20 years after the Berlin Wall: Europe undivided?

A bit off piste here, but it’s a personal interest of mine, so here we go.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification of Germany – you can find much information from the usual news media sources but a special nod to the coverage in The Guardian, where amongst other things you can read the ever-excellent Timothy Garton Ash, and to Transitions Online’s specific 20-year anniversary portal.

The European Parliament is also holding a special event too, with a formal sitting involving 89 people born in November 1989 discussing what Europe means to them. (Incidentally, I note from the perspective of what follows here that all 89 are from current, as opposed to prospective, EU members – an opportunity missed there, I feel.)

It’s to be hoped that they spend some time discussing the future, for let’s not kid ourselves that this is a unified Europe:

1. large parts of south-east Europe – most of which we used to call Yugoslavia – remain outside the EU. Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 and Croatia is likely join in 2010 now that the Lisbon Treaty has been approved – but Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia i Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania all remain outside, some with evidently better chances of (eventual) accession than others. It would be nonsense to pretend that there is an invisible wall dividing these states from the rest of the EU, as much as it would be nonsense to pretend that the EU and Europe are synonymous terms. Serious mistakes have been made on all sides, both in the economic and political arenas, during the last twenty years but the will on the one side to join the EU, and the lack of appetite for them to do so on the other, remains a palpable reminder of the divisions that remain on the continent.

2. outside this part of south-east Europe, other countries with a perspective on the EU exist – both to the south and to the east. Turkey first applied to join the EU in 1960 and yet there remains ambivalence, on both sides; others exist (Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia… ) with differing degrees of desire to access the EU but which remain within Moscow’s purview. It’s impossible to say whether the war between Russia and Georgia last year over the territory of South Ossetia would or would not have happened had Georgia been in the EU at that point. Had it still had happened in that scenario, the EU would have been in direct confrontation with Russia. So, some aspects of the iron curtain remain – on the basis of a line drawn a little further to the east – and it is clear that the European Union needs to sort out its relationship with Russia, as well as with countries to the other side of that line. This is clearly a job for the new High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy – and for the new President of the EU, whoever that might be.

3. central and eastern European countries has been hit particularly hard by the global financial crisis – most of them members of the EU. The crisis lingers to a greater or lesser extent in Latvia, Romania, Poland and elsewhere but most of all in Hungary. There is no doubt some sort of role in re-flotation for the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development but its overall input is likely to be small. Countries in central and eastern Europe are likely to struggle with the aftermath of these problems for years – like the UK, Ireland and Spain, evidently – but frequently on the basis of economies that, as a result of the short history since 1989, are evidently less stable and less secure and, as a result, less able to withstand such economic shocks.

Much to ponder. And much to hope that the warnings from many sides of the dangers of complacency about the divisions that remain across Europe do not become realised.

Orange and T-Mobile rubber stamp merger proposal

Orange and T-Mobile have announced that they have formally signed their agreement to establish a 50:50 joint venture in respect of their UK interests, and on the basis of the ‘merger of equals’ terms of the transaction they announced back in September.

The proposal now requires the approval of the relevant regulatory authorities, including Ofcom; the press release comments only that this is ‘expected in the first half of 2010′.

The conditions that might be attached to that approval are evidently unclear as yet. From a trade union perspective, we need to note that divestment-based conditions are particularly unwelcome in the context of the added uncertainty and threats to terms and conditions of employment that they embody when employees are dragged from the employer they signed up with to another; from a competition-based perspective, the remedies need to recognise that this is a proposal which sharply undermines a hard-fought for position of more or less perfect competition between the four established operators.

Another lesson that, for all the rhetoric to the contrary, there is probably not much that is more inimical to a senior entrepreneur than a state of true competition.

PPF publishes 2008/09 annual report

The Pensions Protection Fund has published its annual report for year end 31 March 2009.

