It seems to have become like an article of faith, making their stance difficult to shift with even the most rational argument.

As the dole queue rises, it certainly can’t be down to a shortage of workers.  It doesn’t seem right that 3 million employees – about 1 in 8 – should still work risky long hours while unemployment pushes two million – surely the UK can do better than that!

There is a wealth of research stretching back for decades showing links between excessive working time and heart disease, stress, depression and diabetes. That is why the EU brought forward the Working Time Directive in the first place.

The latest study adds to the case by confirming a link between working long hours of overtime and ”predisposal” to major depressive episodes.

For those who like to see some of the numbers:

“In prospective analysis of participants with no psychological morbidity at baseline, the odds ratio for a subsequent major depressive episode was 2.43 (95% confidence interval 1.11 to 5.30) times higher for those working 11+ hours a day compared to employees working 7–8 hours a day, when adjusted for socio-demographic factors at baseline. Further adjustment for chronic physical disease, smoking, alcohol use, job strain and work-related social support had little effect on this association (odds ratio 2.52; 95% confidence interval 1.12 to 5.65).”

Scientific caution rightly means that the authors stop short of saying that long hours increased the risk of contracting clinical depression by about x2.5 in this group of workers, as the causal link is a complex one. However, for those actually contracting heart disease, the difference between “predisposed” and “caused” might seem rather a fine one.

The particular value of this study of the health of UK civil servants is that it has a big sample (around 11,000) and it has been running for more than 20 years, making it one of the most reliable sources for studying working time and health.

…and earlier research from the same source found a worrying 60% increase in the risk of contracting heart disease amongst those working overtime.

There is obviously a serious risk here and yet the state and business leaders oppose taking action to protect people – simply scandalous!

King’s argument was that inflation had been kept high by the rise in VAT, higher import prices and soaring energy costs.

“The consequence has been a ferocious squeeze in the purchasing power of take home pay. That led to a fall in consumer spending which accounted for much of the weakness in growth in 2011″

Mervyn King points out that consumer demand fell by a full 5% in 2008. He might have chosen to add that it has continued to fall more slowly and that it is not expected to return to stronger growth until at least 2013.

So there we have it, just as the TUC suspected, we have become stuck in recession because we have not had big enough pay rises.

This is a serious problem, because at the level of the individual firm it might superficially seem quite logical to pay as little as possible in hard times, but the net result will be that the economy gets stuck in a vicious circle of low demand. The Government has no appetite for coordinated action to increase wages – and doubly so in the public sector – but that is exactly what is needed now if we are going to kick start the economy.

This is not just pie in the sky, as the money is alreday there to use in most of the bigger companies. It is a little known fact that the UK’s corporate sector is sitting on an ever greater pile of financial reserves rather than investing and spending. Once we get a firm recovery going, that money could be unlocked and flow into the economy quite quickly – but this can’t be done while real pay is falling.

Turning back finally to last night’s “state of the economy” speech, there are quite a few matters where Mr King’s analysis of what is needed differed from my view, but I will gladly give him the last word on a point where he is absolutely correct:

“The legitimacy of a market economy will inevitably be challenged if rewards go disproportionately to a small elite”.

Perhaps the Chancellor is just toying with the idea of tweaking around the edges of the public sector pay scales.  Certainly to push for full localisation would be foolhardy, as it would cause significant detrimental economic side effects and would be likely to lead to the Government having much less control over the public sector pay bill.

The main risk is that the less well-off regions and nations of the UK would be made poorer by localisation. Columnist Chris Giles was making the case for localisation  in the FT today, but he admits with cutting irony that:

“cutting public sector pay in poor areas is as likely to generate local dynamism as the austerity measures currently imposed on Greece.”

Second, the mechanisms needed for local bargaining would not be very efficient.  National bargaining brings economies of scale to public sector pay setting. Local bargaining would mean committing significant extra resources. For example, the NHS has 161 acute hospital trusts. Each of these would have to gather labour market intelligence, draw up a negotiating position, hold a number of negotiating meetings involving senior staff, and set up new pay-roll systems and so-on.

Significant differences in pay between localities, regions and nations would also provide an incentive for public servants to migrate away from the poorest areas, causing new skill shortages.

Localising pay might well also reignite the legal battles over equal pay, with all the expense and uncertainty that would entail.

