Tagged news

The term ‘exploitation' is easily bandied about. All of us know what it means in some intuitive sense. We think we're being treated unfairly, made to work long hours with little job security. And for young people today, it's increasingly difficult to find a job at all. Even middle-class kids with university degrees have to rely on their parents to support them for several years while doing unpaid internships to accumulate sufficient brownie points on their CV to find a job.

We asked those who signed up to our statement calling for a bank windfall tax to fund a green new deal to explain why they thought a windfall tax is justified. We got some great responses and have posted some of the best below. Please feel free to continue the debate in the comments section.

I began my working life in 1954, as a commis chef at the Patten Arms in Warrington. They paid me £2 7d a week, which was protected by the Wage Councils - the same Wage Councils the Tories abolished in 1993. That led to people being paid less than £1 an hour.

A growing number of our fellow citizens are suffering from the deadening, debilitating effects of unemployment. Yet the ordinary working men and women adding their names to the lists of job centres and employment agencies around the country are not the only victims of the economic recession.

On Friday 15 May, MPs will debate the second reading of a private members bill that would effectively kill of the National Minimum Wage. The bill, introduced by Tory MP Chrisptopher Chope, who as a minister in Thatcher's government introduced the Poll Tax, has the potential to render existing legislation which guarantees a fair wage meaningless and drive millions of workers back to poverty pay.

Sometimes some of us can feel that we have been here before. In 1975, with the British economy in trouble, Labour Government ministers and officials met executives of Chrysler in the United States to see if the car manufacturer's operations in Scotland could be saved.

On Friday March 13th, I will be putting forward a Private Member's Bill in the House of Commons that would uprate the current level of statutory redundancy pay - the minimum that workers can expect to be paid if they are laid off.

Back in 2003 when Gordon Brown's five tests were being discussed, an excellent pamphlet by David Begg, Olivier Blanchard et al (2003) noted that sooner or later the pound would be squeezed between the mighty ‘tectonic plates' of the euro and the dollar. With sterling dropping through the €1 psychological barrier, it appears that the moment has come.