Here are some videos from today’s employment regulation debate at Congress House. Brendan Barber and Howard Reed (independent economist) debated the cases for and against deregulation with David Frost (British Chamber of Commerce Director General) and Professor Francis Chittenden (Manchester Business School), with Christine Buckley in the chair. We’ve video of all four speakers’ opening arguments: Read more »
The headline grabbing element in today’s pensions announcement is the review into increasing the state pension age for men to 66. Unlike our hopes for the auto-enrolment review, there can’t be much doubt that this is a done deal given George Osborne’s announcement at the Conservative Party conference (even if Steve Webb was sceptical of the figures quoted at the time – though to be fair he did not oppose the idea.) Read more »
The FT reports today that 2.3 million jobs in the private sector are directly vulnerable to public spending cuts according to a new report from Oxford Economics.
The public sector spends £80 billion on services on top of the £140 billion used to buy goods from paper clips to fighter aircraft.
The service spending directly supports more than 1.2 million jobs, with another 1.1 million in the supply chain.
I am sure their shareholders will think that membership money for those employer groups clamouring for big spending cuts is money well spent.
On Friday 4 June, a joint delegation of European trade unions and employers met with the President of the European Commission to discuss the impact that cuts in public expenditure across Europe will have on employment. Unions and employers had agreed a joint declaration on the issue, which saw agreement that growth is the only sustainable solution to the problems of the budget deficits caused by the global financial and economic crisis. It is incredibly important that employers were willing to join the ETUC in calling for growth, thus rejecting the prevailing orthodoxy in Governments, the Commission and bodies like the OECD and IMF that cuts are the main priority. On the eve of the meeting, ETUC General Secretary John Monks warned that the current path risks repeating the errors of the 1930s, when co-ordinated cuts in public expenditure around the developed world turned the global recession into a profound depression. AS well as supporting growth and a sustainable industrial strategy, the ETUC is arguing for financial sector re-regulation, fiscal co-ordination and a financial transactions tax.
One of the more interesting discussions about employment in the recession has come from Richard Lambert, the Director General of the employers’ organisation, the Confederation of British Industry. It is an important contribution to the discussion about why unemployment has not risen as much as might have been expected in this recession. Read more »
In my first post on the CBI report on public sector pensions I looked at how they try to undermine public sector pensions by calculating future liabilities. I argued that this figure provides little useful information about their future affordability or sustainability. Much better is the approach taken by the Treasury, and endorsed by a recent NAO report, of looking at how affordable future pension payments will be.
This is a familiar argument for those who follow public sector pensions. It’s a basic choice between the way that economists and those who actually have to pay the pensions think, and how the actuaries and accountants who understand private sector pensions approach the very different world of pay-as-you-go public pensions.
In this post I want to look at what the CBI have to say about the net cost of public sector pensions. This is the difference between pensions in payment each year and the the contributions paid by employers and employees. Here I think they not only make some very strange assumptions about how this should work, but also have some very odd figures. Either I do not understand what the CBI is saying (which is entirely possible) or they have made an uncharacteristic mistake with their figures. Read more »
The TUC are big supporters of the new pensions settlement due to start in 2012. Ten years ago TUC policy that employers should have to contribute to the pensions of their staff was seen as a way-out demand. Now it constitutes a cross-party consensus backed by employers, unions and much of the pensions industry, thanks to Lord Turners’ Pensions Commission and some smart campaigning by unions and the wider consumer movement.
It is right therefore to mark two more milestones on the road to the implementation of the reform package. Read more »
Patrick Hosking is very rude about the National Association of Pension Funds in the Times today. He makes two charges. First:
Few have more reason to complain about the reckless greed of bankers, yet there has been barely a peep from the sector. The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), the body with the authority, credibility and firepower to make its voice heard, has stayed schtum.
This seems to me to be fair comment, and indeed we have already said roughly the same if more politely. But his second charge is wrong. Read more »
“I’m dreadfully bored and depressed in my job. I work for a big bank as a portfolio manager, and have nothing to do. I tried starting new projects but have been discouraged by management. So I spend my time writing a script and studying but the fact that I have about 10 hours of work a week is killing me.” Portfolio manager, male, 28
Of course this doesn’t prove anything. There’s both rubbish and brilliant management in private and public sectors. But the belief that private sector management is inherently superior is surprisingly widespread, even though UK management is generally weak. Read more »
Other than attacks on public sector pensions, the commonest pension story in the media at the moment is news of employers closing defined benefit (DB) schemes to replace them with defined contribution (DC) schemes. (Briefly a DB scheme pays a pension based on your pay and years of service and is guaranteed by the employer, while a DC scheme is simply a savings pot with your pension depending on the contributions made and how well they are invested.)
This is undoubtedly a big story, but there is an even bigger one. I’ve been going through the ONS statistics in some detail and they show that as well as changing the type of pension on offer employers are still retreating from providing decent pensions at all.
Ashley Seagar had a great column in yesterday’s newly one pound Guardian asking “Have we learned nothing from the financial crisis?”.
Much of it refers to the new Trade and Development report from UNCTAD (the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) that was published yesterday. PDF overview here and the gateway to the full version here. Read more »