Perhaps most worryingly for the Government though, genuine localisation of public sector pay would take a great degree of control away from the chancellor. Local determination is not compatible with pay freezes and caps.

Furthermore, although local market pressures may bear down on public sector pay in a recession,  what would happen in a boom? The answer is likely to be that trade unions would be very astute about playing off public sector  employers against each other in negotiations, as the bargaining “game” would then become a contest between national unions with full-time negotiators and local employers . The process of ramping up settlements by singling out the weakest employers first is known in industrial relations jargon as “whipsawing”. This could well lead to the overall public sector pay bill rising more quickly.

This strategy might benefit some public sector workers, but this would be to some extent at the expense of others. Unions do not pursue  this route now as it would simply be unfair .

The overall outcome would be that those who live in rich regions would get richer whilst those in poorer areas would lag even further behind – simply the antithesis of us “all being in it together”.

The tone of the piece is that we are all working longer but that we are reasonably happy about it. However, reading between the lines there is a more interesting story here – “the average worker …. is made to feel angry by bosses once a day.” – sounds like there is still a strong need for trade unions here!

On the continued rise of unpaid overtime holding back job creation, it’s worth noting that the service sector has both the highest incidence of unpaid overtime and the highest rate of profit (15.9% according to the Jan 2012 ONS figures). In addition, balance sheets show that large companies are sitting on piles of cash while directors fret about the economy.

If some of these companies got off of the fence and started hiring then we could make progress towards a better work-life balance.

3 million UK employees currently work more than 48 hours per week and the LFS shows that 80% of them want to cut their working time. Inhuman working hours damage family life and squeeze out participation in volunteering and civil society. We simply can-not build a 21st century country with 19th century working practices!

The rise will put a bit of extra cash in the pockets of the UK’s lowest-paid workers at a time when they are feeling very squeezed, which is worth a cheer,but the increase will have to be bolder next year.

- NMW rates from October 2011

Cuts in public services and benefits are hitting the working poor the hardest and this increase is not enough to protect them from falling living standards.

An increase that is set at the highest level possible without causing net job losses would push more money into the economy, as research suggests that minimum wage workers spend 100 per cent of any rate increases.

The LPC also says that the latest increase should benefit the public finances by £230 million as tax and national insurance rates increase and the benefits bill falls. It is important that employers pay their share at a time we are fighting cuts in public finances.

Its also worth who gets the National Minimum Wage, as this helps us to see that it has so far been a socially progressive instrument – and we believe that there is still more potential to be fulfilled.

Minimum Wage employee jobs 2010

Derived from LPC report 2011, p22, fig 2.5. Based on LFS figures.

NMW jobs by location 2010

Source: LPC report 2010, p21

Number and proportion of NMW jobs by industry

Derived from LPC report 2010, table 2.2.

The BBC  Panorama programme also wants to hear from those who have been wrongly denied the National Minimum Wage – contact: panorama.reply@bbc.co.uk in the next week or so.

We support the interns campaign groups and investigative journalism because it is important to build up a compelling body of evidence on this deplorable scam. In the coming months we want abusive internships that fail to pay the minimum wage to become too hot to handle .

Yesterday I raised the issue of unpaid interns on the You and Yours programme on Radio 4. This was a step in our campaign to persuade the Government to enforce the existing law, which will be discussed at next week’s TUC Congress and which we will be ramping up in the coming months.

There is a real chance that the Government might move on this issue if there is enough pressure to do so. The political calculation may be changing as many middle-class parents contribute significantly to their childrens’ education and are faced with the cost increasing sharply. The rapid growth of unpaid internships means that an extra delay is developing before young people start earning. This is expected to lead to parents taking a jaundiced view of employers who demand free work as the price of entry into a career – and of the  government if it lets this state of affairs persist.

“The impact of the public sector cuts on private sector jobs remains a concern. A total of 20% of private sector employers now say they will have either a quite serious or serious impact on them.” - Recruitment and Employment Confederation Jobs Outlook survey, 23 August 2011

The impact is twofold:

• loss of trading opportunities in the public sector; and
• loss of consumer demand as public sector workers are displaced, or fear that they will be displaced.

No surprise then that employers organisations (such as REC) are belatedly starting to worry about Government policy.

