Janet Williamson

Ed Miliband has put forward two proposals to tackle executive pay, both of which the TUC has campaigned for over many years. In a speech on Monday, the Labour leader said that under a Labour government, companies would be required to publish the ratio of their directors’ pay to average company employee pay.

The gap between top company directors’ pay and the pay of their own employees (and indeed average earnings in the economy as a whole) has risen inexorably over recent years, despite a provision in the Corporate Governance Code that says that remuneration committees should take into account pay and conditions elsewhere in the company.

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Richard Exell

I have a new post at Left Foot Forward, looking at today’s employment figures. The headlines are very good – employment is up and unemployment is down – but there are still some underlying weak points. The number of job vacancies came down again, so the ratio of unemployed people to vacancies went up; the TUC continues to worry that too many new jobs are part-time or temporary and it is still true that women are gaining less from the employment recovery than men. But the biggest worry of all is that public sector jobs are being lost faster and in larger numbers than we expected: 143,000 in the last twelve months – before the main cuts start to take effect.

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Anjum Klair

Our previous analysis in March showed that West Dunbartonshire was Britain’s worst employment blackspot. The unemployment data released today shows that West Dumartonshire still continues to be one of the hardest places in Britain to find a job, however it is even tougher in Invercylde to find a job, where over thirty dole claimants are chasing every vacancy.  

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Anjum Klair

While there have been improvements in recent employment figures, the state of the labour market is still extremely fragile and the UK is still a long way off returning to its pre-recession health. Analysis by the TUC shows that it could take over five years for the UK to return to its pre-recession employment rate, and far longer in the north of England.

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Sam Gurney

Countries which have adopted the ILO Convention on Asbestos (Convention 162) are under increased pressure to ban it after the ILO Committee on the Application of Standards issued a landmark ruling on a case brought by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). This includes Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Russia, Serbia, Macedonia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The CLC and other unions argued that Canada had consistently ignored scientific and technical information that pointed to the need for a total ban of the product. 

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Owen Tudor

The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) has a long and honourable history – including resisting harassment and initimidation when the army was in charge of the government. But one of the main reasons they are respected by both government and the rest of civil society in Nigeria is the part they have played in resisting petrol price rises. Now they fear that the government is gearing up again to try to increase the price of oil for Nigeria’s working poor, and the NLC will once again resist them. Oil is a major issue in people’s lives, because it affects almost every aspect of the economy. If oil prices rise in the morning, bread prices are up by the end of the afternoon.

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Owen Tudor

Neil McCulloch, from the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, didn’t believe in the Robin Hood Tax, he says. Until he and Grazia Pacillo looked into it, and produced a report called The Tobin Tax: A Review of the Evidence. Tonight, he was speaking in Brussels about how a Robin Hood Tax would definitely work, would raise £7.6bn a year in the UK from a 0.005% tax on currenecy transactions, and would mostly fall either on the traders themselves or on their richest customers. His blog in the Guardian says the same. Quite a conversion, and all the more welcome because of his initial scepticism.

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Sam Gurney

The ILO is holding its 100th conference in Geneva this week, and as well as a ground-breaking convention on the rights of domestic workers, we’re about to agree a major review of labour administration and inspection – the key, along with stronger unions, to implementing all the other conventions the ILO has produced in the 91 years since its foundation.

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Paul Sellers

Accountants UHY Hacker Young claim that welathy and poor“face among the highest taxes in the world” in Britain in a very irritating story in today’s Metro newspaper.

My nasty suspicious mind can’t help thinking that it must be first group that the authors are really worried about – after all, the poor are rarely known to hire accountants.

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Matt Dykes

Co-operatives UK have published a new report looking at the experience of mutuals delivering public services in Europe.  It is one of the more useful contributions to the growing debate around public service mutuals and well worth a read.

There are a number of lessons that can be drawn from the European experience.  There are three that struck me in particular.  Public service mutuals succeed when they meet specific community needs, where the state supports and nutures them and where models are clearly defined.

The poorly defined and market-orientated model proposed by the Coalition fails on all accounts.  Which probably accounts for the lack of interest from the public and resistance from the workforce.

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