Richard Exell

More bad news for domestic economic confidence with today’s Asda Income Tracker, which reports the

Biggest ever drop in family spending power as prices increase twice as fast as income

The Tracker measures families’ discretionary spending power – how much is left to an average household after deducting taxes and basic items like groceries, fuel, transport and mortgage payments. Currently this produces a weekly figure of £165, down from £179 12 months ago, an annual fall of more than £700 and the lowest figure since October 2008.The fall is largest ever, and Asda blame it on income growth running at less than half the rate of inflation.

Continue Reading →

Matt Dykes

This week UNISON published ‘Mutual Benefit’ an excellent new report looking at the issues of mutuals, co-operatives and social enterprises running public services. The report rightly raises many of the concerns that the TUC shares about the threats posed by this government’s market-led agenda.

But it also points to an alternative approach to public service reform, raising arguments that have been conspicuous by their absence in the current policy debate.  We believe there’s real value in exploring these arguments further.

Continue Reading →

Richard Exell

Yesterday new statistics showed that the proportion of working age households who were workless was lower in 2010 than in 1997 – despite an increase after the global recession hit this country. There was even more good news: the proportion of children living in workless households was also lower in 2010 than in 1997 and the number of children fell by more than a third of a million.

I held off blogging about this until today because I wanted to double-check whether DWP Ministers would say anything about these figures.

Of course they didn’t – it was good news and they seem only to be interested in bad-mouthing the achievements of the Department they run.

Continue Reading →

Nigel Meager

At first glance, the June labour market statistics tell  a positive story: the headline unemployment figure fell by 88,000 in the quarter to April, while employment grew by 80,000. So far, the increase in private sector jobs has been more than sufficient to offset the fall in public sector employment.

However, as several commentators have pointed out, including the TUC’s Richard Exell, one swallow doesn’t make a summer. Some indicators reveal a more gloomy picture, including the claimant count figure which increased strongly in May, and job vacancies which fell again in the quarter to April, almost back to the lowest level experienced during the recession.

Nevertheless, there is something unusual going on.

Continue Reading →

John Philpott

The latest official figures showing that the number of people working in the UK private sector jumped by more than half a million in the year to March is clearly welcome. Admittedly the good news is tempered by the loss of well over 100,000 public sector jobs during the same period. But the overall rise in employment is nonetheless remarkable for an economy experiencing a fragile recovery from a harrowing recession and starting to feel the impact of unprecedented fiscal austerity.

This poses something of a conundrum. We’re familiar with the phenomenon of jobless growth – as characterised by the ongoing recovery in the United States – but the UK economy is at present demonstrating the polar opposite by creating jobs without growth. How can this be?

Continue Reading →

Scarlet Harris

Sarah Veale and I have blogged here previously on how government proposals to speed up the equalisation of the State Pension Age will affect hundreds of thousands of women approaching retirement.

In addition to the Rachel Reeves MP campaign mentioned in previous blogs, Age UK have also been campaigning hard on this issue and have now published a report called Not Enough Time which confirms that the proposed changes do not allow women sufficient time to plan. One of the respondents to the Age UK survey said:

“I have had my pensionable age moved twice now and the financial plans I have made to enable me to retire at 64 are now in tatters. There is simply not enough time for me to make up the shortfall.”

Continue Reading →

Owen Tudor

Some people have very short attention spans. The resurgence of the global left after the Great Depression took a decade and a half (and a world war). The campaign for a UK national minimum wage took at least a dozen years. The Robin Hood Tax campaign has been running for just over a year, and some people wonder why people aren’t paying it yet, or think we’ve lost. So, as the heads of EU governments meet at the end of this week, it’s time to reflect on how far the campaign has come, and how far we’ve still got to go. But make no mistake, this is a campaign that is on its way to victory, if we keep up the pressure.

Continue Reading →

Owen Tudor

Last Monday, Save the Children hyperbolically proclaimed that there were ‘just 4 hours to save 4 million lives’ – the length of the conference held that day in London to replenish the funds of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI). In the end, £2.6bn was pledged, with the largest sums – over half – coming from DFID (£0.8bn) and Bill Gates (£0.6bn). The extra funds are welcome news, and dominated the headlines that day, despite the dissent of anti-aid rightwingers and more cautious voices from the development community and the left.

Those latter criticisms expose the fault lines in the current debate within the pro-aid community – basically between sticking plaster charity and long term social justice. The TUC approves of sticking plasters – but we would prefer to see social justice make sticking plasters just a minor element of the solution rather than the most we can provide.

Continue Reading →

• Financial Transaction Tax campaign – Say yes to FTT in Europe
  A triple bill of campaign actions today. First up is this clever tool from the international Financial Transaction Tax campaign, showing you how the various EU member states are placed over the issue, and asking you to help lobby the naysayers and waverers amongst them – our own government included!
• Unions Together campaign: Let’s give the Pensions Bill the chop once and for all
  Unions Together are asking us to lobby our MPs over the Pensions Bill, seeking to get it voted down in the commons. They've had a good response already but want to make sure all MPs are aware of their constituents' concerns.
• Age UK State pension age campaign
  And third, Age UK don't think the Pensions Bill's proposals specifically to equalise men's and women's state pension age in November 2018, and then raise it to 66 by April 2020 (6 years early), leave enough time to plan. They are organising a post card campaign, and asking people to write to their local papers via their site.

Continue Reading →

Richard Exell

Would disabled people actually benefit if they were paid less than the minimum wage? Today Conservative MP Philip Davies claimed that allowing employers to pay a lower wage to disabled people would help them to get jobs: “the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help”, he said.

This isn’t just morally wrong, it’s bad labour market policy as well. After the national minimum wage was introduced without excluding disabled people, employment rates rose for disabled people and the employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people came down.

Continue Reading →