The Court Clears the Government of Aiding and Abetting War Crimes

The UK's Export Control Act states that the British government "will not grant a licence if there is a clear risk that the items might be used in the commission of a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law." The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) - a group of NGOs including Oxfam, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch - argues that exports to Saudi Arabia currently breached this condition, given the likelihood of the weapons being used in the Saudi campaign in Yemen. CAAT had sought to block the export licenses for British-made fighter jets, bombs and other lethal weaponry they say the Saudi-led coalition is using - at least somewhat indiscriminately - in its military campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen's civil war.

London's High Court ruled that the British government's arms sales to Saudi Arabia were lawful and could continue. Parts of the hearing and verdict were closed to the public. The court said that the classified information ("Closed material") brought forward in the case "provides valuable additional support for the conclusion that the decisions made by the Secretary of State not to suspend or cancel arms sales to Saudi Arabia were rational." The court also claimed that the British government had access to a "wider and qualitatively more sophisticated range of information than that available to the claimant's sources" - a reference to the classified foreign office and military intelligence used in the case.

The Saudis had "sought positively to address concerns about International Humanitarian Law," the court said. "Saudi Arabia has been, and remains, genuinely committed to compliance with International Humanitarian Law; and there was no 'real risk' that there might be 'serious violations' of International Humanitarian Law (in its various manifestations) such that UK arm sales to Saudi Arabia should be suspended or canceled," the court said.

 The plaintiffs rejected claims of the British government being better informed than aid agencies.

"The suggestion that human rights researchers were rarely or never on the ground in Yemen, or relied on 'second-hand information,'...is not true," Human Rights Watch said.

"It has been documented by UN reports, by aid groups on the ground and by credible human rights organizations," said a statement put out by Save the Children.

The UN annual report on Yemen's civil war, and the related sanctions, said the Saudi-led coalition acting in support of the Yemeni government had carried out attacks that "may amount to war crimes."  

Freezing out teachers

Teachers' pay has been frozen since 2010 and will remain capped at 1%, a real-term pay cut for more than half a million teachers in England and Wales.

Kevin Courtney, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), explained, "Teachers’ pay increases have fallen behind inflation by 13% since 2010 while this public sector pay policy has been applied.  This latest pay announcement will mean that figure increases to over 15%.  The pay being offered to newly qualified teachers would be over £3500 higher if the pay cap had never been applied and schools would have far fewer difficulties in recruiting new graduates. The Government’s attack on national pay scales and its pursuit of performance related pay at a time of funding cuts in schools has meant that teachers are increasingly unlikely to get pay progression either. The result is that the Government’s own figures show that average pay for classroom teachers has only gone up by £300 - less than 1% - since 2010."

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), said: “For many teachers, this marks the seventh successive real-terms cut in their pay. We will not be able to attract the best and brightest to teaching if we constantly cut their pay.”

The Climate Change Corporations

Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report, the Carbon Majors Report (pdf) 

A relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions,” says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute.

The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report.

ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988. If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 1988 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by 4C by the end of the century. This is likely to have catastrophic consequences including substantial species extinction and global food scarcity risks.

A Carbon Tracker study in 2015 found that fossil fuel companies risked wasting more than $2tn over the coming decade by pursuing coal, oil and gas projects that could be worthless in the face of international action on climate change and advances in renewables – in turn posing substantial threats to investor returns.

A fifth of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions are backed by public investment, according to the report.

A research paper published last year by Paul Stevens, an academic at think tank Chatham House, said international oil companies were no longer fit for purpose and warned these multinationals that they faced a “nasty, brutish and short” end within the next 10 years if they did not completely change their business models.

Ha’am doresh tzedek hevrati (The people demand social justice)

 Histadrut, Israel’s largest and state-aligned trade union federation, was founded by Labour Zionists in 1920.  This nationalist trade union federation initially excluded Arab workers. The Histadrut was crucially part of the early Zionist movement and a backbone of the Jewish state. The Zionist movement was the labor movement,” explained editor of the newly revitalized Histadrut newspaper, Davar Rishon , Yaniv Carmel. “Histadrut is part of what caused Israel to exist.”At its peak, it represented over 80 percent of Israeli workers and had a hand in all parts of economic and social life, from transportation to publishing to health insurance. In 1930 the Histadrut founded the socialist Mapai Party, which, as the precursor to Israel’s current Labor Party, was to dominate Israeli political life for decades.

