Jeremy Warner has an interesting piece in today’s Telegraph in which he says:
the trickle-down effect that is meant to spring from wealth accumulation has not worked as it should have. Flexible labour markets have delivered big time for bankers and shareholders, but failed to improve the [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, Inequality | 1 Comment »

The Financial Times’ front page this Saturday morning has a startling headline: “Bankers in favour of paying global tax”! But it’s not as good as it looks. The news from the World Economic Forum in Davos is that several leading global bankers have decided that they need to accept a lesser tax to head off [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, Tax | 2 Comments »

It has been interesting to watch how different people have reacted to the new equality report, produced by John Hills and his team.
Of course there has been much confusion about whether we are talking about narrowing inequality of outcomes or inequality of opportunity. These are both desirable and considerably intertwined, but not the same thing at [...]

Filed under: Inequality | 1 Comment »

Alex Brummer spent many years at the Guardian before moving to become city editor of the Daily Mail. He often writes good sense in a paper where I do not always look for it. His latest column for the New Statesman has some insight but is mainly pure essence of Daily Mail - perhaps not surprisingly as it is about pensions, and [...]

Filed under: Media, Pensions, Public spending | 1 Comment »

At single parent charity Gingerbread, we’ve been researching how single parents’ incomes and spending patterns compare with families with two parents. Our new report ‘Family Finances’ shows that lone parents’ poverty and struggles to get by can’t simply be blamed on bad choices about money.
In doing the research for this report, we were interested in finding [...]

Filed under: Child poverty, Earnings | 2 Comments »

Nicola has written for Left Foot Forward about the response from parts of the business lobby to the Government’s introduction of legislation to make the six months of maternity leave transferrable between parents. She disputes that new rights will impose ‘enormous costs’ on employers, and asks:
“If de-regulation is so necessary, why are so many other [...]

Filed under: Employment law, Work-life balance | 1 Comment »

Read the 15th TUC Recession Report
Today we have published our 15th Recession Report.  This will be our penultimate edition – in recognition of the recovery we will be moving to monthly Labour Market Reports and bi-monthly Economic Reports from March.
While a recovery in the labour market is a long way off, there are some positive [...]

Filed under: Labour market, Recession Report | 3 Comments »

The final report of the National Equalities Panel (NEP), “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK” is out today – you can download the full thing or exec summary from the Government Equalities Office website. It’s an exceptional piece of work, describing in graphic detail just how unfair and unequal our society has become [...]

Filed under: Equality, Inequality | 9 Comments »

Mervyn King is at it today in the Financial Times, endorsing a global bank levy rather than splitting up the banks or a financial transactions tax. He describes the latter as the least likely outcome of global discussions and he may be right. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t, or won’t, get such a tax.

Filed under: Beyond Crisis, Financial crisis, G20, Tax | 2 Comments »

Job satisfaction has dropped to a record low, with a particularly sharp fall among young people, according to a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development that is reported in today’s FT.
The report  blames the pressures of the recession, including job insecurity and stress. These factors will undoubtedly have taken a heavy toll [...]

Filed under: Labour market, Quality of work | 1 Comment »