Richard Exell
What’s the best way to measure the shortage of jobs? A new set of European figures shows that, by international standards, the UK has a serious problem.
The unemployment figures are an obvious source of data about people who want work but haven’t got jobs, but if we only rely on them we’ll seriously underestimate the problem.
Duncan Weldon
Yesterday I went an excellent conference in Berlin organised by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung on ‘Recovery & Recession in Britain and Germany” featuring parliamentarians, economists, think tankers and trade unionists from both countries.
For a one day conference a lot of ground was covered – from fiscal policy to the challenges of generating growth to questions of how prepared we are for the next crisis. I was especially interested in some of the discussions around how linked the UK and Eurozone banking sectors actually are – something I will blog on in the future.
I thought in this short post though I’d concentrate on just two issues that particularly struck me – labour market performance and the ongoing Eurocrisis.
The Labour Market
Perhaps the most striking chart shown was the one below (reproduced here using data from Eurostat):
Ben Moxham
The EU’s snappily title “Generalised System of Trade Preferences” or “GSP” is a rare creature in the world of international trade instruments: it links trade with human rights in a binding way. It rewards developing countries with access to EU markets if they effectively implement key human rights and environment conventions. But given that serial labour rights abusers such as Colombia and Georgia are still on the scheme, unions are heavily critical of it.
The EU is currently updating the GSP and we’ve put forward many ideas on how to improve it. Below is an edited speech (I’ve added some hyperlinks, cut out the blah blah) I recently gave to a study group of the European Economic and Social Committee outlining those ideas.
Richard Exell
What is going to happen to the Dilnot report? In the summer, the Dilnot Commission on the Funding of Care and Support published its report but the big question is whether its recommendations will ever be implemented by a government obsessed with austerity. An important TUC on-line seminar on 28 November will discuss the Commission’s recommendations and the political struggle that is building up around them.
Everyone knows that ‘something must be done’ about paying for social care. We have a system that isn’t really a system, with:
And with an ageing population, the one thing we can be sure about social care is that we’re going to need more of it.
Owen Tudor
It’s difficult to know what is most risible about Open Europe’s latest attack on workers’ rights, “Repatriating EU social policy”. Is it the suggestion that scrapping EU-generated employment and social rights would create 60,000 jobs and boost the economy by £4.3bn, which is simply ideological wishful-thinking, or the suggestion that unions might approve of repatriating to Westminster the power to legislate over these matters because the European Commission is currently pushing an agenda of austerity (er, what, unlike the British Government?) It is unlikely that anyone will believe, let alone be persuaded by, this bizarre report, although it was especially unfortunate that its assertion that the Temporary Agency Workers Directive will have one of the worst effects on employment coincides with news that the first month after the UK implementation of the Directive saw an increase in temporary employment! The report’s purpose is presumably to increase the pressure on David Cameron to pick a fight either with the rest of the European Union (which would be bad for Britain) or to pick a fight with Nick Clegg (which would be bad for his government). But it is always worth contesting the myth that better rights at work are bad for the economy, because it helps us make the case that better rights at work are actually positive not only for workers, but for the rest of the economy too.
Owen Tudor
I’ve posted on Left Foot Forward about Chancellor George Osborne’s opposition to the Robin Hood Tax at the EU Finance Ministers’ meeting in Brussels yesterday. There’s no doubt that the progress made over the last couple of months has led to a reaction from the financial interests that oppose the tax. We’ve seen a huge increase in attacks on the tax from the financial sector, from right wing pundits, and from politicians either backing or scared of the City – as well as a lot of trolling in the blogosphere. Most of the arguments are not new (if I see one more article that refers to the Swedish experience of FTTs as a killer fact, I shall scream – even the IMF have seen through that one). but they’re getting creative. The newest is a suggestion that the tax will fall mostly on pensioners – you know, the people George Osborne has demonstrated he is so concerned about (not!) - which seems to have originated in the Netherlands. Hopefully these criticisms will lead to a proper debate, rather than being rejected out of hand by Robin Hood campaigners or used as a convenient excuse by opponents who want to kill the argument stone dead – as Osborne was suggesting at ECOFIN yesterday.
Richard Exell
You know how it is, you’re looking at a dataset pretty sure you know what you’re going to see …
Well that happened to me with today’s figures on Business Research and Development. I’d been interested in the impact of the recession on research and development, and what struck me was how little change there has been in the proportion of GDP spent on this form of investment:
Adam Lent has pointed out that UK business investment has recovered quite well, and that it’s one of the few “reasons to be cheerful” we’ve got at the moment. Private non-financial corporations have a lot of cash saved up and our prospects are very dependent on how they spend it: investments in property, food retail or outside the UK will do less immediate good.
Adam senses a shift to venture capital, but it would be good if the money was also being spent on product and process innovation within British corporations. This will be difficult without investment in R&D and the table above shows what an uphill struggle this is likely to be.
Owen Tudor
Early this morning we got the great news that the US trade union movement has won a fantastic victory at the ballot box, overturning an Ohio law that would have slashed public sector workers’ terms and conditions and denied them collective bargaining rights. The referendum was considered by the Financial Times to have been a key showdown between organised labour and the pro-austerity, anti-union right wing. Ohio electors voted 63%-37% (an outstanding margin in what is a swing state in Presidential elections) to overturn the law.