In my view, the snag is that  we cannot have a stable economic recovery until the banks are once again willing to lend reasonable amounts  of money.

The reasoning runs as follows – the credit crunch was caused by the banks stopping lending, which then sparked the recession, caused house prices to fall and severely depressing consumer demand. Nobody is spending at the moment because credit is hard to come by and both employers and workers are waiting to see what happens to the economy next.

However, an end to house prices falling is a necessary condition for the revival of consumer demand, which in turn is needed to encourage firms to invest. The availability of sufficient mortgage finance under reasonable conditions of access is therefore a precondition for a stable economic recovery.

The Government has agreed targets for lending with banks, but has allowed them to fall way short with impunity. Time to employ some sanctions with teeth.

“It is a fact that the aggressive cuts Osborne laid out last year are … hampering our economic growth”.

Not my words, but those of Jim Armitage, business correspondent of the Evening Standard – usually rather a fan of Government policy. There are many straws in the wind that suggest that the business community is getting twitchy about the direction of government policy, having belatedly woken up to the fact that public sector cuts will both depress consumer demand and reduce the number of contracts let to the private sector. As this will in turn reduce tax revenues, there is a real danger of that the economy will enter a “vicious circle”.

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.

According to this story, the UK is “seventh worst” when it comes to high taxation. This is in a table of 19 selected countries that goes rather beyond the fair comparators of OECD or EU membership. Significantly, the table includes Dubai, where the zero rate of tax means that you can keep all of your earnings – although you will also likely to find that you will have to spend quite a bit of your pay-packet on things that we get for free in the UK.

This article is basically just an attack on taxation – and by extension, on public services. Watch out for more of these stories as the UK cuts start to bite.

However, away from the glare of politics in the media, there are some faint signs that thinking business people are beginning to worry that deep cuts will hurt the private sector, through lost contracts and deflated consumer demand.  If some big business players really are getting cold feet about cuts, then they have a duty to speak out.

Read the “high tax” story in full in the Metro.

The Government’s consultation ends on Thursday. If you want to join us in defending May Day and calling for an additional bank holiday, read on.

Quick response – if you are in a hurry, you might just want  to say something along the following lines:

I do not believe that May Day should be moved. My view is that  public holidays are days of celebration that are embedded in our culture, and should not be tampered with for economic reasons. Furthermore, I think that  moving May Day to a colder, wetter time of the year would be more likely to undermine domestic tourism than to give it a boost. What we really deserve is a completely new bank holiday. I support the TUC/ voluntary sector proposals for a new “Community Day” holiday from 2013 onwards.

Submit your response to: bankholiday@culture.gsi.gov.uk – Or you can make a submission by taking part in this online campaign action from the TUC’s Going To Work campaign site.

You can also find the full Government consultation papers at the DCMS site.

The problem is that difficult economic times means that many employers have turned their attention to other matters, whilst some employees have also become more reluctant to ask  for home-working in workplaces where rumours of redundancies are in the air. More now needs to be done to promote smarter working, otherwise we will miss out on an easy win-win solution that also benefits our environment.

Home-working can also benefit employers, both in terms of personnel benefits and reducing office costs. Its is also the case that cutting commuter journeys reduces congestion on our transport networks and attenuates needless vehicle emissions.

The TUC’s analysis of the Labour Force Survey found that the number of people working from home has increased substantially in the past five years- by more than 200,000. However, the increase stalled during the recession and further measures  are now needed in order to re-start the upward trend. It could help if the Government extends the right to request flexible  working to everybody, but home-working and flexible working are also matters for employer good practice and trade union collective bargaining.

…..and after Tuesday’s nightmare journey (90 minutes to travel 6 miles), I’m really glad that its Work From Home day!

Home-working 2005-2010

Source: LFS (autumn quarters) – all in employment

The underlying cause is the weak UK economy, which is being further damage by cuts in Government spending. Conversely, it is also the case that there is unlikely to be a strong recovery as long as faith in the housing market remains weak. A large number of  repossessions obviously constitutes a human tragedy and also has a corrosive effect on faith in the housing market.

