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ASUU’s warning strike plan meets a firm line from the government: “no work, no pay.” Talks stay open, but classrooms may shut if demands stall. What outcome protects students most? #ASUU #Education #Nigeria #ValidUpdates

#ASUU #campus updates #Federal government #labour policy #Nigeria education #strikes #students #universities

From Benefits to Boardrooms: Labour's Bold Move to Slash Inactivity and Boost Employment

Tower Blockers! If you’ve been keeping an eye on the news, you might’ve caught wind of a big shake-up in the UK’s benefits system. Labour’s got a plan to get more people off the couch and into jobs, and it’s stirring up quite the conversation. Here’s the scoop: First off, let’s talk numbers. According to the latest stats, almost two-thirds of those on Universal Credit aren’t working. Yeah, you…

#disability benefits #employment #ESA #Labour policy #mental health benefits #PIP #UK benefits #universal credit #welfare reform #work capability assessment

Churches on the Brink: Labour's Tax Relief Slash Threatens 1,000 Historic UK Sites

In a move that has stirred both the pews and public opinion, the UK Labour government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a drastic cut in tax relief specifically targeting churches. This policy could lead to the closure of nearly 1,000 of Britain’s historic places of worship, igniting a fierce debate over the preservation of cultural heritage versus fiscal responsibility. The…

#Britain #church tax relief #cultural heritage #Keir Starmer #Labour policy #mosque security #UK politics

RACE EQUALITY campaigners have said that the newly-elected government must prioritise tackling systemic racism, amid...

Race equality campaigners have said that the newly-elected government must prioritise tackling systemic racism, amid concerns that Labour’s previously touted plans for a Race Equality Act could be shelved after the bill was renamed to focus on employment. They argue it is crucial for Number 10 to beef up efforts to address race disparities alongside any new legislation that is introduced. Labour’s proposed Race Equality Act was four years in the making as The Voice previously reported. However the bill has now been renamed the Equality (Race and Disability) Bill. No silver bullet The proposals at the Race Equality Act’s launch, back in February, fell short of being the silver bullet to tackle systemic racism that many campaigners had called for. It was still hoped however, that the proposals would form a core part of Labour’s plans when elected to government. The recent King’s speech however, which outlined the government’s legislative plans suggested otherwise noting that “legislation on race equality will be published in draft to enshrine the full right to equal pay in law”. While equal pay was indeed a part of Labour’s initial proposals, its mention in the King’s Speech raised questions. It is unclear why it was specifically mentioned in isolation or why the bill was renamed. It’s also uncertain, when or if a final draft will be available for scrutiny and which of the original ideas included in the Race Equality Act plans will remain. Race equality campaigners have said the Black community needs clarity and answers.

#uk #uk pol #labour policy #race equality #policy change #race equality act #becomes #equality (race and disability) bill

Keir Starmer announces party will now spend less than £15bn on green projects a year if it wins election

Running Scared

By Honest John

Now we know the dreary truth, what to make of this, the apogee of all Labour U-turns? How to assess this dropping of the policy centrepiece that had allowed Labour to claim, that despite all other policy retreats, the Green Prosperity Plan remained in place to give lie to those that claimed Labour had no genuine transformative vision? How to respond to Labour junking its assertion that, in office, it could pursue a radical vision: to repair the ruin of the Tory years by a green re-industrialisationof post-Brexit Britain? The Green Prosperity Plan has gone - “ditched” as so many programmes, proposals and strategies before it - its ambitious intent of £29bn of annual investment to kick start a green transformation of the British economy shrivelled to less than £5bn per year in the course of a Parliament. Labour’s governing offer, purpose and mission sacrificed on the altar of fiscal conservatism; its commitment to the British people discarded in order to to blunt Tory attack; its growth engine, from which the repair work to public services devastated by Tory neglect and ideological hostility, was to come, dismantled.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of one of the most extraordinary displays of lack of self-confidence in recent political history, is not Labour’s self-defeating adherence to a “fiscal rule” as complicit as it is mendacious; not the ineptitude of the policy reversal’s messaging; not the absence now of any distinctive Labour offer at the next General Election, and not even the pernicious power grab by the Blairite faction which surrounds Keir Starmer that this repositioning assuredly indicates. No, for me, the most dispiriting aspect of this whole long drawn out saga is the utter political cowardice demonstrably at the heart of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party that this act symbolises.