In a sign of the recession, the PPF has seen a rise in the number and value of schemes transferring to it. Nearly 31,000 people are now covered by the PPF, of whom some 13,000 are already receiving pensions, while a further 179,000 are in a total of 290 schemes being assessed at the end of the year. This has led to the deficit in the PPF rising from £517m in 2007/08 to £1.23bn in 2008/09 – although the PPF believes that the lack of big claims since March and improvements in the financial markets have seen this drop back to below £1bn. The PPF now commands assets of nigh-on £3bn, while schemes in assessment will add a further £5.9bn (and liabilities of £8.8bn).

Despite this, the levy on all occupational defined benefit schemes, by which the PPF funds its shortfall, will remain at £700m for 2009/10.

Lawrence Churchill, Chair of the PPF, said that the figures and the deficit were expected and that the recession had highlighted the value of the Fund, as well as the ‘resilience’ of its framework ‘in testing times’. Clearly he’s right that no-one wants a situation in which workers lose their pension as well as their job (in a formal recession or at any other time).

Interestingly, PPF levels of compensation average around £4,000 per annum (and around £1,940 for women). This is substantially lower than the average occupational pension income of more than £8,000 per annum, as revealed in the DWP’s 2007/08 Family Resources Survey. This may itself be a little on the high side, since Incomes Data Services’ Pensions Bulletin (September 2009) suggests that the average pension in payment is around £5,820 per annum, but it does indicate some likely pointers as to the size, income levels and relative maturity of schemes entering the PPF so far.

Agreement reached on EU telecoms package

Representatives of the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers have reached agreement on the EU’s telecoms package in a conciliation procedure. This procedure resulted from the impasse that proceeded in May from Parliament’s insistence on including a clause (Amendment 138) requiring a judicial procedure before users’ net access could be cut off.

The impasse on this one issue had threatened the whole package, a combination of five Directives and a Regulation which seeks to strengthen competition and consumer rights, facilitate high-speed internet broadband connections to all Europeans and establish a European body of telecoms regulators (BEREC) to complete the single market for telecoms networks and services. (A list of the dozen most prominent reforms can be found in the Commission’s press release.) Parliament recognised that agreement was necessary so as not to jeopardise the package and is reported by the Swedish Presidency to have agreed not to press its view too hard. Consequently, a compromise has been reached which seeks to take the spirit of Amendment 138 of the need to enshrine an approach which protects net users’ rights by providing fair and impartial procedural and judicial safeguards which embody the user’s right to be heard, taking place with ‘due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy’ (see Parliament’s press release and its own FAQs).

The package is subject to confirmatory votes both by Parliament, in a final reading in full session, and the Council (by majority vote) which are both expected to take place before the end of November. The text can only be approved or rejected – no further amendments are possible. Establishment of BEREC is expected next spring while the Directives (unlike the Regulation) will need to be tranposed into the 27 national legislatures before they can come into force at national level, a process which is expected to have been completed by May 2011.

Agreement on the package is timely. It is important not least given the rapidity of technological evolution and the role of infrastructure investment in sustaining European economies out of recession, to which regulatory predictability is expected to add positively to the conditions surrounding the consideration of investment in high speed broadband and thus to job security and growth. Connect General Secretary Adrian Askew, as President of UNI Europa Telecom, earlier this year specifically endorsed the need to secure the package, and UNI has worked very hard to secure workers’ rights, not least in terms of the package openly seeing workers as stakeholders in any question of regulatory separation.

It’s also clear that, after two years of negotiation on this package, and as with the European treaties more generally, appetite for ‘another go’ should this package have fallen would be extraordinarily low.

NICE report on mental health at work

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, an independent organisation providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health, has today produced a new public health guidance note for the Department of Health on Promoting mental wellbeing through productive and healthy working conditions.

Starting from the presumption that work has an important role in employees’ mental wellbeing, but that it can also have negative effects on health, particularly in the form of stress, the guidance includes a very useful paragraph summarising the issues in and around the workplace that pose risks to mental health at work:

Working environments that pose risks for mental wellbeing put high demands on a person without giving them sufficient control and support to manage those demands. A perceived imbalance between the effort required and the rewards of the job can lead to stress. A sense of injustice and unfairness arising from management processes or personal relationships can also increase stress and risks to mental health.