The Government should certainly look again at its decision to cut the rate of support for Mortgage Interest and make sure that lenders are never tempted to take short cuts with those in arrears. Mortgage lenders could also think about doing more to extend schemes to convert mortgages into rent agreements so that people do not lose their homes

One crumb of comfort is that repossessions have not reached the epidemic proportions seen in the early 1990s. Government has been more willing to intervene this time around, but it looks to me as though changes in lenders behaviour has largely been driven by the fact that they learned a Sharp lesson from the Major recession. Back then, they all rushed to repossess, only to find that they could not sell, with the result that their share prices fell sharply.

Just to recall, there were 75,000 repossessions in 1991, equating to 0.77% of mortgages, whilst at the height of the recent recession there were 48,000 repossessions, which constituted 0.32% of mortgages.

It is also important to note that repossession put further strain on our social housing system, which is grossly underfunded and cannot meet existing demand. We must be tireless in making our demand that everybody in the UK should be able to have a decent home.

Most employers simply paid their staff to take the day of the Royal Wedding as a day off, and honoured their contractual rights in cases where employees had to work. However, a miserly minority decided to treat the bank holiday as a normal working day, whilst some agency workers were sent home without pay.

The TUC has written to Business Secretary Vince Cable calling on him to changing the law on special bank holidays by making a simple amendment to the Working Time Regulations, so that the minimum statutory entitlement of 5.6 weeks paid leave and public holidays is increased by one day in years when a special one-off holiday is proclaimed.

While too late for the royal wedding bank holiday this year, this change would ensure that the same problem does not arise again for the bank holiday to mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee on 5 June 2012 and that everybody would at least get an extra day off at some point during the year.

Working people also have to defend what we have already achieved. In particular, later this year the Government will be consulting on moving May Day to October, with the aim of extending the domestic tourism season. Shadow culture secretary Ivan Lewis called May Day “an integral part of British cultural life” in Saturday’s Daily Mirror, whilst Brendan Barber said that it was “a spot of union bashing”. Some Tory back-benchers have never liked May, even calling it a “commie holiday, although this claim totally ignores the centuries of tradition that preceded the foundation of International Workers Day.

My own May Day holiday experience was visiting Abbey Hill Steam Rally in the morning and Kingsbury May Festival in the afternoon. What I saw on Monday was hundreds of people of all ages enjoying themselves.

However, both of these events were held in field on a grass surface, so I can’t see them transferring to October if the Government goes ahead with its plans, which would mean that there would then be rather less domestic tourism of that kind going on.

The Government simply has to bear down on the banks to start making more mortgage finance available, otherwise the housing market will remain at a standstill, and ordinary working people will continue to be squeezed out.

There are some signs this week that the laissez-faire attitude to bad internships might be about to change. The Government has promised a push to make internships fairer as one of the measures outlined in its Social Mobility Strategy, whilst today’s Low Pay Commission report urges the government to enforce the National Minimum Wage (NMW) for interns.

The Social Mobility strategy published on Tuesday warns employers that they could risk legal action under the NMW legislation if they don’t pay young people properly.

The Low Pay Commission report, which the Government has accepted, recommends:

“that the Government takes steps to raise awareness of the rules applying to the payment of the National Minimum Wage for those undertaking internships, all forms of work experience and volunteering opportunities. In addition, we recommend that these rules are effectively enforced by HMRC using its investigatory powers.”

I have also just heard that a best practice code on interns that I have been working on for the past year with a number of the professions will be launched by the minister in July, so there is a real feeling that things might move forward now – and we need to make sure that they do so.

This initiative is long overdue, as the TUC and others have been complaining about interns not being paid the NMW for a number of years now. The problem is that a crackdown can only come from government, through investigation by HM Revenue and Customs, as it is very hard for an intern to complain for fear of losing their reference.

If the price of getting into a desirable profession is a period of free labour, then those from less-well off backgrounds will always be excluded. There is also a growing danger that free work will be substituted for paid work, thus driving a coach and horses through the NMW.

More broadly, I was relieved to see today’s announcement that the NMW would increase again in October, as this is the first time that the Low Pay commission has reported under the coalition government (although the coalition did honour the recommendations made in March 2010). Clearly the NMW has become an entrenched and valued part of life in the UK, and that must be a good thing is these troubled times. However, ensuring that simply calling a young person an “intern” does not mean that they lose their right to the minimum wage must be an urgent task for the coming period.

