So we’re using Touchstone blog to launch a new Economic Dashboard, giving a quick way to see trends on many of the main economic indicators since 2008. Every month, we’ll update the charts, so we can plot any progress the country is making towards recovery, or help make the case for policies that will make a difference.

You can view historical charts for unemployment, vacancies, part time work, wages, inflation measures and much more, as well as pulling up the stats snapshots from previous months. We’re also making a widget version available to other sites who’d like to display the graphs and stats on their own pages, and you can use the dashboard to generate your own widget codes.

Whatever your viewpoint, we hope having a quick overview of the state of the labour market and wider economy is going to be a useful resource for those wanting to join the debate about how the country can rebuild after the crisis.

View the Economic Dashboard

Wages failing to keep up with inflation, tax and benefit changes and cuts in public services all combined are going to dramatically reduce the living standards of many British families by 2013, according to our latest research.

In Unhappy Families, the first analysis of this ‘living standards gap’, we’ve looked at the effect on four typical British families, and found their living standards are set to be hit by between 6% and 10%. Have a look at the headline results we’ve found for our families:

Living standards have fallen more than at any time since the 1970s. The wrong people are now set to pay the price for what went wrong over thirty years, coupled with the coalition’s naive belief that a programme of cuts can put right the damage in just four years.

A not entirely seriously filmed video from UNISON, highlighting a very serious point. Clause 168 of the Health and Social Care Bill removes the restriction on the amount of income a Foundation Trust can make from private charges – the so called “private patient income cap”.

As Foundation Trusts are already being told to find £20bn in efficiency savings, we believe many will seek to maximise their income from other sources by giving greater priority to paying private patients. If this happens, NHS patients could find themselves being pushed to the back of the queue for care, and waiting lists starting to grow again. 

The TUC and health unions will be lobbying Parliament over the Bill’s Commons third reading, next Tuesday and Wednesday (6th/7th Sep). Please join us in standing vigil for the NHS by uploading your photo to a giant photo mosaic we’re producing to show the depth of concerns around the country about the future of our National Health Service.

But if Battle for the Boardroom offers us a peek into the psyche of British managment, I’m a little worried.

You start with a company, whose aim is to control every building in a city. You attempt this by throwing squad after squad of besuited executive employees at your competitor’s buildings, cancelling out their own employees in a battle of attrition. It’s kind of The Apprentice meets the First World War.

Luckily you always manage to respawn new workers at your HQ to send into battle (especially if you can afford a handy consultancy upgrade). Then when your opponent’s HQ has finally fallen to your drone employee onslaught, you get to sit in your office with your secretary and count a huge pile of money.

Of course personnel issues aren’t entirely neglected. You do get a bonus at the end of a level if you have any staff left, which is hopefully just enough to cover the cost of the expensive consultants you’ll need in the next level.

Okay, I’ll admit, it’s actually quite fun for a few minutes. I don’t know if it’d quite inspire anyone to sign up for the trenches of a management career though – but if it did, I’m pretty sure those would be exactly the sort of people we’d rather not have anywhere near our boardrooms!

However, on closer inspection, Tourism and Heritage Minister John Penrose’s latest wheeze is not actually a “new bank holiday” but rather a recycled old one – the tease! He’s running a “pre-consultation” on whether we should move the May Day bank holiday, and if so, where we should stick it.

I’m not entirely sure why we need a pre-consultation here. There’s a perfectly serviceable full-fat consultation on these issues coming up later this year – one that would be run by proper Cabinet Office guidelines on consultations.

It couldn’t possibly be that amidst some grim economic figures, John Penrose is desperate to be seen to be doing something – anything – for his sector of British industry (so long as it doesn’t actually cost any real cash of course) – could it? Plus as a bonus, getting in a quick dog-whistle toot to keep restless Tory backbenchers distracted?

Penrose’ stated rationale is that Britons would spend a lot more if we could extend the tourist season out to October. Not a bad idea that, but doing away with May Day bank holiday would likely lose us more economic activity than the October day gains. The Horticultural Trades Association got their shot in earlier this week to protect garden centres’ best trading days, with a Populus poll finding 78% of people wanted to keep May Day holiday.