Then came waves of privatization that gutted Israel’s welfare state and labour movement. “It was a very radical transformation in which suddenly so many jobs in what was the public sector were now performed by private employees,” said Professor Orly Benjamin of Bar Ilan University. Services Israelis once considered a right had now become a commodity. Today less than 30 percent of Israeli workers are union members. And as the private sector grew, so did wage and economic divides: Israel has among the highest rates of poverty and inequality among the 35 countries of the Organization for Economic and Cooperation and Development (OECD). 

Now, the union movement is slowly rising again bolstered by the 2011 social-justice protests against the high cost of living. In 2011, it looked like Israelis were ready for change. Angry at the high cost of housing and basics like cottage cheese, young Israeli leftists pitched a tent on Tel Aviv’s iconic Rothschild Boulevard. In the months that followed, over 400,000 out of a total population of 8 million citizens took to the streets in an unprecedented show of anger over economic issues, dubbed the social-justice protests. “People say the protests failed, and they changed very little when you look at government’s neoliberal policies, but I think one of the big changes is how people think,” argued Haggai Matar, a leader in the Journalists’ Union. “It sparked this new consciousness of, ‘OK, maybe we can do better,’ and rethinking the relationship between workers and employees.”

However, there was one central Israeli issue the protests left out: The occupation of the Palestinians and the institutional racism faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel. It was an intentional move by organizers to not alienate the Israeli majority. But it also revealed the deep divides any labour movement faces in tackling the politics behind Israeli economic problems, Dr. Jonathan Preminger, a specialist in Israeli unions commented argued. The core of the protest was a certain kind of person who in the past benefited from the Jewish-oriented Zionist welfare state,” Preminger said. “They were harking back to this. ‘Why are you taking this away from us?’ But in this image there was no place for Palestinians. This image is exclusive of Palestinians.”

While the Histadrut once passively ruled the field, alternative labour groups are increasingly competing with it in a revitalized fight to organize workers against cutbacks in salaries and services, unprotected outsourcing, and abusive or nonexistent labor contracts. Unionizers hope that labor alliances among the country’s divided voters—from working-class Jewish Israelis to Palestinian Arab citizens, ultra-Orthodox Haredim, Russian immigrants, leftist activists, Mizrahi Jews, and West Bank settlers—will reorient Israel’s economic—and then, perhaps, political—arrangements away from the 1% and back to the people.

“Unionizing is a tool to bridge the differences between the various groups in Israel,” said Yaniv Bar Ilan, spokesperson for Koach La Ovidim (Democratic Workers’ Organization), a rising though still small trade federation. “Only in the workplace can you actually unite.”  Koach La Ovidim started in 2007 as a counter-weight to the Histadrut aimed at organizing contract and other marginalized workers, said Yaniv Bar Ilan. Even before the protests, the field was changing: In 2010 the Histadrut started a new division specifically dedicated to signing up new workplaces, which until then it had not been actively doing.

In the working-class port city of Ashdod. There a group of Jewish workers from a metal factory who decided to work with a very small independent labour organisation, WAC-MAAN, instead of the Histadrut, fearing the latter was too friendly with business interests. The group, which is openly opposed to the occupation, also works with the thousands of West Bank Palestinians labouring in Israeli settlements, where exploitation is rife. In 2007, an Israeli court ruled that Israeli labor laws, like the minimum wage, apply to workers in settlements. In practice, violations are the norm. MAAN is the only representative trade union trying to organise these Palestinians. MAAN had started in 1995 as a workers’ advice center and became an officially recognised, representative trade union in 2011

Another 150,000 Palestinians, only about half of whom have legal permits, work at menial jobs inside Israel, according to Ala Khattab of Kav Laoved (Worker’s Hotline), a nonprofit that provides them with legal aid. The Histadrut, in a controversial arrangement, collects dues from West Bank Palestinians officially working in Israel, and then provides some compensation to the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, which nominally covers workers in the Palestinian territories.

