We’ve just sent in our submission to the European Commission’s public consultation on its trade policy. The consultation covers everything under the trade sun, and so does our long submission.

It’s not exactly weekend reading, so I’ll pick out one of the more juicy issues (and award a prize to anyone brave/sad enough to read the whole thing): the EU’s new investment powers under the Lisbon treaty. Read more »

   Filed under: Europe, Globalisation, Human rights, Investment, Multinationals, Trade | 1 Comment »

That’s a slightly better title than the one I used for a blog I’ve just uploaded to the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) site: “The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprise: What do they mean for ethical trade efforts?“. Read more »

   Filed under: Multinationals | 1 Comment »

The Financial Times printed an editorial recently headed “Why China’s pay unrest is healthy“. But it wasn’t a guest editorial from Socialist Worker. What the FT argued was that higher wages in China are an important part of rebalancing the global economy.

The recent disputes at Foxconn and Honda have thrown into sharp relief a number of key elements of modern China. Productivity has outstripped wages, leaving China a far more unequal society. And exports have outstripped imports, leaving the world more unequal too. Inequality between and within nations is at the heart of the economic problems facing the planet. In recent years, there have been countless strikes and disturbances in Chinese factories (not just over wages – often over corruption and job losses – but those are all at base about the distribution of wealth too). They rarely hit western headlines, but have been recorded by the excellent TUC-supported China Labour Bulletin, based in Hong Kong. So how should China go about raising wages? Read more »

   Filed under: Globalisation, Multinationals, Trade | 2 Comments »

As the Vancouver Winter Olympics come to an end, attention turns to the next Olympics – London 2012. And trade unionists around the world are turning their attention to the workers’ rights implications. The Maquiladora Solidarity Network worked closely with the Canadian Labour Congress to ensure that the workers who made the clothes associated with Vancouver 2010 were paid fair wages, worked reasonable hours and were protected from injury and disease. For London 2012, the TUC is working with a range of unions, Labour Behind the Label, Anti-Slavery International and War on Want under the banner of Playfair 2012: campaigning for a sweat-free Olympics. We want the multi-national corporations like Adidas, Nike and Pentland (makers of speedo) to guarantee workers’ rights in the supply chains for their sportswear.

   Filed under: Globalisation, International development, Multinationals, Trade | 2 Comments »

There are a number of issues at stake with the takeover of Cadbury’s by Kraft. Inevitably free market fundamentalists have accused doubters of being protectionists and little Britishers but the case against this takeover goes much wider than a defence of the iconic nature of the Creme Egg. But unions are right to fight back.

The biggest issue is that this is going to be largely funded by debt. This will mean that Kraft will have to extract significant value out of the business to pay interest and the loan capital. It is a perfectly reasonable public policy objective to discourage highly-leveraged bids of this type.

What makes this worse – as Nick Clegg very effectively pointed out at yesterday’s Prime Ministers’ Questions – is that some of the loan finance is coming from the  publically-owned RBS. It is indeed strange that RBS is funding something that the government has opposed. Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, Manufacturing, Multinationals | 3 Comments »

This is very significant.  After endless denials by corporate Britain, one of the world’s biggest banks has finally admitted it deliberately avoided tax to the tune of £500 million.  It has confessed that it had a department within the bank dedicated to establishing the avoidance schemes.  That Department has now been closed down.

For those who have been campaigning hard on this issue and have had to listen to all the denials, dismissals and ridicule from big companies, this is massive proof that they were right.  No-one will believe that RBS was the only offender – the onus is now on other big companies to come clean. Read more »

   Filed under: Corporate governance, Financial crisis, Multinationals, Politics, Tax | 3 Comments »

It used to be the case that those who engaged in debate about tax havens fell into three categories:  those who thought they were morally indefensible and should be closed down, those who thought they were morally indefensible but didn’t think anything could be done about it, and those who thought tax havens provided a useful service to the wealthy and to the global economy.

It is a measure of how much has changed since the financial crisis in September that this debate has been transformed.  Tax havens are recognised now not just as a moral outrage but also as a key cause of the crisis itself.  The vast bubble in debt trading that has been central to the crisis was fundamentally linked to tax havens with the ‘special purpose vehicles’ which were set up to hold the proceeds of securitisation initiatives being based as a matter of course in locations such as the Cayman Islands.  The important point being that this not only took such trading out of tax liabilities but also removed it from regulatory oversight due to the secrecy that deliberately shrouds financial activity in havens.

So the TUC report today which reveals that four of the five big banks have 1,207 subsidiaries incorporated in tax havens will ring alarm bells across the world. The report could not analyse HBOS because the bank failed to list its subsidiaries or their location in either its annual return or company accounts.  This may be a breach of company law. Read more »

   Filed under: Corporate governance, Financial crisis, Multinationals, Recession, Tax | 1 Comment »

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 UK operations – at least one of them is quite heavily unionised in the west. Read more »

   Filed under: Multinationals | Comments Off