That Reeves’ fiscal rule was always going to kill the Green Plan if Labour seriously intended to adhere to it, is hardly news (although the Shadow Chancellor is currently making out that this was a key reason for having to destroy the Green policy now), but the apparent intent of the Labour leadership to adhere to all Tory spending plans, no matter what stunts Jeremy Hunt may pull in the spring with regard to unfunded tax cuts, is an extraordinary strait jacket for any incoming government to impose on itself, let alone one that is telling the electorate it will be a reforming administration. In fact, as matters stands, Reeves is committed to enact at least £22bn of revenue public spending cuts and £14bn of capital budget reductions from April 2025: such is the reductive logic of Labour’s inane fiscal rule. Labour’s fear of Tory attack and its lack of faith in the British electorate, and itself, despite a 20 point opinion poll lead, is apparently so overwhelming, it is capable of neutralising its entire political project.

The real worry at the heart of the Green Plan decision is that if Starmer’s Labour is running scared of Rishi Sunak, one of the weakest Prime Ministers this country has seen, and a Conservative government that is barely functioning as such, how will it perform in government itself - when it is buffetted by a right wing media stoking scare stories and populist nonsense; by the continuing underperformance of a systemically weak economy Labour appears to be intent on doing nothing to envigorate, or by unpredictable international events that could upend current political assumptions? If the excruciating absence of political courage and principle embodied in the decision to drop its one big radical set of ideas, is carried through into power, Labour may find itself being one of the shortest-lived, and embarrassingly inconsequential, governments in postwar history.

11th February 2024

#british politics #labour policy #labour #green prosperity plan #keir starmer #rishi sunak #next general election

Labour Loses Its Plot

Why Starmer’s and Reeves’ Latest Backtrack may be a Broken Pledge Too Far

By Honest John

ACCORDING TO the opinion polling organisation Politico, Labour currently enjoys an average 16 point opinion lead over the Conservatives; on the basis of these figures, the polling analysis organisation U.K. Polling Report predicts that Labour would, on a uniform swing, win an overall majority of at least 28 seats; furthermore, Britain Elects, an organisation that studies marginal constituency polling as well the national surveys, says Labour is heading for a whopping overall majority of 114, an assessment broadly supported by more considered analyses of last month’s local elections, characterised by widespread anti Tory tactical voting. Even under relatively pessimistic projections therefore, Labour are comfortably heading for majority power after the next election.

And yet Keir Starmer’s team continue to cling to the “Ming Vase” thesis of how Labour wins power. The analogy of the Labour leader seeking to persuade enough people to vote for the party in a general election to carrying a priceless Ming vase on a tray across a crowded room without allowing it to fall and smash, was first coined by Roy Jenkins observing Tony Blair’s caution in the run up to the 1997 election. As with so much else from the Blair era, despite the unusually steady and consistent polling and voting numbers indicating victory, the Ming Vase theory has come seemingly to dominate the tactical thinking of Keir Starmer and, perhaps even more so, that of shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Only this can explain the unforced and unnecessary watering down of Labour’s ambitious plans to spend £28b per year on green industry, green energy and green jobs. The pledges outlined at last year’s Labour Conference (in the Green Prosperity Plan) are the centre piece of Labour’s entire industrial, employment and post Brexit economic strategy. Its proposals, leading inevitably to radical policy change in energy, housing, employment, industrial democracy, regeneration, skills, research and infrastructure, are genuinely transformational: an eye catching description of a “re-industrialised” Britain, speaking to a new state led approach to economic management and drawing clear lines between a revived social democracy and the failed Toryisms of the last thirteen years. Labour’s green plan is quite simply the defining narrative of its intended government.

Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the pledge to borrow £28b a year to fund this programme of industrial and social change is effectively scrapped for at least two years after a Labour election win is dispiriting enough. But what takes this latest backtracking into the realms of querying what a Labour government after 2024 actually for, are the reasons given. The headline thinking behind the policy dilution is that Liz Truss’ tax cutting ideological experiment last summer has so increased the cost of U.K. borrowing that big commitments like the green plan are no longer sustainable. But in fact the actual reason stated is that the borrowing and investment associated with Labour’s green strategy (committing it to borrowing at this scale until 2030) would contradict Reeves’ “fiscal rule’ that debt must be falling as a share of national income at the end of Labour’s first term (five years). Given that Starmer’s Labour has already ruled out tax increases, or any form of asset tax and has not committed to an increase in Corporation Tax, it is hard to see how any existing spending commitments can be met without substantial borrowing that would be consistent with Reeves’ “rule”. Under this logic, the green plan would never see the light of day again, let alone any other measures to put right the grievous austerity cuts to health, education, social care and criminal justice that have resulted in key public services barely being able to function under the Tories.

The effective removal of the central plank of what a Labour government would actually do with power, apparently in the interests of reinforcing Labour’s electoral “credibility”, means it is now very hard to discern any political strategy in Labour’s remaining policy stance at all. It is as though Starmer and Reeves believe we really are in 1997: that the credit led boom years of Major and Blair are still in place, that there has been no 2008 crash, no austerity, no Brexit and no Covid and that with a little tweaking at the edges, the country will return to market led prosperity but with sensible Labour grown ups in charge rather than the clowns and grotesques that have masqueraded as Prime Ministers under the Tories. Only three constituencies ever seem to really matter to the Labour leadership: the financial markets, the Tory press and the seats in the red wall. What else explains the serial junking of all the party’s ambitious and genuinely transformational commitments and their replacement with a fatuous and zero sum numbers game on immigration?

But as Andrew Marr has recently pointed out in incisive articles and video shorts for the New Statesman, there is an entire consituency of youngish (30-50 year olds) anti Tory voters, despised by the Conservatives as “woke” liberals, who are increasingly spread uniformly across the country that Labour is seemingly content to ignore. This group tend towards Labour but can by no means be taken for granted by Starmer’s party, given the attraction of Liberal Democrat, Green and Scottish and Welsh nationalist policy offerings, and by a tendency by this group not to want to vote for mainstream parties at all. This large bloc of aware and socially engaged voters have been attracted to Labour by both its expansive plan for green-led transformation and for very specific and relevant policies such as abolishing student debt, now also carelessly dropped by the leadership for reasons of supposed financial prudence. With those policies gone, just what is Labour’s offer now to this large educated grouping that could swing marginal after marginal Labour’s way across the country at the next election?

Another constituency, far less articulate or even visible than the group mentioned above, and crying out for the change only a reforming government can bring, are, of course, the low income working class. Increasingly impoverished, reliant on benefits and food banks, high users of public services that can barely provide the basics any longer, in low wage and precarious employment and traumatised by inflation, these voters are close to desperation. However, there appears to be no policy offer for the very people Labour was set up over a century ago to represent, from Starmer’s leadership either. Even Tony Blair delivered the minimum wage, dramatic decreases to child poverty and increased skills and academic education to this constituency. In this case it seems Starmer and Reeves do not wish to emulate their hero: in Starmer’s Britain the poor will have look to themselves.

Starmer and his front bench seem wilfully oblivious to just how much fundamental damage has been done to the fabric and infrastructure of Britain by the successive blows of a decade of public spending squeeze and a no-plan Brexit. Overlay that with the economic shrinkage caused by the pandemic, Truss’ lunacy and now by inflation, then nothing but wholesale reform of Britain’s institutions, economy, governance and its approach to social justice is required. Prioritising placating right wing cultural and economic opinion over offering any sort of practical vision to address the damage wrought by thirteen years of Tory vandalism is as inadequate as it is baffling.

Labour will win the next general election, but its over cautious, visionless and uninspiring approach, seemingly following Blairite political rules that have not been relevant for over a decade, leaves it with an existential question: just what and who is Labour for?