Sadly, at the polls, Israelis generally vote on security-related issues over economic problems. And in recent years, Israel’s right-wing and increasingly extremist politicians have been winning elections based on the security argument, while nearly all parties, from the right to the left, have largely promoted the same pro-privatization and neoliberal economic policies.  The shift to the far right on the Palestinian question will not only have an impact on Israel’s future with its neighbours, but also on issues of socio-economic equality and labour conditions along the way. “If you walk in the streets of a regular Israeli town and you ask people what is the difference between the left and the right on peace and settlements, everyone will know,” said Rami Hod, executive director of the Social Economic Academy, which educates and trains groups and leaders on social-justice issues in Israel. “About the state and religion, everyone will know. But about tax, labour, health, the majority of Israelis will say they don’t know.”

Inside Israel, leftist groups face extreme demonisation. Dudi Zamir, an activist with MAAN explained “A union is a union,” praising MAAN for being constantly available. “It doesn’t matter who’s working with them.” 

Martin Villar, an organizer with Koach La Ovidim, pointed out  “One of the things that frustrates me the most is that even the people that are part of your trade union and that you are taking care of every day, in the end they go and vote for parties that are actually doing the opposite of what you believe,” said Villar. “So we are in weird times. The left in Israel is in a very big problem. We don’t know what to do, actually.”

Dudi Zamir is an example of this contradiction when he says “I like Netanyahu and [far-right Jewish Home Party leader Naftali] Bennett. We did the army. We served our country. We love our country." He also didn’t blame Netanyahu for tough economic times. He faulted the factory’s management, not the prime minister’s policies.

Dr. Jonathan Preminger commented, “Unionism has never simply been a left-wing concept, in terms of the progressive view,” he said. “It’s easy for people to be part of unions and keep what from the outside looks like exclusive national concepts. Everyone has their contradictions.” While Israeli labour organizing is no longer specifically about Zionist aspirations, Preminger said that many still invoke these historical images to justify their work. “I don’t think we can see any link between labor organizing and what the state would want,” Preminger said.

Roy Perlman, a Histadrut organizer explained "This is the place where all the tensions of Israeli society meet,” he said. “It’s a place that’s not perfect from the academic or ideological point of view. People unionize not because they read Marx. They unionize because they feel this need to work together against this system that wants us to see each other as competitors.”

Villar remarked, “We hope that they [union members] will go through this political change, but it’s not the main reason we do it.”

Villar described trying to organize security guards who worked at East Jerusalem Jewish settlements in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah. It was a personal and professional challenge—and then it all fell apart when someone in the security company spread a Facebook post by a Koach La Ovidim organizer expressing political opinions that offended many of the guards. The Sheikh Jarrah settlement was a particular flashpoint for anti-occupation activists for several years, with Jews and Palestinians joining together for weekly demonstrations. In Silwan, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel has accused security guards of acting with impunity. The guards, from the Modi’in Ezrachi company, ultimately unionized through Histadrut Leumit, a smaller rival of the Histadrut, according to researcher Lior Volinz. Israeli Journalist Avi Barelli and other labor activists dismissed Histadrut Leumit (National Histadrut) as a “yellow union” preferred by employers because of its pro-management reputation.

Preminger said. “But I don’t think they are going to change much at the moment. I don’t think people are going to join unions at the moment as a way of dealing with larger issues and the social disparities and the occupation, not yet at least. However, the fact that people do join unions puts them in a particular new mind frame. And once you take that first step, new things open up.”

Reforms to the labor laws was pushed through by the Histadrut in 2009 during negotiations for the Labor Party to join Netanyahu’s coalition. Forming a labour union already required the support of one-third of the workers and representation from a recognized outside trade union. The new laws prohibit employers from barring worker access to union organising representatives and fines employers if they do not negotiate with any new union established in their organization. In 2013 the National Labor Court went further and prohibited employers from harassing or monitoring employees to discourage them from organizing, and even prohibited management from expressing views critical of unionising efforts.