The guidance note is aimed at all those who have ‘a direct or indirect role in, and responsibility for, promoting mental wellbeing at work’ and includes a series of four recommendations, as well as an appeal to primary care trusts, primary care services and occupational health services to provide support for employees and employers in micro, small and medium-sized businesses. The major recommendations intended to assist employers, employees and trade unions to protect the mental health of employees at work are:

- take a strategic and co-ordinated approach to promoting employees’ mental wellbeing

- assess opportunities for promoting employees’ mental wellbeing and managing risks

- provide employees with opportunities for flexible working

- strengthen the role of line managers in promoting the mental wellbeing of employees through supportive leadership style and management practices.

There is little that is new about any of these – good organisations should already have an eye on employees wellbeing and many, in conjunction with their trade unions, do actively promote employees’ mental health. The advice is complementary to the advice and standards on stress that already exists, including from the Health and Safety Executive, and it is a useful addition to the armoury of tools that exists in this area, not least in providing detailed references to other related guidance.

Nevertheless, the timing of the publication is key: in a continuing recession, with rising unemployment and concerns over job security, and when employees are under even greater pressure to cover for redundant colleagues, the guidance is a timely reminder of the costs of poor mental health which can be associated with organisational responses to recession and of the duty of all to safeguard against the worst effect of economic crisis in the workplace.

Camera reunited with owner by Facebook

A story is popping around about Facebook’s role in re-uniting a camera lost on holiday on Mykonos with its owner.

The finder, having failed to locate the owner by wandering around Mykonos’s chora, and attracted by the six degrees of separation theory, set up his own Facebook group (Needle in a Haystack) determined that, if all his contacts signed up all their contacts and all their contacts… the owner would eventually be found. Starting in mid-October from a membership of 40, the group grew to over 230,000 before its French owner was eventually found (though within how many degrees is not known) after a friend spotted himself in one of the pictures taken off the camera and posted on the group’s page.

It’s a sweet story – provided, of course, that the professions of those involved that this is a genuine story are accurate and this is not another balloon boy hoax – but perhaps most of all in that it demonstrates the power of the internet to shrink the world: an Australian man working on the UK music festival circuit over the summer finds a camera while holidaying on a Greek island and manages to locate its French owner currently working in London…

Trade union statement to G20 finance ministers

The International Trade Union Confederation and the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD have produced a joint statement to the meeting of G20 finance ministers taking place in St Andrews this weekend.

The statement calls for action on the following issues:

- jobs, with fiscal stimulus measures to have a stronger focus on job protection and creation

- a commitment to ’substantial financial commitments’ for climate change action

- an expeditious timetable for far-reaching reform of the international financial regulatory system

- the building of a new model balanced economy encompassing democratic institutions and open to dialogue with trade unions.

The TUC has also endorsed the statement and written to Chancellor Alistair Darling to encourage him to play a ‘leading role’ in persuading other G20 nations to support the aims of the international trade union movement.

The STUC is running buses to the event from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen – no online details are available at the STUC’s website but can be accessed via the link to travel arrangements on the specific G20 St. Andrews website. A counter-conference event is also taking place in parallel in London and is being organised by Put People First.

Make your voice heard!

Connect ballot approves merger with Prospect

In a ballot which closed at lunchtime yesterday, Connect members have voted decisively to merge with Prospect; over 88% of those voting formally supported the proposal.

The move will create the UK’s largest managerial and professional union, representing members in the private and public sectors and across a diverse range of occupations.

Adrian Askew, Connect’s General Secretary, said:

I am delighted that our members have strongly backed plans to merge with Prospect.  This promises an exciting future and we look forward to working closely with colleagues in Prospect, sharing our expertise and our innovative approaches to trade unionism to represent and protect our members.

Connect members will be part of a dedicated sector for communications workers within Prospect, with the merger due to take place as from 1 January 2010.

TUC Recession Report No. 12

The TUC has published its most recent commentary in this insightful and well-researched series today – you can access it via Nicola Smith’s posting for the TUC’s Touchstone blog here.