I like May Day. As a good lefty, I’ve a dog-whistle of my own around the nearby International Workers’ Day, but it’s also a day that’s been celebrated for centuries, from Olde English Roodmas and Celtic Beltane, albeit with a short puritan break thanks to Cromwell. 1^st May is even the date of the Act of Union – surely the kind of tradition that would appeal to a “Conservative and Unionist Party”?

So by way of pre-suggestion to the DCMS’ pre-consultation – How about a compromise? Don’t just shuffle the bank holiday deck chairs. Let’s keep May Day AND have an all-new October holiday.

If you’d like to see a new bank holiday give the country a boost, and break the four month slog between August and Christmas, go pre-tell John Penrose’s pre-consultation. And as he asks, send him a tweet (140 chars is always the most reliable to get views on your new legislation if you don’t really want to hear them I find…), using the hashtag #bankhol.

Though may I also humbly offer a second hashtag suggestion of #keepmayday?

It lets you add your details, such as income level and number of children, and it’ll estimate how they will be affected by the tax changes taking place from today and from April next year.

Try the calculator now

With the same report showing house prices up 3.4% overall (7.6% in London), first time buyers and low- and middle earners are being priced even further out of the property market than they already were. Such diverging experiences of the property market hardly bode well for us all being in it together.

I’ve made (with the help of some great code made available by Tim Craft) an interactive map, that lets you see what this data means at a glance. You can also plot the same constituencies by political party returned at the last election, to get more of a sense of the areas represented.

Launch the interactive jobs map

Of course, this is only what the ITUC’s survey was able to uncover in the 140 countries it studies. Many other violations will have remained unreported, where people are unable or unwilling to make their voices heard, often due to the fear for their jobs or even their safety.

A year of international tensions has put unions, as key players in democratic civil society, right on the front lines. Workers protesting unpaid wages, harsh working conditions or the harmful effects of the global financial and economical crisis have faced beatings, arrest and detention, in countries such as Algeria, Argentina, Belarus, Burma, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Honduras, India, Iran, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan and Turkey.

The survey estimates that some 50% of the world’s workforce are now in vulnerable employment. Job insecurity especially affects workers in export processing zones of South East Asia and Central America, as well as domestic workers in the Middle East and South East Asia, and migrant and agricultural workers worldwide. It will come as scant surprise that many of the worst affected sectors here are those with high proportions of women workers.

Informal employment has grown right across industrial sectors and regions. Workers in ‘atypical’ employment find it harder to organise or union rights, which compounds their vulnerable position in the labour market.

2009 was the 60th Anniversary of ILO Convention 98 on the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining. This Convention still hasn’t been ratified by countries such as Canada, China, India, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam, meaning around half of the world’s economically active population is not covered by these vital work rights.

The first will be tomorrow’s unemployment figures. Unemployment is lower in this recession than in previous ones, but that doesn’t mean that it’s no longer a problem. Tomorrow we’re hoping to see movement on a few important indicators:

• Claimaint count: Last month saw the number of dole claimants fall by 32,300 – the fastest fall since 1997. Another sharp fall in this week’s figures would indicate the UK labour market is recovering well from the recession.
• Economic inactivity: A fall in the number of economically inactive people (excluding students) to below 5.82 million would show that unemployed people are moving back into work rather than becoming permanently detached from the labour market.
• Full-time jobs: The number of full-time jobs fell towards the end of 2009. We’re hoping the latest figures will show an important recovery in full-time employment.

Unemployment and the deficit are closely linked, as tackling unemployment is a way for the Government to save serious amounts of money. During the 1980s, when there was very little intervention to help those out of work, government spending on unemployment benefit peaked at £4.8 billion in 1981/82 and remained above £3 billion for much of the decade. Spending peaked at £2.7 billion after the 1990s recession.

Spending after the recent recession is projected to peak at £1 billion and is forecast to fall during the current financial year. We believe this is largely because government action has been very different to previous recessions.

Then on Thursday we’ll get new figures on public borrowing, which are currently expected to confirm borrowing in 2009-2010 as being below the Chancellor’s original forecast. If this holds, it would show that investing in jobs, which result in both higher tax receipts and lower benefit spending, is the best way to tackle the deficit.

