OK, to be honest, Bush’s sanctions on Bolivia are about Bolivia’s alleged failure to control drug trafficking, rather than trade generally. But I’m at a Wilton Park conference on labour/environmental standards in trade agreements, and the irony struck me. At our conference, trade unionists, employers and trade negotiators are disagreeing about whether the World Trade…
New immigration Minister Phil Woolas has spoken out on immigration, and, true to form, has revealed that the brief he’s been given is, as always, to sound tougher than the last guy! He has told the Times that he wants to make it harder to enter the UK, and indeed that the Government doesn’t want…
Today is Blog Action Day, when thousands of bloggers around the world will be blogging against global poverty. It may seem odd to focus on poverty in developing countries as the storm of the financial crisis whips through the stock markets of the rich and powerful. But the two crises are linked.
LabourStart, the website “where trade unionists start their day” took me to China Daily today, and a report on efforts by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) to unionise foreign-based multinational companies. It reported that the following companies were proving very resistant: Wyeth, Microsoft, 3M, AstraZeneca and PwC. Maybe you work in one of their…
There’s an old saying about what makes charity aimed at developing countries effective. ‘Give a man a fish and you keep him alive for a day. Teach him how to fish and you keep him alive for years to come.’ But isn’t this a pretty poor ambition? Fishing is a hard, often dangerous job. In…
Cycling low-skilled temporary migrant workers in and out of the country, refusing them opportunities for settlement, is not a sensible way to run an economy – it reduces efficiency and increases costs for employers. Unfortunately this OECD position contradicts the opinion of the Home Office, whose new points based system will prevent many migrants with…