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The social partners in the chemicals induustry in Germany have negotiated a groundbreaking agreement that aims to deal with long-term workforce planning issues as the existing workforce ages. Under the agreement, 2.5% of the pay bill will be invested in a fund to deal with age-related staffing problems. The fund will then be used to pay for age-related policies such as carers' leave.
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Ben Baumberg has written the best brief summary of what can be learnt from the Employment Retention and Advancement Demonstration Project, which tried to help lone parents and long-term unemployed people who got jobs to keep them and to move on to better pay with training, advice, guidance and cash bonuses.
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Great article by ETUI’s Andrew Watt which exposes the facile and nasty suggestion that UK unemployment – or EU unemployment for that matter – is the result of lazy unemployed people. Unless, that is, people get lazier in recessions and less lazy in booms!
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A new report from Barnardo’s looking at the 16-19 Bursary Fund – the government’s replacement for Educational Maintenance Allowances. The charity finds that lower levels of money and the fact that it is harder to access the fund “are forcing many young people to consider dropping out of education and training altogether due to financial hardship” others are suffering severe hardship – going without meals, for instance – to stay in their courses.
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NIESR expects global growth of 3.5% in 2012 & 4% in 2013 (provided there is a ‘successful resolution’ of the Euro Area crisis.) Despite this, NIESR expect a mild recession in the Euro Area and the UK, with the UK economy contracting by 0.1% this year – but growing 2.3% in 2013 (provided the Euro crisis ends well).
Unemployment is expected to reach 9% this year and stay high till after the next election: “Unemployment at this elevated level for such a long period is likely to do permanent damage to the supply side of the economy, with large long-run economic costs.”
CPI inflation is expected to fall to 2.2% this year and 1.4% in 2013. The cyclically adjusted current budget is forecast to return to balance in 2016–17.
“The UK economy currently suffers from deficient demand; the current stance of fiscal policy is contributing to this deficiency. A temporary easing of fiscal policy in the near term would boost the economy.”
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At the IFS website Robert Joyce considers the benefit cap in the Welfare Reform Bill. This is now expected to affect about 67,000 households from 2013-14, reducing their benefit entitlement by an average £83 p.w.
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An excellent post from the Engineering Employers' Federation, showing that feeble household spending lies behind the UK's very weak recovery.
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A page of resources from the Children's Society on how the "benefit cap" will hit children. Did you know that if the government reverses the Lords amendments, 70 per cent of the people who lolse out because of the cap will be children?
Or that 80,000 children could be made homeless?
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A German research paper looking at Germany and the UK shows that “work-hour mismatches (i.e., differences between actual and desired hours) have negative effects on workers´ health. In particular, we show that ‘overemployment’ – working more hours than desired − has negative effects on different measures of self-perceived health.”
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“Variable pay for performance, while it may seem attractive in theory, creates more problems than it solves. There’s no proof that it helps achieve its intended purposes, and other approaches not only work better but also strengthen employee loyalty.”
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