In the first five months of 2013, 60 percent more workers unionized and more new union locals were established than in all of 2012, the daily Ha’aretz reported. Since 2011, Koach La Ovidim has grown from 15,000 to 22,000 members, reported Bar Ilan. Shapira declined to provide an exact Histadrut figure, but she said there have been “tens of thousands” of new yearly members, including contract and tech workers. Roy Perlman, a Histadrut organizer, estimated that there are around 800,000 members. The Histadrut set up 22 new worker committees in 2011, 39 in 2012, and 40 in the first half of 2013, according to Israel’s TheMarker, a daily business newspaper published by the Ha’aretz group. The Young Histadrut (NOAL), which organizes youth, also added 7,400 new members between 2012 and 2013. MAAN, meanwhile, has doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 workers, said Tamir.

Adapted from here

Global Unemployment

Earlier this year, the International Labour Organisation released a report that showed the endless trends of increased unemployment. The number of unemployed globally will increase this year to total 201 million, an increase of 3.4 million unemployed people from last year. These are deflated numbers. They are merely an indication of reality. It is impossible to know actually how many people are unemployed or barely employed.

Twenty-five percent of Spain’s working age population is unemployed, he says. Near three-quarters of Spain’s young are unemployed. Four of five Spaniards between the ages of 16 and 29 live with their parents. The numbers define their lives. One of the most striking aspects of unemployment in Spain is that one in four of Europe’s unemployed lives in that country.  The unemployment rate for Moroccans rose astronomically from 16.6 percent before the current economic crisis to 50.7 percent today. One in three Moroccans are unemployed in Spain. Moroccan migrants have now been returning home.

The numbers of the working poor are set to increase even more dramatically, by five million people over the next two years. ILO reports that half of the workers in South Asia live in extreme or moderate poverty, while two-thirds of the workers in Sub-Saharan Africa live in extreme or moderate poverty. These are the people with jobs. Having a job is not sufficient as an indicator of being outside poverty.

Capitalism has failed to end poverty, hunger, homelessness, crime, etc. and has actually increased those things. Marx was right on about the capitalist use of a Reserve Army of Labor. The capitalists want unemployment high because they want to keep wages low and to steal the productivity gains for themselves. The rich are waging class warfare on the rest of the world.

Poverty Pay

Stagnant pay for men over past two decades and fast-rising earnings for women mean families relying on dad’s pay alone are more vulnerable to hardship. 

Families who rely on a fathers’ earnings alone are at greater risk of poverty than other households, with average incomes stagnant for the past 15 years, according to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The IFS said that because the father works in most single breadwinner households, those families have not benefited from the relatively large increases in women’s earnings since the mid-1990s. Over the past two decades, growth in the earnings of working fathers has been “extremely slow”, at 0.3%-a-year on average, according to the thinktank. In contrast, mothers’ earnings have grown by more than 2% a year. While the incomes of two-earner families are 10% higher than in 2002-03, the incomes of one-earner families have not changed over that period.

“With men’s earnings growing so slowly over the last 20 years, it has become increasingly hard for families dependent on the father’s earnings alone to keep up with other families,” said Jonathan Cribb, a senior research economist at IFS and an author of the report. “The average incomes of one-earner couples with children have not grown at all since the early 2000s, and the only reason that they are any higher than in the mid-1990s is the greater generosity of benefits and tax credits.”

Fathers in one-earner couples were less likely than other fathers to be in well-paid professional or managerial jobs. They were also increasingly likely to have been born abroad.

“These figures show that families with a single breadwinner are under increasing strain and have become much more vulnerable to poverty,”said Helen Barnard, head of analysis at the foundation. “Relying on one earner no longer protects families from hardship. Balancing work and caring, and earning enough to make ends meet is an uphill struggle for many."

A growing number of children living in families with one working parent were at risk of poverty. The proportion of children living with one working parent and one non-working parent in relative income poverty rose to 43% in 2015–16 – after accounting for housing costs – up from 33% in 1994–95.

A separate survey by the charity Grandparents Plus found that one in four mothers would have to give up work if they did not have help with childcare from their own parents. Only 7% of parents said they did not rely on their mother or father to have their children while they worked.