And Friday sees the publications of the preliminary estimate of first quarter 2010 UK GDP growth. Here we’re expecting to see modest growth and a further rise in manufacturing output. Good news, but meaning the economy is still fragile and still reliant on public investment.

Of course the UK can’t keep a deficit of this size forever, but the more sustainable way of reducing it is to encourage growth and get people back into work. Cutting back on public investment now could plunge the economy back into a double dip recession and send unemployment soaring.

We’re hoping this week of important economic indicators will bring harder questions to our politicians of all stripes about exactly how they intend to tackle unemployment and secure economic growth.

Meanwhile, outside the Twittersphere…

Okay, okay… That was a cheap shot. In truth, pretty much everything that can be done to help people use Job Centres is welcome, and if you really are in the market for a way to search national listings on an iPhone, then it’s free, looks to work, and can be got hold of here.

We spend around a third of our waking hours at work. More than being just an economic process where employees simply trade their time for a wage, work is centrally important to us as human beings. It helps us define our identities, our physical and emotional well being, and even how long we live. We all deserve a fulfilling working life, with job satisfaction and the opportunity to achieve more of our full potential.

But too many of us get stuck with ‘bad work’ instead. You know you’re in this category if you have symptoms like a lack of control over work, poverty pay, repetitive or monotonous tasks, a lack of respect, incompetent line managers, work overload (or indeed getting too little to do), an absence of training and personal development, unsafe working conditions, over-long hours and bullying.

This ‘bad work’ really hurts us. It leads to stress, ill-health and lower motivation. There is a strong link between stress and the use of tobacco, recreational drugs and alcohol, while being stuck at your desk all day and snatched 20 minute junk food lunch breaks can lead to obesity. Workplaces suffer higher sickness absence, higher staff turnover and reduced levels of productivity as a result.

For those employers unimpressed by the idea of helping their staff improve their personal well-being, the idea’s hardly pure altruism. It could lead to a better, more successful organisation with loyal, motivated and productive staff.

We’d like to see a national standard for ‘good work’. Having a practical index for this potentially nebulous idea would help employers look at work organisation and job design, and include effective channels for employee engagement. Of course, many jobs are always going to involve elements of monotony or demanding physical effort, but an index would at least help employers recognise where this is, and compensate to make work better fitted to the people that do it.

It would hopefully encourage employers and employees to work together to ensure that work is no longer seen just as a place where employees go to earn enough for material sustenance, but as an activity that helps satisfy some of Maslow’s higher needs; belonging, esteem and self-actualisation.

We don’t often quote Audrey Hepburn on this blog, so before sending you off to read the pamphlet, I’ll remedy this oversight by giving her the last word:

“Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.”

This year we’ve seen an increase in the number of people working what we’ve dubbed ‘extreme overtime’. This is not extra work conducted on jet-skis, but rather people who do in excess of 10 hours a week above their paid contracts), and 14,000 more reported this in 2009, bringing the total close to 900,000.

And despite what many commentators might have us believe about conditions and motivation in the public sector, a higher proportion of public sector workers worked unpaid overtime in 2009 than private sector workers (25.3% against 18.3%).

The free work these people do in the public sector was worth nearly £9 billion – quite a tidy sum. Public sector workers are also more likely to do ‘extreme’ unpaid overtime (4.9% against 3.1%), and slightly more likely to do more of it (18 hours a week average against 17.8 hours).

Now of course, there are mitigating reasons for this – just as the stories about public and private sector pay recently weren’t quite as clear cut as they may have appeared. The types of work done in the public and sector aren’t directly comparable, and in any case have changed in recent years with trends such as public sector outsourcing to the private sector.

But next time you see a story about the cost of lazy public sector workers in the paper on your commute home, you might like to consider there are probably still quite a lot of them at their desks, racking up that £9 billion of extra work.

Here are some quotes from their resulting paper, “The Parameters of a Financial Transaction Tax and the OECD Global Public Good Resource Gap, 2010-2020“:

For the OECD, the size of fiscal consolidation projected at $300-370bn per year over the coming years will place severe budget constraints on governments. Working families risk paying twice for the crisis: first through rising unemployment and falling incomes and then, as a result of cuts in public expenditure, through reduced access to social services and the corresponding rise in inequality.

