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 »

Alan Beattie has marked the latest World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial in Geneva with a full page Financial Times article asking why the global economic crisis has not yet produced new global institutions. There are two things needed: time and leadership. Read more »

   Filed under: Financial crisis, G20, Recession, Trade | 1 Comment »

You can’t have missed the ad for the TUC’s Beyond Crisis conference, but Put People First are also organising an interesting event on November 7 from 10:00 – 17:30 at Central Hall Westminster, SW1H 9NH.

This is what the conference leaflet says:

In March, we marched in our tens of thousands to demand the G20 Put People First. Far from putting people first we’ve seen nothing but a tinkering around the margins followed by the return to business as usual. Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, G20, Globalisation, International development, Recession, Trade | Comments Off

The TUC Congress carried a resolution calling for a campaign against the proposed EU-Colombia free trade agreement, because Colombia is the country where most trade unionists get killed, and the Colombian government does next to nothing to investigate or punish the murderers. The day before Congress debated the motion, Members of the European Parliament were already arguing against the deal. Labour MEP David Martin, who is an influential voice on the Parliament’s Trade Committee, asked the EU’s Trade Commissioner Baroness Cathy Ashton to:

“suspend their GSP+ agreement with Colombia, and secondly suspend our negotiations for a free trade agreement, until we get the assurances from the Colombian Government that trade unionists, human rights activists and others can go about their business safety in that country?” Read more »

   Filed under: Europe, Globalisation, Trade | Comments Off

This morning’s Financial Times finds Martin Wolf in reflective mood (’This crisis is a moment, but may not be a defining one’, p. 13). Wolf argues that “the (economic) crisis is global, with a particularly severe impact on countries that specialised in exports of manufactured goods or that relied on net imports of capital.” Wolf adds that policymakers have thrown the most aggressive fiscal and monetary stimuli and financial rescues ever seen at this crisis, and that this effort has brought some success.

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   Filed under: Earnings, Economics, Financial crisis, Globalisation, Labour market, Manufacturing, Recession, Trade | 3 Comments »

Today’s Budget announced a £750m Strategic Investment Fund, to support advanced industrial projects. This follows Monday’s launch of ‘New Industry, New Jobs: Building Britain’s Future’, by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson.

The TUC has campaigned for years for an intelligent industrial strategy, centered on the kind of strategic industries where the UK is or could become competitive in world markets. For most of those years, both the Government and employers were lukewarm, equating our approach with a failed policy of ‘picking winners’.

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   Filed under: Budget 2009, Economics, Manufacturing, Trade | Comments Off

Kenneth Clarke and Vince Cable have both attacked the Government’s paper yesterday outlining a new industrial strategy.  Cable called it “old labour corporatism” while Clarke went for the thoughtful “platitudinous waffle”.  They are both wrong.

Peter Mandelson, the driving force behind the paper, is genuinely rethinking Labour economic policy for a very different era when the UK can no longer rely on financial services and construction to drive growth and will have to compete in areas that have been neglected for years such as engineering innovation and high value manufacturing.  A shift like that cannot be delivered by the market alone especially when other governments are much less shy of giving their leading industries the odd helping hand.  My guess is that even the Tories would end up pursuing a pretty similar approach were they in power.  The TUC has, of course, argued for this approach for years. Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, Manufacturing, Recession, Trade | 4 Comments »

The announcements from the White House last week about Cuba have excited some interest, but (and Obama’s team clearly planned it this way) not huge waves. Several commentators have suggested that the steps taken – allowing Cuban-Americans to visit the island and send remittances, as well as some liberalisation on telecommunications – have been nugatory. Fidel Castro himself, while welcoming the moves, said that Obama needed to go further and scrap his country’s illegal trade embargo altogether. And of course he should. But this week’s moves make scrapping the embargo – until recently fairytale politics – a realistic prospect. Philip Stephens, writing in the Financial Times, suggested that the US trade embargo was unique to Cuba and uniquely American, and that the steps Obama has taken were very small and mostly symbolic. I think he’s wrong on all counts. Read more »

   Filed under: Trade | Comments Off

I have written before about why progressives should be very, very cautious before they flirt with protectionist sentiment. Two articles in The Financial Times today reinforce the point.  The first gives a detailed account of the Chinese Government’s unexpected decision to forbid what would have been the biggest foreign takeover of a Chinese company: Coca-Cola’s $2.4 billion bid for Huiyuan Juice.  There is widespread speculation that this was a protectionist measure and fears are growing of a retaliation from the US or possibly Australia where Chinese moves to take over mining companies has caused political disquiet. (UPDATE 28/3/09: The Australian Government yesterday blocked the takeover of Oz Minerals by the Chinese company Minmetals.) Read more »

   Filed under: Energy, Financial crisis, Recession, Trade | 1 Comment »

Christopher Caldwell from the right-wing US journal The Weekly Standard has returned to the theme of protectionism in the Financial Times today (referring to the ‘Buy American’ clauses in the US rescue package). He takes a sideswipe at requiring labour (and environmental) standards in trade agreements. His argument is that anything which raises prices for consumers is a bad thing, and that labour standards are one of the causes of keeping prices high. But that’s not always the bad thing he makes out, and sometimes prices can be too low for our moral welfare. Read more »

   Filed under: Human rights, Trade | 1 Comment »