Cannon fodder

The British army is specifically targeting young people from working-class backgrounds in a glossy recruitment campaign despite claiming to aim advertising at all socio-economic backgrounds, an internal briefing document seen by the Guardian reveals.

A briefing document on the This Is Belonging campaign spells out that the key audience is 16- to 24-year-old “C2DEs” – marketing speak for the lowest three social and economic groups.

Army chiefs insist they do not specifically target poorer people from deprived areas, but seek out talented and motivated youngsters of all social classes from across the country. However, the briefing document, clearly showed this was not true.

Rachel Taylor, the director of programmes for the charity Child Soldiers International,  said: “What’s very clear from the document is that the army is deliberately and strategically targeting young people from deprived backgrounds who have limited options in life. It’s not about presenting the military as one of many options. It’s about exploiting people who don’t have a lot else going for them and taking advantage of that lack of opportunity to fill the ranks usually for the most dangerous and badly paid roles.”  Taylor said: “It’s very clearly targeting the most economically deprived areas with low employment. It’s not as if the MoD [Ministry of Defence] would suggest that they are trying to encourage kids into a great career before they get snapped up by other employers. It’s about going to the areas that are most vulnerable and most desperate and picking kids up from those areas knowing they don’t have a lot else to choose from.”

She said it was also concerning that the document made clear that 16-year-olds were part of the target audience. “There’s a reason why 16-year-old boys are a great target for recruitment. At that age adolescents are primed into risk-taking behaviour, into wanting to prove themselves as a man, into wanting to establish an identity, a sense of belonging, which is really played upon in the current advertising campaign. Teenage boys want to take risks; they are lured in by the romance, the glamour, the danger. The marketing strategy very cynically takes advantage of that.”

The media brief from the army andCapita, which works on recruitment for the MoD, describes it as “a new inspirational and motivating creative campaign” getting over the message that recruits will join “a brotherhood and sisterhood formed of unbreakable bonds which … will accept you for you.” But it adds: “Priority for this campaign is to drive the volume of applicants” and goes on to pinpoint “our core regular target audience” as 16-24 C2DEs. Under “target audience” the brief says: “16-24, primarily C2DE. Mean household income 10K. High index for social, mobile, cinema. Not heavy TV viewers. Interested in sports and spending time with friends.” In the same section it mentions other groups used by marketing experts including “M55” – which refers to lower-income homeowners whose adult children are still striving to gain independence, meaning space is limited – and “Municipal Challenge” – urban renters of social housing facing an array of challenges.

The tactics used by army recruiters were criticised in a report published last week called The First Ambush by Veterans For Peace UK. It said two motives drove army recruitment: the need to escape disadvantage, and the allure of the soldier’s life. officers, while targeting poorer neighbourhoods for enlisted personnel, particularly in northern cities and in Wales. It claimed the British army visits English universities and private schools in the search for future officers, while targeting poorer neighbourhoods for enlisted personnel, particularly in northern cities and in Wales.

Battery Not Included

Scientists in The U. S. A. say they have created the first battery~free mobile phone (Metro, 7~ 7~17),
signalling the end of chargers.
       
It makes and receives calls using only a few microwatts of power which it gets from light or latching on to wi~fi signals .

Also it uses 'almost zero power' by encoding speech vibrations from the phone  into a radio
signal , The University Of Washington said.
        
The companies that produce mobile phone batteries and chargers will be watching this closely
because this has the potential to affect their profits .
      

Indonesia's Coal Pollution

Much of Indonesia’s cultivable land falls within mining and exploration concessions. And as coal mining depletes and contaminates water sources, more lands become unsuitable for growing food.

Merah Johansyah, coordinator of the Mining Advocacy Network, said the amount of rice already determined to be lost due to mining is equivalent to the country’s annual rice imports. “If things were managed properly, we wouldn’t need to import rice anymore,” said Johansyah "This is only rice, we have yet to report on other crops"

Researchers found that coal concessions cover 19 per cent of the 44 million hectares (170,000 square miles) of rice-growing land in Indonesia — 1.6 million hectares within operating mining concessions and 6.5 million hectares within coal exploration concessions. Coal mining, the report contends, depletes and contaminates water resources, leaving previously cultivable land unsuitable for growing food.

