. They handed over a petition to Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini, demanding that he and the cabinet resign. Armed riot police guarded entrances to government ministries.Estimates of the numbers involved in the protests range from 2,000 to 20,000. The demonstration was met with force from the last absolute monarchy in Africa.

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Scarlet Harris

Today we heard from Vince Cable that a central plank to the government’s long awaited growth strategy is to scrap the planned extension of the right to request flexible working to parents of 17 year olds and to give small businesses a three-year exemption from the new additional paternity leave scheme which allows mothers and fathers to share the mother’s right to maternity leave and pay if they wish.
This is bad news for parents who need that flexibility, particularly at a time when the Government has been making cuts to many of the childcare services, benefits and tax credits that support working parents. The decision to scrap the extension of the right to request seems particularly petty, given that the proposal in question would only have served to correct an anomaly which affects a small number of parents. Parents of children aged 16 or under and carers of adults (aged 18 and over) are entitled to make a request so the proposal would have just given an extra year in which a request could be made.

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Philip Pearson

As we head for the pre-Budget weekend, rumours abound that the Treasury is turning the silver bullet of the Green Investment Bank into a “quackless duck”. Environment Secretary Chris Huhne spoke confidently about the bank – the famous ‘duck’s quack and banks borrow’ comment. The Business Secretary told the Environmental Audit Committee recently that the Green Investment Bank will be “certainly… a lot more than a fund”. But the Treasury thinks otherwise. The bank’s assets would be counted as public debt. It wants the bank’s funding capacity delayed until 2014. If this is true, it’s further evidence of the lack of a growth strategy.   

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Paul Sellers

Conservative backbencher Christopher Chope had a private members bill on the National Minimum Wage (NMW) on the parliamentary agenda for today’s session. When it came to the crunch he decided to withdraw his bill, as the government would not support it.

I wanted to celebrate this non-event, as it is not often that I can say that Government has got something absolutely right, and I’m not quite sure when I will get such an opportunity again.

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Leonie Greene

The solar PV (photovoltaic)  industry was braced for bad news but the announcement today was shocking.  If today’s new Tariff rates go through nothing above 50kW is commercially viable, which means no particularly meaningful school, local authority, community, co-operative, commercial or farming sector schemes. The solar energy sector had grown in less than a year from 3,000 to 10,000 jobs with an REA survey predicting 17,000 jobs by the end of this year – precious green growth that should have been seized with both hands.

The government have fundamentally failed to understand how the industry works.  Larger schemes are needed for purchasing power, to drive supply chains and cost reductions for the benefit of all.  And this had demonstrably worked well bringing costs down around 20% in a single year.  No economy has built a solar industry based on a very modest set of ambitions for the domestic sector.  And no new manufacturers will be interested in locating in the UK with such a suppressed domestic market.  And it must be said, 50kW isn’t even large.

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Paul Sellers

Housing minister Grant Shapps has a letter in today’s Daily Telegraph  complaining that local authorities are drastically cutting back their work on the Supporting People initiative, even though his department have themselves only cut back the grant for this work by 12%(!)

It would be naive indeed to think that it would be possible to more than decimate the funding of local authorities and still maintain such services. If councils are running sacred at the moment it is clearly because the scale of Government cutbacks is so very frightening.

I can’t help feeling that we will see a lot more of these attempts to shift blame as the local elections begin to loom. They should be strongly resisted.

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Philip Pearson

Next week, the government will launch its growth strategy. Today, the Energy Minister may have all but killed off thousands of jobs in the UK’s domestic solar power industry. It’s one of the best new growth industries we have. Before the announcement of the review, the Renewable Energy Association (REA) estimated that 17,000 new solar jobs would be created by the end of 2011. Not now it won’t. By delaying the deployment of new generation capacity the Government risks running Britain into the energy gap. Already the UK is forecast to have one of the lowest generation reserves in Europe. These are the details. 

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Owen Tudor

After last week’s momentous European Parliament vote in favour of a European Robin Hood Tax, backed up days later by the 17 countries which use the Euro as their currency, Conservative MEP Roger Helmer attacked the Robin Hood Tax (a campaign he described as “presentational genius” – many thanks!) using the standard arguments that it would lead to the banks leaving the UK and to you and me paying the tax because the banks would pass it on but also, in an outburst of Euro-scepticism, because it would be seized by the European Commission to further bloat the Brussels bureacracy. He’s wrong on both counts, of course.

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