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Owen Tudor

Owen Tudor

I’ve been the Head of the TUC’s European Union and International Relations Department since 2003 and have worked at the TUC since 1984. I’ve been a member of the Health and Safety Commission, the Civil Justice Council, the Social Security Advisory Committee and the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council and now I’m on the Wilton Park Advisory Council. I’m particularly interested in the trade union movements of Australia, Iran and Iraq, the Middle East and the USA, and I’m interested in migration, trade, and building trade union capacity. I’m the Secretary of TUC Aid, the TUC’s charitable union development arm and on the Robin Hood Tax campaign steering committee.

  • International

    Swaziland needs to get rid of its King

    4th April 2012 — Filed under: International

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    ‘Obscene’ is a word often applied too liberally in international development, but this really does qualify: news wire service Agence France Presse (AFP) reports that “Swazi King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch, has ordered his impoverished subjects to give him cows for his birthday celebrations this month.” The celebrations are due to cost nearly £0.5m.

    Swaziland is one of the world’s poorest nations with over 60% living on under £1 a day, and the world’s highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection. Its population is actually falling as a result. The absolutist dictatorship of the King, who has banned political parties and sustained the longest period of emergency powers in Africa, has reduced his country to a basket case while he has amassed a personal fortune worth over £50m and a harem of 13 wives.

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  • International

    Stealing from the poor is no way to tackle poverty

    2nd April 2012 — Filed under: International

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee has encouraged the Coalition Government to break the promises made to the electorate by both coalition parties, and reiterated in the coalition agreement, to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income on overseas aid, and to legislate to make that commitment law. The TUC has warned consistently that the Government’s pledge might be broken. It would be a further breach of trust with the electorate, following on from student fees and no top-down reorganisation of the NHS.

    But we, like the development NGO umbrella group BOND, also think it would be disastrous for poor people across the developing world. In the light of criticisms of the 0.7% pledge made from the left as well as the right (including War on Want’s John Hilary on the Guardian website last week), I think it’s timely to explain why.

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  • International

    Insecure work: same problem, different hemispheres

    27th March 2012 — Filed under: International

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    The TUC and ACTU leaderships met this afternoon to exchange information and experiences about what we call vulnerable employment and they call insecure work. The ACTU’s Howe Inquiry has just finished taking evidence in 23 different places around Australia, in much the same way as the TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment did in the UK.

    The issues workers face in both countries are remarkably similar: sham self-employment, long-term ‘temporary’ jobs, and problems enforcing the laws that already do exist. And union campaigns have emphasised alliances, with churches, academics and local communities. In both cases, unions are keen to go beyond providing advice, and organising workers to defend their own rights. We’re both battling the assumption that globalisation has made ‘flexibility’ and insecurity inevitable.

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  • International

    ALP backs Holden, and got my taxi driver’s thumbs up

    25th March 2012 — Filed under: International

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    This week ex-leader of the ACTU and now Manufacturing Minister Greg Combet announced that the Australian Government had shown its commitment tbygones and skills by putting $210 million into the iconic Holden brand as part of a deal that will see Holden invest $1 billion over the next few years and build two next generation cars.

    And while Labor was investing for Australia’s future, the opposition National Liberals were pledging to cut $500 million in subsidies to auto manufacturing, without specifying how many people would be thrown out of work as a result.

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  • International

    Tackling poverty globally: are NGOs on the wrong track?

    24th March 2012 — Filed under: International

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    Brendan Cox, who, in a career of many highlights for one so young, advised PM Gordon Brown about development and is now working for Save the Children has written a fascinating report, funded by Bill Gates, which looked at the lessons of a decade of global anti-poverty campaigning to see what might work best in the future.

    His conclusions, politely expressed as tentative, but actually bang on the money and to be ignored at our peril, include the need for working in alliances rather than as individual NGOs, and set out a number of possible topics. Chief among these are women’s rights and social protection, both bread and butter to trade unions, although as Brendan points out, rather broad when specificity is often easier to tackle. But he doesn’t mention food poverty as an issue, which makes it really surprising that UK NGOs have chosen that as the priority for a new campaign they will launch later this year. And their decision to eschew more than a very limited alliance also runs counter to the evidence of what makes a good campaign that Brendan painstakingly assembled.