Mines reduce available ground- and surface water and pollute these vital resources with acidic drainage and heavy metals. Villagers living near coal mines reported having no option but to use mine pit water for washing, bathing, irrigation of crops and fish farming, and told researchers their rice yields were consequently reduced by 50 per cent and fish production by 80 per cent. The researchers also analysed water samples from 17 coal mining sites and surrounding waterways. All but two were found to have concentrations of aluminum, iron, manganese and/or pH balances likely to have an impact on crop production and fish farming.

Water samples taken from the largest mining site in East Kalimantan were found to have aluminum concentrations that exceeded by 21 times, and iron by 119 times, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum recommended concentrations for freshwater aquatic life.

Aluminum toxicity has been linked to neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Alzheimer disease. High concentration of aluminum in water can also be deadly for fish. In plants, aluminum toxicity can reduce root systems, induces a variety of nutrient-deficiency symptoms and decreases yields. Iron toxicity causes similar problems, potentially resulting in poor plant growth and severe yield reductions at concentrations above 10 parts per million (ppm). For aquatic life, iron has been found to be harmful at concentrations as low as 1ppm.

“It turns out that there are no standards for heavy metals contamination in water used for agriculture, Johansyah said. On the contrary, he added, Indonesian law allows abandoned mining sites to be used for housing, tourism, water and cultivation.  “The regulation allows it and there’s no water quality monitoring as there are no standards,” he said. “There are regulations on water standards for agriculture but they do not give specific numbers.”

The food-migration crisis

World organisations, experts and scientists have been repeating that  climate change poses a major risk to the poorest rural populations in developing countries, dangerously threatening their lives and livelihoods and thus forcing them to migrate.

Billions of dollars is spent by the major industrialised powers, those who are the main responsible for climate change, on often illegal, inhumane measures aiming at impeding the arrival of migrants and refugees to their countries, instead to preventing the root causes of massive human displacements.

One such a solution is to invest in sustainable agriculture. On this, the world’s leading body in the fields of food and agriculture has once again warned that climate change often leads to distress-driven migration, while stressing that promoting sustainable agriculture is an essential part of an effective policy response. Ffarming and livestock sectors typically bear more than 80 per cent of the damage and losses caused by drought, underscoring how agriculture stands to be a primary victim of climate change. Other impacts include soil degradation, water scarcity and depletion of natural resources.

José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) cited figures showing that since 2008 one person has been displaced every second by climate and weather disasters –an average of 26 million a year– and suggesting the trend is likely to intensify in the immediate future as rural areas struggle to cope with warmer weather and more erratic rainfall.

William Lacy Swing, director-general of the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), also on July 6 said “Although less visible than extreme events like a hurricane, slow-onset climate change events tend to have a much greater impact over time.” Swing cited the drying up over 30 years of Lake Chad, now a food crisis hotspot. “Many migrants will come from rural areas, with a potentially major impact on agricultural production and food prices.” Using migration as an adaptation strategy can be positive –remittances can bolster food security and productive investment in places of origin.  “We need to systematically integrate migration and climate change into national development and poverty reduction programmes, disaster risk reduction and crisis planning and develop agricultural policies and practices that enhance resilience in the face of climate-induced forced migration,” IOM’s Swing added.

US Low Wages

The U.S. economy is now a decade on from the start of the global financial crisis and at what most economists view as full employment, yet when it comes to wage rises, the answer seems to be forget about it.

Government data on Friday showed that average hourly earnings in June rose just 2.5 percent on the year and have slowed in the past two quarters rather than accelerating even as workers become scarce due to continued economic strength. The lack of wage growth is mirrored across the developed world. International Monetary Fund data shows that across the developed world, the share of national income paid out to workers had fallen to less than 40 percent by 2015 from close to 55 percent in 1970, driven largely by technological change and globalisation.

"There is no shortage of explanation as to why wage growth remains tepid – shadow slack, reduced bargaining power due to globalisation, de-unionization, automation, etc. – but what is puzzling is that wage growth, at least according to the average hourly earnings measure, was clearly accelerating in 2015 and 2016," JPMorgan Economist Michael Feroli wrote."Why it would slow only in the last two quarters is a mystery." 