The headline figures are that unemployment in the June-August period is, at 2.47m, static on the previous month’s figures (for May-July), but higher than the same period in 2008 by 677,000. The unemployment rate is 7.9%, an increase of 2.1 percentage points on 2008, while the employment rate was 72.6% – 1.8 percentage points down on the same point in 2008 but an increase of 0.1 points on the figures for the previous month.

The TUC comments that unemployment is likely to continue rising into 2010 – small falls in unemployment, or rises in the employment rate, may be more of a blip than a sign of the corner being turned – but the rate at which it is increasing may be beginning to slow. Certainly this recession, despite its length and the sharpness of the drop in GDP, has had a lesser impact on employment than we could have expected on the basis of previous recessions – perhaps a testament to the policy decisions taken at an early stage in the recession.

This month’s special analysis focuses on child poverty not least in the light of the potential impact of the recession on the government’s 1998 commitment to end child poverty by 2020 – to which all the major parties are now committed. Recent progress has been poor and it looks likely that the 2010 milestone of halving the 1998-99 level of child poverty will be be met. However, taxes and benefits do substantially reduce poverty levels and are also a powerful force to reducing levels of inequality – it is unlikely that as much progress as had been made during the 1990s would have been achieved under a government less concerned with harnessing the tax and benefit system towards such aims.

Protecting the real value of benefits, to say nothing of ensuring that they are not reduced in absolute terms, has a key role to play in ensuring that the amount of relative poverty, as well as income inequality, does not become worse during a recession or in the subsequent recovery period.

Labour photo of the year

LabourStart has been running a photo competition to nominate the 2009 labour photo of the year and, some 3,200 votes (and, so far, more than three times as many views) later, the winner has been announced.

You can also still view the other photos nominated here.

A good competition – and a very worthy winner: it’s a photo that challenges.

Fujitsu workers vote for strike on pensions

Unite announced today that its members at Fujitsu had voted to go on strike in opposition to the company’s proposals to close the Fujitsu pension scheme to future service, amongst other pay and jobs issues going on in the company including 1,200 redundancies – some one in ten of its UK workforce – with some 6,000 having been informed that they are at risk. The union said that 74% of members voted for strike action while 92% voted in favour of action short of strike, and that its senior reps would now be meeting to determine the course of action.

Fujitsu has since August been consulting on changes to the pension arrangements which, at the end of the consultation process and subject to the company choosing to go ahead with its proposals, will see some 4,000 members of the main defined benefit pension plan sacked and then re-engaged on new contracts which do not offer membership of a defined benefit scheme. The company has also imposed a pay freeze this year, withdrawing promised pay freezes, but recently lauded above-target earnings for the first six months of the year. Unite contrasted the company’s current treatment of its staff with its pay out of about £150m to shareholders last year, as well as around £1.6m to two directors in compensation for loss of office.

Connect also has a number of members in Fujitsu.

France Telecom establishes €1bn staff help fund

This morning’s Financial Times is reporting that France Telecom, under intense pressure from workers following a series of work-related suicides amongst its managerial and professional staff, is in the process of establishing a €1bn fund to provide some support to workers towards the end of their careers.

Negotiations on the programme with the company’s trade unions are apparently not yet concluded (and the union websites are as yet silent), but the purpose of the fund seems to be to allow workers aged 57  – the group most affected by the company’s restructuring and the currently-suspended system of compulsory job moves every three years – to move to part-time working while maintaining pay. It needs to be stated that not all those who have committed suicide in the past period (or who have sought to do so) are, however, in this age group.

The size of the fund is not fixed at €1bn but, according to the report, the company has acknowledged that a sum of that magnitude is its ‘working hypothesis’ and would depend on the final precise terms of the scheme and the eventual take-up.

The news was broken as the item appeared in a briefing on the company’s third quarter results – the analyst materials for which do refer to as yet incomplete negotiations on a new social contract, part of which encompasses talks on psychological risks and the programme of part-time work for seniors (see slide 17 of slide pack).

A full conclusion needs to wait for the outcome of the negotiations with the unions but, for now, it does demonstrate what workers acting together can achieve in the context of social dialogue.

Hat-tip: Martin Silman, Executive Director Industry Analyst Relations at AT&T.

