Owen Tudor

Amid all the furore about alleged corruption in FIFA – who demanded what and what did people offer – a more mundane corruption might get overlooked. The international trade union movement’s Playfair campaign is dedicated to rooting out the human suffering associated with global sporting events like the World Cup. Today, the ITUC has issued a report which calls on FIFA to confront the terrible working conditions facing the vast majority of construction workers in Qatar, where several football stadiums will be built before the 2022 World Cup.

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Owen Tudor

The Prime Minister has launched a volley of criticism at the rest of the G8 leaders who this week failed to ‘fess up in Deauville about breaking their overseas aid pledges. He is absolutely right to take the moral high ground on this issue: and is clearly and valiantly at odds with most of his MPs (according to confidential poll results we’ve seen) as well as Defence Secretary Liam Fox. But is taking the moral high ground a good way to persuade his fellow G8 leaders to follow Britain’s lead? Cameron’s righteous ranting is in stark contrast to the effective diplomacy of Blair and Brown who persuaded the G8 to make their aid pledges in the first place (at the 2005 Gleneagles summit).

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Owen Tudor

Unite have protested about the decision, announced on Tuesday this week, to close the RBS office in Telford, and cut over 700 jobs there and in Plymouth, Leeds and so on.

This contrasts obscenely with the news announced in February that RBS was paying £950 million in bonuses to its top bankers. There really couldn’t be a clearer example of the inequality between the fairy-tale world of top bankers and the grim reality of life for people who work at the grass roots.

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Richard Murphy

At the heart of George Osborne’s economic policy is a deeply perverse belief that if he cuts public spending and services people’s confidence will increase because they will think that they will have more money to spend themselves as a result and so there will be economic expansion as they spend more in anticipation of this windfall.  This is called expansionary fiscal contraction. There is no evidence to support it: it’s very obviously not working. It has rightly attracted opprobrium, including from Paul Krugman.

This perverse, and failing, policy is matched by another perverse policy which will also fail, but which has not as yet had time to evidence that fact.  This is the policy of cutting corporation tax in the belief that this will increase both growth and employment, which is central to Osborne’s policy of cutting the mainstream corporation tax rate from 28%,  which it inherited from Labour, to 23% over a period of four years.

It is argued by many, including academics  and the OECD that there is, indeed, a relationship between growth, employment, and low corporation tax rates. However, new research that I’ve undertaken for the TUC, published today, leads me to seriously doubt this.

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• Send a message to the NHS listening exercise.
  Campaigning website 38 Degrees have been disappointed by their research into Andrew Lansley’s NHS “listening exercise”, where they’ve found local sessions seemingly being conducted in secret. So they’ve made a way for the 95% who don’t know how to engage with it to submit their concerns direct. If you’d like Mr Lansley to listen to you, then visit their site and get involved.
• Osborne’s recovery depends on consumers getting further into debt. But they’re not.
  Duncan Weldon writes for False Economy that sharp drops in consumer spending are jeopardising the coalition’s plan to reduce government debt.
• Light a candle for the NHS
  The Health and Social Care Bill’s crucial third reading could be called any time. The union coalition All Together campaign is preparing for actions across the country once the date is announced.

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Tim Page

We had an interesting couple of hours at the Resolution Foundation this morning, trying to address the problem of falling living standards for low and middle income earners. The foundation’s report, ‘Growth without gain?’, which was launched today, pulls no punches in highlighting the scale of the problem. Over the course of the coming months, the Commission on Living Standards, established by the Resolution Foundation to explore this problem, will be seeking answers.

‘Growth without gain?’ points out that whilst less chronic than in the US, where median earnings have been stagnant for a generation, leading economies such as the UK, Germany and Canada have seen median wages either remain stagnant or falling during long periods of growth, prior to the 2008-09 global recession. However, other OECD countries, including Australia, France, Sweden and Norway have experienced better wage performance, suggesting there are lessons that countries like the UK can learn.

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Owen Tudor

With the race for the position of head of the IMF well and truly underway, unions are insisting that who gets the job is far less important than what they do with it. Various names are being promoted, including the two declared candidates, Christine Lagarde of France and Mexico’s Agustin Carstens. Many are arguing that the job should no longer be a fiefdom for Europe (as part of the deal that sees the US monopolising the World Bank head) but given to someone from the global south. But global unions have stressed that, whoever gets it, the key tasks they face are promoting a sustainable growth strategy that delivers more and better jobs, and tackles inequality within and between nations.

In that context, Carstens’ neoliberal instincts would be a disaster, with Lagarde scoring better for advancing Financial Transaction Taxes. But someone like Gordon Brown or South Africa’s Trevor Manuel would be even better. It’s unlikely that the trade union movement’s support will secure anyone the top job, but having a strategy for sustainable growth might just.

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Richard Exell

It’s been fun to see the Daily Mail getting into a tizzy about “judge-made laws” in the superinjunction brouhaha. But they have got a point - I found myself nodding in agreement when they wrote:

It is also wrong for judges to usurp the function of our elected representatives by effectively writing a privacy law of their own.

I agree, its a worrying sign when the judges invent new laws out of thin air. I’m looking forward to the Mail’s editorial condemning Torquay Hotel Co Ltd v Cousins (1969) and the Taff Vale Case (1901).

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Owen Tudor

A few months ago, Chancellor George Osborne MP was pointing to various international bodies as backing his fiscal austerity measures – the OECD Secretary General, Angel Gurria, went out on a limb, for which unions slammed him, and the Tories are still claiming that President Obama’s administration backs their deep and harsh deficit reduction plans (although no way is that what he said on his visit this week!) But the economic figures for the last two quarters, showing the UK economy flatlining, have seen the international support for Osborne begin to fall away. 

On Wednesday the OECD came out with a rather more balanced assessment in their Economic Outlook of the risks of austerity, as analysed in Left Food Forward (hat tip) and revealed in interviews with Gurria’s deputy, Pier Carlo Padoan.

And on the same day, the UN World Economic Situation and Prospects report was published. Jomo Kwame Sundaram, the Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, concluded:

Fiscal austerity when your economy is barely growing is really quite premature.

Who can he mean?

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Sean Bamford

Figures release by the National Office for Statistics this morning shows net migration at its highest level in more than five years. A major factor in producing these figures is the decline in the number of people leaving the UK.

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