…And yet these same governments have still to deliver on their commitments to finance global public goods, including raising Official Development Assistance to 0.7% of Gross National Income and climate change adaptation and mitigation measures for developing countries. The global public good resource gap that would emerge would be in the range of $324-336bn per year between 2012 and 2017.

TUAC believe a Financial Transaction Tax could be an economically viable and politically acceptable way of plugging this gap, and preventing its re-occurrence:

The economic justification for an FTT starts with the acknowledgement of the harmful effects of short-term speculation producing strong and persistent deviations of asset prices from their theoretical equilibrium levels.

Such “overshooting” in prices lead to speculative bubbles over the long run. A measured and controlled increase in transaction costs implied by an FTT would slow down trading activities so as to align capital flows with economic fundamentals and the real economy , while freeing up new sources of financing for global public goods.

And they have this to say on the IMF’s current preferred option of a global banking insurance scheme, and how it measures up as an alternative to a transaction tax:

The two instruments differ in terms of both revenues (which would not be available for public goods under an insurance scheme) and the handling of risk (institution-based under insurance, transaction-based under an FTT).

Two and a half years into the crisis, serious flaws remain in the national and international financial supervisory framework. An FTT, unlike the insurance proposal, would provide governments with a powerful regulatory tool which would not depend on the ability of the supervisory authorities to price or assess risk. An FTT is thus the most appropriate ‘low-cost’ instrument for tackling volatility in asset prices and for downsizing the global banking industry, particularly at a time when the international financial supervisory framework is in tatters and will take a decade to reform.

We’re backing a campaign, Don’t Risk the Recovery, along with 38 Degrees, the Fabian Society, Left Foot Forward and IPPR. You can help by taking action now at the 38 Degrees site. They have an urgent petition to Darling and Osborne,  asking them not to play short-term electoral politics and gamble the recovery we need so badly.

Please take a minute to sign the petition now, and tell your friends about it.

“We are going to have to cut our spending and I agree with the 20 leading economists who said we need to start this year. The next government, whatever party that is, must set out a plan to reduce the bulk of the deficit over a Parliament by cutting wasteful spending and must not put off those tough decisions to next year. These factors threaten to undermine the confidence of international and UK business, UK consumers and the global financial markets. That could cost jobs and reduce investment in Britain.”

And there we were thinking the debate had moved on a bit, with all three main parties now agreeing it better to hold off on major cuts until at least 2011. Big public spending cuts this year would risk sending the economy back into a double-dip recession. It’s obviously not ideal, but the deficit can and should be financed until the economy is growing again.

Much of the business of Branson’s hugely diverse Virgin Group depends on consumer confidence to survive. He really should be more careful he wishes for, or does he think that ‘forcibly increasing leisure hours’ for many more people will somehow lead to them consuming more Virgin lifestyle products?

And of course as Left Foot Forward point out, Branson himself may have a more direct connection to the deficit. It’s been widely reported that he makes use of offshore trusts to minimise his contribution to the UK Exchequer’s revenues, and has in the past been convicted for tax evasion. A bit rich (possibly a bit super-rich) then to prefer others to stump up the difference in service cuts and job losses.

Prepared by Richard Murphy‘s Tax Research LLP, our submission Taxing Banks examines how banks are currently taxed around the world, and the case for reform both in order to raise income needed to meet the costs of the crisis, and to make many of their activities less potentially harmful and more tax compliant.

The recommendations range from a number of different financial transaction tax options (such as the Robin Hood Tax) in the short term to more fundamental reform of taxes, disclosure, codes of conduct and anti-avoidance measures as longer term solutions. You can read the full report as a pdf download.

Not sure if this exactly equates to “feared by the bad, loved by the good“, but it’s a pretty good start for the new Robin Hood Tax campaign, which is launched today.

The Robin Hood Tax could raise hundreds of billions of pounds to help repair the human damage caused by the global economic crisis, protect public services at home, fight poverty abroad and help foot the bill for climate change, through a levy on banks’ financial transactions. The rate would vary according to the type of transaction, but around an average of 0.05%.