Equal Pay Day 2009

… Is today. Or, perhaps, it’s Unequal Pay Day since 30 October is when women stop getting paid this year.

The Fawcett Society, which works for gender equality in the UK, has launched the initiative on the basis that, with an equal pay gap of 17.1% at the full-time level, this is the point in the year when women are effectively working for their employers for free compared to their male counterparts who will get paid right the way through until 31 December. The equivalent of 62 working days without pay.

You can find out more about the Fawcett Society campaign here, while Connect reps can access Connect’s equal pay pages – including the submission on equal pay audits about which I blogged a couple of days ago – here. A group of leading campaigners, including the TUC’s Brendan Barber, has also written to The Guardian seeking a number of initiatives designed to deliver justice in the workplace for women.

With the EHRC consultation on equal pay audits, there is the opportunity to make real strides for equal pay in 2010 and beyond – should it be bold enough to recommend that the government take decisive action via mandatory pay audits. It is clear to us that the voluntary approach will not deliver the real action required to ensure that the equal pay gap is closed and, in this context, the government’s reluctance to take that step is hard to understand. The forthcoming Equalities Bill offers the opportunity to address this and we would urge the government to use it to make a start on extending the pay calendar for women by introducing equal pay audits.

Pension scheme membership – ONS figures

The Office of National Statistics has today produced figures on the level of membership of occupational pension schemes, using figures drawn from the 2008 annual survey of occupational pension schemes.

The headline figures are that, within the purview of the survey, there are 27.7m members of occupational pension schemes in the UK – though this includes both active and deferred members (in respect of the latter of which there may be some double counting in the figures since an individual may be a deferred member of one scheme and an active member of another) and current pensioners. Of this total, there are some 9m private and public sector employees currently contributing to pension schemes, while there are 8.8m current pensioners and 9.9m people with future entitlements.

(By the way, pension schemes are not so-called Ponzi schemes; i.e. they do not depend on a continual stream of incoming members (and contributions) to pay the pensions of existing pensioners – although ‘mature’ schemes, where the scheme is either closed to new members or where the membership profile is much more towards pensioners than existing members, often find it necessary to adopt much more cautious investment policies, resulting in lower returns).

The survey also reminds us that defined benefit schemes in the private sector have higher contribution rates than do defined contribution schemes: the average total contribution rate (both member and employer) for open defined benefit schemes in 2008 was 19.7 per cent, compared with an average of 9.0 per cent for open defined contribution schemes. Furthermore, the figures also seem to show that the current woes of pension schemes are very much reflective of the times, and that closing schemes is not a money saving measure: closed DB schemes had an average employer contribution rate of 18.1%, compared to 14.6% in open schemes.

There are of course some holes in the figures – the ONS itself points out that the figures exclude those in personal pensions, including group personal pensions (GPPs) and stakeholder pensions. Nigel Stanley over at the TUC has today done a very good job in highlighting this shortcoming in the figures (as well as engaging in some useful agenda setting in terms of how some of the nuances of the figures might otherwise have been reported).

Nigel’s point on the real scandal in the figures being the huge number of private sector workers who are without an occupational pension at all picked up on the central theme of the TUC’s earlier Press Release on the ONS survey. In it, Brendan Barber, General Secretary, went on to comment that the figures pinpointed the correctness of the government’s reforms to the pensions system starting in 2012 in requiring employers to contribute to schemes where employees themselves want it.

This is a different issue to the staged introduction of the employer contribution to personal accounts announced by the DWP and, while it remains disappointing that the regime will take so long to introduce, as I blogged about below, it is good to see something of a fightback against the Tories’ announcement that they would review the reforms. Tim Jones, chief executive of the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority, also came out fairly strongly recently in some unattributed remarks (or otherwise a private interview) picked up by Citywire in which he insisted that the reforms were on track.

