Nicola Smith

Yesterday we heard that ‘scroungers will be forced to work in a tough new crackdown‘ (Daily Star), a headline that was tastefully juxtoposed next to a story about offenders being forced to undertake unpaid cleaning work on the underground. This new initiative is a mean policy, which will give Jobcentre advisers the right to require claimants who are fully compliant with the JSA regime to undertake a four week unpaid work placement. Childcare costs will not be provided, there will be no training and all the evidence suggests the impact is most likely to be that fewer, not more, unemployed people find work (as they have less time to engage in jobsearch and are more likely to simply drop out of the system). But scandalous as this new approach is, the bigger story is that overall levels of support provided by Jobcentre Plus are about to fall off a cliff.

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Alice Hood

The campaign to save the NHS from the dismantling signalled by the Health and Social Care Bill took an interesting turn at the weekend as Liberal Democrats queued up to denounce the proposals, and the Government appeared to send mixed messages about the extent to which they might be persuaded to change course.

Unions from across the health sector have been working hard with other campaigners and patients groups to expose the dangers posed by the Bill. Under the banner of ‘All Together for the NHS’, unions representing nurses, doctors, midwives, physiotherapists, radiographers, support staff, paramedics, managers and many more are coming together to call on the Government to think again. The key arguments behind the campaign are here.

Friday 1st April will be ‘All Together for the NHS day’, with health workers and service users getting together to lobby key MPs in their constituencies and campaigning to raise the profile of the issue through events all over the country.

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Nicola Smith

Yesterday’s Times (£) reports on concerning new survey evidence from the Institute of Chartered Accountants: 20 per cent of employers they surveyed reported that spending cuts have already affected their turnover and 45 per cent believe that turnover will face negative impacts from cuts over the next 12 months. As a result of these fears 47 per cent of those reporting turnover reductions have already reduced staff. The Chief Executive of the ICAEW, Michael Izza, said:

What has been forgotten, though, is the extent to which the private sector is a supplier to the public sector. Whether it is services, materials or equipment firms of all sizes and from all sectors have had work either directly or indirectly from Government organisations…These relationships are either under threat or have already been terminated.

The affects of cuts for the private sector may be an impact that the Government and much of the business lobby is conveniently forgetting to mention, but it’s not an issue that the TUC has been unaware of.

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Philip Pearson

Europe’s energy policy makers could learn a thing or two from the 50 union reps who met at Congress House last Saturday (March 12) for unionlearn’s first conference on green skills and greener workplaces. In The Guardian today, Environment Secretary Chris Huhne backs the EU plans to cut energy use by 20% by 2020. He rightly sees this as the key to more ambitious European climate change targets. But industry accounts for a fifth of our emissions, yet the EU statement make no reference either to the “workplace” or to changing behaviour at work. 

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Owen Tudor

Last December the TUC heard the bad news that DFID was not going to renew its funding for our international development work. This was despite an independent evaluation we’d commissioned of our work, which praised the unique contribution trade unions could make to development, and the progress we were making in securing decent work. Ministers have expressed their support for decent work, for its crucial contribution to making sure that everyone benefits from growth.

We have now received DFID’s assessment of our independent evaluation, and it echoes the independent evaluation. Indeed the only criticisms it makes of our work are that we haven’t boasted enough about the indirect effect on development we have through the ILO and ITUC, and that we need to develop our monitoring and evaluation tools so that we can demonstrate our impact more clearly. It’s good that our achievements have been recognised, but frustrating that this wasn’t enough to win DFID’s financial support for taking that work further.

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• A Blueprint for Growth, Consolidation and Convergence in the Euro Area
  Andrew Watt of the European Trade Union Institute spells out a comprehensive critique of the EU's austerity package, and proposes a six-point plan to create growth instead.
• EUobserver / [Comment] Europe has a banking crisis, not a wages crisis
  Re-define's Sony Kapoor reminds Europe's leaders that it was the finance sector – where wages and bonuses are now back to pre-crisis levels – that caused the crisis, not ordinary workers' wages. So why penalise the latter?

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Owen Tudor

The leadership of the European Union – Governments and the European Commission – have decided that Europe’s future depends on two things: cuts to public expenditure and reductions in workers’ wages, rather than measures to promote growth. As former financier Sony Kapoor has pointed out, this is a strange conclusion to reach – was the global economic crisis caused by profligate Governments or greedy workers? No: so how come tackling those ‘issues’ is the solution to a crisis caused, as even the IMF admit, by inequality? The ETUC has developed a serious rebuttal of the austerity approach, detailed information about each country’s cuts packages, the policy alternative to austerity, and now a serious campaign to oppose austerity on the streets and in the Ministries:

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Brendan Barber

This is what I’ve just said to a fringe meeting at the Lib Dem Spring conference in Sheffield, where I’m sharing a platform with Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander:

I like to think that the TUC has developed good relations with the Liberal Democrats in recent years – of course there have been disagreements but also mutual respect.

Charles Kennedy addressed our annual Congress when he was leader, as my predecessor John Monks spoke to your Assembly. Chris Huhne addressed the TUC environment conference last October – and in turn I’ve been delighted to speak at a number of your fringe events.

That mutual respect has been based on a recognition that we share some basic philosophical roots and approaches.

Social Liberalism was a driving force behind the creation of the post-war welfare state of Keynes and Beveridge, but it also drew on important work done by the TUC on social insurance.

The social democratic tradition that helped regalvanise your party in the 1980s was the UK’s main advocate of what I would call the social Europe bargain – a key belief in today’s trade unions.

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Owen Tudor

The latest IMF working paper (which means it’s not a statement of IMF policy) on Financial Transaction Taxes doesn’t add a lot to our understanding of their likely impact. It accepts that they would raise huge sums of money (and reiterates the widespread use of such taxes), but restates the IMF’s support for a Financial Activities Tax that would raise far less. The rationale is that FTTs would reduce the ‘effectiveness’ of the financial markets. Those who still believe that the financial markets are efficient at all must now be a small sect of reality deniers or people who have just woken from a twenty year coma: the paper admits that FTTs would not only raise huge sums (which could be used to combat global poverty and address the climate change challenge, as well as reducing damaging cuts in public spending) but also reduce risk-taking and discourage short-termism. It’s just that the IMF appears still to believe that taking risks with the financial markets and short-termism are good things. That’s why their assertion that FTTs would “distort” tax-free markets is at the nub of their preference for the FAT taxes which would have less impact on the markets, and raise less revenue.

For those of us who believe FTTs would “correct” free market behaviour, and that long-term investments would actually be a good idea, the IMF have not only confirmed that only FTTs offer the revenue-raising potential we need, but would also have beneficial behavioural impacts too.

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Owen Tudor

Right at the end of an amazing week of progress in Europe for the financial transactions tax (known as the Robin Hood Tax in the UK), a meeting of heads of government from the 17 countries which use the Euro as their currency (not including the UK of course) agreed to take consideration of an FTT for the Eurozone further. 

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