9th June 2023

#british politics #keir starmer #rachel reeves #Labour policy #green new deal #British general election

Ontario is Giving $1.5 Billion in Rebates to ‘Safe’ Employers. But Critics Say Companies with Serious Violations are Still Eligible

Mojtehedzadeh, S. (2022, March 22). The province is giving $1.5 billion in rebates to ‘safe’ employers. But critics say companies with serious violations are still eligible. The Toronto Star. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/03/22/the-province-is-giving-15-billion-in-rebates-to-safe-employers-but-critics-say-companies-with-serious-violations-are-still-eligible.html UTL Link: http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fblogs-podcasts-websites%2Fprovince-is-giving-1-5-billion-rebates-safe%2Fdocview%2F2641345953%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D14771

Sara Mojtehedzadeh writes: "Companies under active investigation for workplace violations, as well as those with high serious injury rates, will be eligible for refunds from a $1.5 billion program meant to reward employers with good safety records, according to the terms of the recently-announced initiative. ... But the eligibility requirements are so broad that critics say most companies will receive the money — even those with troubling safety issues. 'We’re calling this decision by the government an assault on injured workers,' said Ontario Federation of Labour president Patty Coates. Under the terms of the program, companies convicted of offences, such as injury claim fraud, will be barred from receiving rebates. Employers convicted of serious offences under provincial safety laws since 2021, and those with more than one conviction since 2017, will also be ineligible. But that criteria will disqualify fewer than 300 companies across the entire province, according to data requested by the Star."

"[T]he rebate program’s current eligibility criteria doesn’t disqualify companies with accident rates that are significantly higher than their industry average, or those under active investigation for workplace violations. ... Even injury statistics can be a fraught way to assess workplace safety, critics say, because some employers pressure vulnerable workers not to report accidents. This practice, which is illegal, is known as claims suppression. ... The WSIB did not respond to the Star’s questions about eligibility for employers who experienced massive COVID-19 outbreaks in their workplaces. The Ministry of Labour has initiated prosecutions against 'several' companies for safety violations related to the pandemic, a spokesperson said. But this would not disqualify them from a rebate, according to the current terms of the program."

Additional Information

(2022, March 9). Over a third of work-related ER visits in Ontario don’t show up as WSIB claims. Institute for Work and Health At Work Newsletter. https://www.iwh.on.ca/newsletters/at-work/107/over-third-of-work-related-er-visits-in-ontario-dont-show-up-as-wsib-claims

Mustard, C. (2021, June 8). Emergency Department Encounter Records as a Source of Enhanced Information on Work-Related Traumatic Injury. Institute for Work and Health. https://www.iwh.on.ca/sites/iwh/files/iwh/presentations/iwh_speaker_series_2021-06-07_mustard.pdf

Photo Source: (2022). The province is giving $1.5 billion in rebates to ‘safe’ employers. But critics say companies with serious violations are still eligible [Photograph]. The Toronto Star. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/03/22/the-province-is-giving-15-billion-in-rebates-to-safe-employers-but-critics-say-companies-with-serious-violations-are-still-eligible.html

#health and safety #labour policy #WSIB #worker protections #employer rebates #worker safety #worker injury

ILO Launches New Online Database on Trade Agreements that Include Labour Provisions

(2022, January 26). ILO launches new online database on trade agreements that include labour provisions. International Labour Organization (ILO). https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_835844/lang--en/index.htm

The ILO writes: "The International Labour Organization (ILO) has launched a new global database on trade agreements containing labour provisions, paving the way for a more human-centred approach to trade policy. Aimed at policymakers, technical experts, and representatives of workers, employers and civil society, the Labour Provisions in Trade Agreements Hub (LP Hub) offers a comprehensive, structured compilation of the text of labour provisions in more than 100 regional trade agreements (RTAs) in about 140 economies."

"The launch of the database follows increasing requests from governments, workers’ and employers’ organizations for a central data source for information, research, and comparative legal analysis. Users will be able to navigate and analyse labour provisions across trade partners and over time, visualize data and trends, search for specific terms and download relevant information. A key feature is the classification of labour provisions into categories, which allows users to locate key terms quickly and accurately within and across agreements."

Additional Information

Labour Provisions in Trade Agreements Hub. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/LPhub/

Photo Source: Graham, S. (2015). Sign Here [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/OQMZwNd3ThU

#labour policy and legislation #labour policy #labour legislation #ILO #international labour organization #trade agreements #labour provisions