Something needs to be done about the large number of people not saving for their retirement: the system of personal accounts is a good start in tackling that culture and there are indeed a lot of myths that need to be busted about personal accounts. If only that lengthy staged introduction could be cut-back…

Mandelson reveals BIS thinking on illegal file sharing

Just two days after the French ‘three strikes’ legislation on illegal file sharing passed into law (blogged about below), BIS Secretary Lord Mandelson has revealed that the UK approach will also encompass the possibility of persistent offenders having their internet connections cut off (BIS press release here; video of Mandelson here).

The formal response to the BIS consultation on illegal file sharing, which closed one month ago, is not expected until the publication of the long-awaited Digital Economy Bill, but Mandelson confirmed in his speech, at the C&binet creative industries conference, that proposals on file sharing will be included in it. It’s also fairly clear what they will look like. A careful reading of what is being proposed reveals an essential conservatism in that the cutting of persistent offenders’ net access will be very much a last resort, reserved for the most serial of infringers and accompanied by a clear appeals process, and that the predominant focus will be on reducing the extent of illegal file sharing via warning notifications and targeted legal action by rights holders. When net access plays an increasingly significant part in modern life, and given that net connections are frequently shared between a number of different people, that is clearly the correct approach.

Mandelson is right that ‘we cannot sit back and do nothing’, in the face of music industry evidence that only one in twenty tracks downloaded is done legally (a fact in apparent need of a citation), and (regardless of that) in the face of a growing expectation of a ‘right’ to free music. Mandelson is also right to target the pseudo-commercial aspect of illegal file sharing, confirming that in-family music sharing is acceptable. An approach based on education, enforcement and new business models is clearly the correct one.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that this is an initiative that I very much welcome, overall – but it seems to me that the government and the industry needs to engage in some of the soft stuff as well. By this, I mean a careful campaign focusing on the serious side of what illegal file sharing entails, from the moral perspective of the rights of the copyholder, with a view to changing behaviour over time. A campaign that focuses on the costs to the industry is likely to be far less effective as we are instinctively less sympathetic to the costs to faceless big business. (Or perhaps that’s just me.) And that’s not just because of the film industry’s rather embarrassing ‘knock off Nigel‘ campaign. So I’m particularly interested in Mandelson’s reference to education playing an important role in tackling the issue, and a delay in legislating for the disconnection aspects until April 2011, to give time for the soft stuff to work, is a sensible one.

At the same time, we do need further information on just how illegal downloaders will be spotted, targeted and approached. Such methods need to be open and transparent, and they do need specifically to preclude DPI-based methods of reading our net traffic.

I’d also question whether it is right to rope ISPs into sharing the costs, at any level, of enforcing the interests of rights holders. Numerous analogies could be made here to question the efficacy of holding channel providers partly responsible for the legality of what passes through those channels – I won’t do that but it seems to me intrinsically the wrong approach. It is the responsibility of rights holders to enforce their rights – and, particularly where the co-operation of IPS will be required in this process, not least because – ultimately – they could be losing revenues as a result of enforcement activity, asking the latter to share even a part of the costs of doing so could be counter-productive. At the same time, Talk Talk’s stance seems, to the extent reported by the BBC, to be rather irresponsible (although the content of the site itself seems to be based on good, honest campaigning).

So, two-and-a-half-cheers for Mandelson on this issue, I think.

UK slips in gender gap league

A report published today by the World Economic Forum (link is to press release) shows the UK slipping to 15th place in a table of 134 countries on the issue of gender equality. This continues a process of gentle decline which has seen the UK slip from 9th in 2006 to 11th, 13th and now 15th.

The Forum’s gender gap index assesses how well countries are dividing resources and opportunities between men and women, regardless of the overall levels of these resources and opportunities, and combines individual assessments within four overall sub-indices: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival; and political empowerment.

The UK ranks top (or, rather, equal top) in terms of the indices on educational attainment, but 22nd on political empowerment, 35th on economic participation and opportunity, and 72nd on health and survival (largely owing to a rather low-looking ‘healthy life expectancy’ of 72 for women and 69 for men).

Income falls within the economic  participation and opportunity sub-index, and here the UK ranks 20th with women’s estimated earned income, in terms of purchasing power parity, standing at 70% of that of men. This is actually the UK’s best result within this index but survey figures on wage equality for similar work show a figure of just 64%  – and the UK ranks 78th, its lowest level within this whole sub-index (just for comparison, Uzbekistan ranked top on this measure).