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  • Politics

    Australia’s Labor movement gets busy

    23rd March 2012 — Filed under: Politics

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    During the couple of days the TUC’s leadership delegation spent in Australian capital Canberra, the Labor Government took a series of steps designed to help ordinary Australian workers and their families. To us, it looked like a whirlwind of action, and even our trade union hosts admitted it wasn’t usually that exciting. But the ALP Government and the trade unions, so crucial to its election in 2007 and absolutely vital to its third election victory in a year or two’s time, have suddenly got busy in setting out a positive agenda of values and practical action worthy of electoral support.

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  • Politics

    Labor and the unions, down under

    21st March 2012 — Filed under: Politics

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    Follow Brendan Barber, Paul Kenny and Owen Tudor @TUCGlobal using #TUCdownunder.

    A TUC delegation to Australia visited Canberra today (21 March) for meetings with a range of Ministers, several of them former officials of the TUC’s equivalent, the ACTU. Despite the political turmoil of the recent challenge to Prime Minister Julia Gillard (who will be seeing the TUC later on today), and the Labor Party’s current poll ratings, there is confidence that Labor can turn the situation around by the time of the next General Election in around eighteen month’s time.

    One issue that ex-ACTU Ministers like Greg Combet, Simon Crean and Richard Marles were at pains to stress was the vital relationship with the trade union movement. Not so much the ‘embarrassing elderly relative’ in Lord Monks’ trenchant expression, more a key way to ensure that Labor stays grounded in ordinary people’s lives, and can win back their support before the next election.

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  • International

    Commonwealth could do better on rights – especially at work

    13th March 2012 — Filed under: International

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    The Commonwealth – 53 nations with over a third of the world’s population – demands democracy from its members and often suspends them for lapses. This commitment to principles as well as the shared history and language that derives from that least democratic of institutions, the British Empire, makes the Commonwealth unique. The EU and OECD also require members to be democracies, but have never suspended one. The TUC is part of the Commonwealth Trade Union Group, with 30 million members in 50 Commonwealth countries, and we have consistently argued that Commonwealth countries should implement all eight core labour standards of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Now, the Commonwealth is considering a Charter for the Commonwealth, and the TUC is pressing the British government to include the ILO’s core conventions in it.

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  • International

    Bankers are taking far more out of transactions than a Robin Hood Tax would

    13th March 2012 — Filed under: International

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    Avinash Persaud is every anti-Robin Hood Tax fat cat banker’s worst nightmare. A former banker himself, and a professor of economics, he can’t be dismissed as well-meaning but naive, or as a banker-basher. So his report today that a Robin Hood Tax would be good for Britain, have a positive impact on GDP, and cost the finance sector’s customers far less than the fees bankers levy themselves, is “a heat-seeking missile” (in John Major’s phrase) at the opponents of the EU’s plans for a financial transactions tax.

    Avinash’s report, commissioned for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, says the EU’s proposed tax (which is less ambitious than the campaign’s proposals, but welcome nonetheless) would raise £8.4bn in tax revenue for the UK Treasury. It would, contrary to the EU’s own initial and flawed impact assessments, raise GDP by 0.25%, equivalent to creating 75,000 jobs in the UK alone.

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  • International

    Tory breach of promise on aid: aid agencies start to grumble

    9th March 2012 — Filed under: International

    Owen Tudor Owen Tudor

    Twenty-four mostly household name development agencies – including the TUC – have written to the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister calling on them to fulfill the Coalition agreement to enact in law the commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on overseas aid. Though the text is intensely polite and bends over backwards to lavish frankly unmerited praise on them over aid policy (several of us had to hold our noses to sign) it is the first time that the aid community has been willing to call the Government out on this possible breach of promise. But aid agencies are getting desperate to hang on to the Coalition’s commitment to aid, just as it looks like it is going to fade away as the economic outlook worsens. The TUC has never been convinced that the Coalition would implement this promise, but it would give us no pleasure to be proved right, which is why we swallowed and signed up.

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