The Government will offer five year interest-free loans to up to 10,000 buyers in order to help them raise the necessary deposit. This equates to an average of £25,000 per head.

This will be good news for some buyers who are struggling to raise a mortgage, but it will only go so far. Statistics from the Council of Mortgage Lenders show that there were 10,500 first time buyers in January alone. They borrowed an average of £114,285 each, with a deposit of £28,571.

However, January is always the slowest month of the year for house sales, and the number of first time buyers was down 29% compared with December 2010 and down 12% compared with January 2010. Clearly first-time buyers have been badly squeezed by the credit crunch, the banks are being overly parsimonious, and the Government will still need to do a lot more to get mortgages flowing properly again

Another measure that warrants modest approval is the decision to extend financial support for mortgage interest for 2011/2012. This means £110 million worth of support for hard-pressed homebuyers, many of whom will be trade unionists. Continuing the measures put in place by Labour has meant that we have not seen the rush to repossess that was so damaging during the Major recession of the early 1990s. Indeed, CML statistics show that repossessions in 2010 were 24% less than in 2009, whilst mortgage interest arrears had fallen by 13%.

On a gloomier note, there was no new money to help social housing. The shortage of housing overall and social housing in particular continues to blight the lives of too many families in the UK and the TUC is deeply sceptical of the Government’s plans in this area.

I wanted to celebrate this non-event, as it is not often that I can say that Government has got something absolutely right, and I’m not quite sure when I will get such an opportunity again.

Mr Chope has continually tried to unpick the NMW as a truly national minimum standard, and his past proposals included the establishment of an opt-out from the NMW. The latest effort sought to establish an exemption for workers whose employers gave them training.

The insurmountable problem is simply that this idea has already been tried and discredited. If it were to be revived it would inevitably lead to misuse and exploitation.

When the NMW was introduced in 1999 it originally had a “Development Rate”, which allowed a discount for up to six months for employers providing accredited training.  However, a TUC review found that it was more often abused than used properly, and the Government accepted the Low Pay Commission’s recommendation to discontinue it in 2005.

The TUC’s own Inquiry found that the majority of employers who used the old training development rate failed to live up to their duties, in that they commonly provided no training at all, or only uncertified training. Re-introducing such a provision would do much more harm than good. All-in-all, simply a bad idea

It would be naive indeed to think that it would be possible to more than decimate the funding of local authorities and still maintain such services. If councils are running sacred at the moment it is clearly because the scale of Government cutbacks is so very frightening.

I can’t help feeling that we will see a lot more of these attempts to shift blame as the local elections begin to loom. They should be strongly resisted.

For those who are not familiar with Supporting People, it is a programme that helps around one million vulnerable people at any one time, including approximately:

• 815,000 older people with support needs
• 39,000 single homeless people
• 36,000 people with mental health problems
• 10,000 women at risk of domestic violence

This is a very important programme, and if the Government really wants to defend it then it should restore the planned cuts in its funding

Moving May Day would not help businesses or working people. However, it has long been the bête noir of the more rabid Conservative backbenchers, some of whom have criticised it as being a socialist holiday, so such a proposal would be purely driven by ideological considerations.

Although May Day was slotted into the modern bank holiday schema in 1978, it is actually one of the oldest days of celebration in the UK. Marking the return of spring is an important part of our Celtic tradition, whilst for some parts of the Christian church, the beginning of May marks Roodmas, which is said to be the date of the finding of the true cross in AD 355.

Of course, since 1891 the date has also represented International Workers Day, which is obviously an important day for the trade union movement, but it would take a rather bone-headed backbencher to ignore the rich complexity of the modern May Day celebrations.

It certainly would not be a very Conservative measure to try to overturn thousands of years of tradition. However, responsibility for public holidays actually sits in Vince Cable’s BIS department. I hope that he will stand firms against any attacks on May Day.

It seems as if the Government agrees bank holidays are good for tourism and the economy, so let’s stop talking about rearranging the deckchairs and simply create a new one. The TUC’s proposals for Community Day would have the additional benefits of bringing people closer together and generating more interest in voluntary and community activity.

It may be an unworthy thought, but one might begin to suspect that a Government that is trying to force through unpopular measures does not like the May Day public holiday because it allows people time to protest on a date that always falls just before the local elections.