Nordic countries, headed by Iceland, filled the first four places – the same four countries as in 2008 (albeit in a different order). New Zealand filled fifth place, as it did in 2008, while South Africa jumped from 22nd to 6th, as a result predominantly of improvements in women’s participation in the labour force and in the representation of women both in the South African parliament and the government.

The individual component figures in the survey can always be challenged, but the survey acts as a useful check on the UK’s general progress towards gender equality – or, in this case, its lack thereof. The result on pay equality is particularly poor and chimes with recent research in the UK which shows that the gender pay gap remains, in the words of the Women and Work Commission, ‘stubbornly persistent‘ despite a reducing trend. At the same time, however, it does provide an opportunity to address the factors which might provide for the step-change required for women to break through the gap which remains.

Perhaps Proposals for promoting greater transparency in the private sector, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission consultation on improving gender equality in the workplace which closes tomorrow, might provide some way forward. As far as Connect is concerned, and as we argued in our submission to the consultation, mandatory pay audits are the way forward since they lead to structured and agreed action being taken towards a closing of the gap, with subsequent publication being the trigger both for accountability and for action.

France approves HADOPI 2 law on illegal downloading

One month after its parliament passed the new law, the controversial French legislation cutting the connections of illegal downloaders was approved last Thursday [registration required; limited viewing time] by the French Constitutional Court.

The new law sets up an agency – HADOPI – that will send out an e-mail warning to people found to be illegally downloading copyright content. Registration of a second offence within six months will be followed by a written report and a third could see a judge order a one-year access suspension or a fine. The members of the agency are expected to be appointed next month and the first warnings could be issued from the start of 2010.

The law’s proponents, including French President Nicholas Sarkozy, have supported the law based on the need to provide an environment in which content owners can flourish in spite of the ease with which content can be stored, reproduced and traded online. Doubtlessly there has been some form of international competition here too as countries have been to some extent racing each other to produce the first laws and thus to define themselves as the country with the ‘best’ protections for content owners. The UK, for instance, is also consulting on how instances of illegal downloading should be dealt with, while the European Commission also launched last week a consultation on the digital single market and protecting creative content online.

Furthermore, the European Parliament has dropped its amendment to the EU telecoms package which would have protected the rights of internet users to a court hearing before being cut off: an interesting development given that Parliament’s insistence on the law earlier this year stopped the package being passed prior to the summer’s EU elections, and then on the specific grounds of the first draft of the French HADOPI.

The French law has been controversial for the measures it takes in response: cutting internet access for up to one year – where this is the conclusion of a judge after due legal process – is a harsh punishment given the pervasiveness of the net and its political and social importance, and some organisations, e.g. Reporters sans Frontières, have as a result criticised the law as constituting a ‘major threat to free expression‘. Reaction has also been produced on the extent to which internet service providers themselves might contribute to the costs of policing illegal downloading, with associations of content owners, both in the UK and in France, arguing that they should while ISPs themselves have fought against such an idea, again on both sides of the Channel – and with some justification: policing copyright infringements should be the activity of copyright holders.

Reporters sans Frontières are right to be concerned about the methods of identifying persistent downloaders but freedom of expression concerns are rather harder to sustain in this context. That controlling persistent downloading is rapidly taking on the characteristics of whac a mole doesn’t preclude the need to do something about it – or that we should simply accept copyright theft as an inevitable part of internet life.

Tories to deregulate health and safety?

This week’s Risks newsletter, edited for the TUC by Rory O’Neill of Hazards magazine, contains an item on ‘Regulation in the post-bureaucratic age’, a recently published Tory policy document on the regulation of health and safety.

Essentially, what is being offered employers is a system of self-regulation under which ‘well run’ employers with certain checks in place, including the employment of professionally qualified experts in health and safety, could refuse to allow HSE inspectors on to their premises except in cases of emergency. External health and safety audits would also be arranged independently of government inspectors.