The market for financial transactions has exploded in the last decade, and is now worth 60 times global GDP. Before the financial crisis banking was the most profitable industry in the world, with profits five times those of pharmaceuticals, and three times bigger than privatised utilities. At the same time the financial sector isn’t taxed as much as other sectors.

Given the huge number of such transactions taking place, it’s estimated that if applied internationally, the low rate scheme could raise £250bn a year. Put against the £4bn reckoned to be enough to halve child poverty in Britain, it’s clear the tax could do a vast amount every year.

The campaign coalition – 50 agencies ranging from Oxfam to the RSPB, and all points in between (including the TUC), are calling on party leaders to support a global tax on the banks, but also to do more in the UK and EU. While an internationally agreed tax system would be the best way to proceed, there’s also a lot the UK Government and European Union could do now to take a lead and build on transaction taxes already in existence, such as UK stamp duty on shares (at 0.5%).

They’ll find an electorate pretty sympathetic to the idea as a way of addressing the UK deficit. The Oxfam poll found that more than a third of people (36%) thought a tax on banks would be the best way to cut the deficit, compared to 26% who opted for cutting public spending, 9% for increasing businesses taxes, 7% for raising income tax, and 4% for increasing VAT.

It could well be the right idea at the right time. The UK campaign is part of an international movement with similar calls being made in the USA, Europe and across the developing world. Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Nancy Pelosi, Jose Manuel Barroso, Meles Zenawi (Ethiopia) have all spoken out in recent months in support of some form of transaction tax. It’s also been backed by financial figures such as Lord Turner, George Soros, Warren Buffet, Avinash Persaud, Sir Philip Hampton, and Terry Smith.

Last word goes to Ethical Currency Ltd founder Alastair Constance, who already contributes a voluntary levy on currency transactions via his company:

“Billions of pounds whizz round the global financial system every day. A tiny tax on each transaction is absolutely practical and will hardly be noticed by those paying it. But it could still raise billions to help make the world a better place.”

“That’ll be 50p, sonny.”

“I don’t have any cash.”

“Well, I’m afraid you kind of need to…”

“What if I paid you £5 later?”

“What?”

“My Dad’s good for it.”

“But…”

“Hold on…” (dials on MyFirstBlackberry) “Dad, are you okay to lend me a fiver if I need it?”

“What for?”

“I want to buy a Creme Egg.”

“What?”

“A Creme Egg. I’ll give you back a tenner after school.”

“How?”

“You just need to persuade the shopkeeper. Hold on, I’ll pass you over…”

“Hello sir? Your son says he wants me to give him credit on a Creme Egg. ”

“I’m sure it’s fine. Don’t worry, I’ll sort out the money if he can’t come up with anything.”

“Hmm… This isn’t how we normally do it, but here you go then…”

(Child eats egg. Rolls up wrapper. Hands it back to shopkeeper)

“What’s that for?”

“Payment. It’s a Collateralised Confectionary Obligation. Good for fifteen quid.”

Official statistics show the number of people claiming Jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) for more than 12 months has increased from 103,930 in December 2008 to 201,015 in November 2009, and we can see the number of long-term dole claimants continuing to rise into the new year.

The pattern is spread around the country too, with the number of JSA claimants more than doubling in 267 local authority areas across the UK, with sharp rises in rural areas such as East and North Dorset, and in big cities like Sheffield, Dudley and Bristol.

And for those unfortunate enough to be spending a second Christmas on the dole, it will be tough for them to stretch benefits far enough to have even a half-decent festive celebration. The Grocer magazine recently totted up a supermarket trolley of the cheapest Christmas staples as costing a family over £100 (before decorations and presents). A weekly individual JSA of £64.30 (£50.95 for under 26s) isn’t going to buy a lot of Christmas cheer.

To counter this in 2010, we’re calling on the Government to extend its job guarantee for young people so that anyone out of work for 18 months is entitled to a job paying at least the minimum wage for a minimum of six months, and to let those at the greatest risk of becoming stuck in long-term unemployment access jobs earlier than that.

It’s important to recognise that Government investment has kept unemployment well below the levels reached in previous recessions, but the stark reality of two such Christmases for more than 200,000 this year really drives home the message that there can be no room for complacency on long term unemployment.