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 »

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 »

Every new Government disses the previous Government’s record, but the remarks made about the UK pavilion at the Shanghai Expo in the weekend’s Financial Times go beyond understandable exuberance. Read more »

   Filed under: Trade | 1 Comment »

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist, but the Colombian Government denies this. The European Union has been negotiating a trade deal with Colombia for several months, in a move which will be seen as a validation of its ‘improved’ human nights record (sic). But the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, has just published a report which shows just how obscenely ill-judged such a move would be.

And this comes on top of staggering revelations that the Colombian secret service has been spying in Belgium, where the EU is of course based. Surely the EU must now listen to European and Latin American trade unionists and Justice for Colombia and abandon this trade treaty, and make sure President Uribe and the rest of the Colombian Government recognise that they will be international pariahs until they stop allowing trade unionists and others to be murdered with impunity? Read more »

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

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 »

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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.

Read more »

   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’.

Read more »

   Filed under: Budget, 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