This forms part of a series of Tory initiatives on regulation – if not quite a ‘bonfire of the quangos’ then a ‘taming of the regulators’ – which has resonance for its likely approaches to other areas of regulation.

The problems with this particular initiative are legion. The document itself draws analogies with the system of controls and audits of corporate financial information which, as Risks correctly points out, brought us Enron and other financial scandals. These scandals taught us – or ought to have done – that information which is intended to be made public is not necessarily reliable and internal appointed experts are not always – whistle blowers apart – able to exercise the appropriate degree of independence which provides the reliable safeguards being sought. Hindsight is a powerful weapon of learning for other analogous circumstances – we ought to use it.

Secondly, where is the evidence that health and safety inspectors cause onerous burdens to business? We all know the triggers that health and safety provides readers of a certain newspaper but, in reality, the health and safety inspectorate is woefully under-resourced as it is (see facts and figures from the Third Report of the Work and Pensions Committee in April 2008) and instances of HSE inspectors landing on premises to carry out spot checks are rare. Perhaps this really is policy making for – and by – newspaper readers…

Thirdly, we ought not – but clearly we do – need to be reminded that, even under the current regime, accidents happen at work. Nine people died in the devastating ICL Plastics gas explosion – commonly referred to as Stockline – in 2004, while 33 others were injured. The independent audit concluded that the explosion was an ‘avoidable disaster’ based on ’serious weaknesses’ not only in the way the companies ran the plant but also, crucially, in the health and safety legislation. Not only did the company management ‘lack knowledge and understanding’ of the underground piping which was the cause of the explosion, the HSE itself was guilty of a ’stiffly bureaucratic’ response (quotes from here). This provides no reason to seek further cuts in the bureaucracy: an unbending of the bureaucracy is likely to require rather more, not rather fewer, inspectors – yet this is surely likely to be the outcome of proposals such as these. Rightly, trade unions including Prospect, which represents HSE staff and with which Connect is recommending merger in a ballot of our membership now taking place, have strongly criticised them.

In the area of health and safety at work, ‘light touch’ regulation does not work – and workers should not need to pay with their lives for that lesson to be continually re-learned.

How very different from the home life of our own dear country

The Berlin newspaper Die Tagesspiegel is reporting a story of a demonstration on the streets of Berlin – but one with a difference: under the headline ‘The rich demonstrate for a wealth tax‘, this is a campaign begun by a group of wealthy individuals for higher taxes so as to help Germany out of economic crisis.

The campaign Vermögende für eine Vermögensabgabe is based on the 2.2 million Germans who own more than €500 000 in property paying a 5% property tax for a two-year period – enough, the campaigners say, to plug the country’s €100bn budget gap.

Dieter Lemkuhl, the founder of the campaign alongside twenty friends, considers himself a privileged individual as an heir to his father’s brewing interests but, as a child of the 1968 demonstrations, he has a social conscience as well as a personal fear of the vicious circle based around money, greed and consumerism. He is also acutely aware of the significant redistribution from the bottom to the top which has taken place in German society, based on an increased number of millionaires, as income from assets has doubled while the tax burden has halved, proceeding alongside a growing precariousness in and around the workplace.

As Lemkuhl says, the growing gap between rich and poor cannot be in the public interest and is by itself unjust. Getting rid of money is not a problem, but this does not create the fairer social structure he seeks by virture of the initiative.

I shall be scanning the pages of the Financial Times more keenly than usual next week for news of a similar initiative being taken in London, perhaps in Pall Mall – though perhaps I shouldn’t be holding my breath…

Hat-tip: the BBC report of the story.

Did that really happen?

Did Griffin really repeatedly lie about sharing a platform with David Duke, even when David Dimbleby referred to the YouTube video, until Dimbleby passed him a piece of paper (presumably with photographic evidence on it)…

Still the wrong decision to invite him on to the programme – and not issuing an invitation to someone to speak on a public (televised) platform is not a denial of free speech – but this morning I’m a little more inclined to see the ‘give ‘em enough rope’ point of view of my friends.

Further, I wonder what the view within the BNP is this morning of the effectiveness of Griffin’s political strategy?