"You can’t continue to get all this job growth but there is no wage pressure. So something is not adding up at all," said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago. 

For decades, higher wages had been driven by gains in worker productivity, but there are few signs now of an investment boom or of innovations fundamentally changing the way work is done. Productivity growth in the U.S. has averaged just one percent since 2005, half the level of 1990-2004; in the past five years the annual growth rate has been a dismal 0.5 percent. 

"The new benchmark for what we call good is lower than what we historically thought," said San Francisco Fed chief researcher Mary Daly, one of the Fed system's top labour economists. "I would suggest the landing place doesn't seem surprising to me given that we have very low productivity growth and inflation that’s not up to 2 percent," Daly said in an interview last month.

Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said on Thursday the government could take some steps to boost productivity. Among these would be investing in basic research, infrastructure, education and public health, including clean air and drinking water.

Sleep-walking into debt

“Britons are getting poorer,” said the TUC’s general secretary, Frances O’Grady. “Having just lived through the longest wage squeeze since Victorian times, their living standards are in freefall again. The government cannot sit on its hands and watch the crisis unfold. It needs to help create better-paid jobs in the parts of Britain that need them most. And lift the unfair pay restrictions on public sector workers.”

Rising prices in the wake of the Brexit vote have put the tightest squeeze on household incomes for more than five years, according to official figures on Britons’ economic well-being. In the opening three months of 2017, real household disposable income per head dropped 2% from the previous year. It was the steepest decline since the end of 2011 and driven by increasing prices of goods and services, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

Households have been hit by a double whammy of slow wage growth and rising inflation. The pound’s weakness since the EU referendum last summer has made imports to the UK more expensive and firms are passing their higher costs on to consumers. Inflation hit a four-year high of 2.9% on the latest measure. That has meant a return to wages falling in real terms, which adjusts for the effects of inflation. Workers had already suffered years of declining real wages in the wake of the financial crisis.

Dan Tomlinson, a researcher at the Resolution Foundation thinktank. “While no one expects it to be as bad as the last one, the fact that the fall in household incomes at the start of 2017 was the biggest in over five years is a huge cause for concern,” he said.

Laith Khalaf, senior analyst at the financial firm Hargreaves Lansdown, said UK consumers “could be sleepwalking into financial difficulties”.

“The pressure is ratcheting up on UK households, but consumers don’t seem to be fully aware of the crunch that is under way,” he said. “Despite weak wage growth and rising prices, consumers are continuing to spend by racking up more debt. That, of course, helps keep the wheels of the economy turning, but stores up problems for the future.”

Refugees are genuine in need

A report challenges the economic migrant myth, revealing that most of those making perilous sea crossing were forced from their homes by persecution and fear.

The vast majority of people arriving in Europe by sea are fleeing persecution, war, and famine, while less than a fifth are economic migrants. More than 80% of an estimated 1,008,616 arrivals in 2015 came from refugee-producing countries including Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, and a quarter of that number were children.

Researchers say the findings challenge the myth that migrants are coming to Europe for economic reasons.

Professor Brad Blitz, who led the research team, said: “Governments and certain media organisations perpetuate the myth that the ‘pull’ factors are stronger than the ‘push’ factors with economic reasons being the key catalyst – but we found the opposite. The overwhelming majority of people we spoke to were coming from desperately poor countries but also places where they were subject to targeted violence or other concerns around family security. They had no other option.”

War was the biggest “push”. One Syrian said: “I used to live with my wife in Idlib. We had a normal life there until the outbreak of war. Our house was bombed and we lost everything, we hadn’t any option but to leave.”

Judith Sunderland, of Human Rights Watch, said many of the refugees arriving by boat were from countries that were not naturally thought of as having protection needs. “Many are coming from Libya, which is a hellhole for migrants and asylum. It’s a country riddled with conflict and they face torture, forced labour and sexual violence. People go there to work but are later forced to flee by sea because of extreme abuses.” Sunderland added: “Everyone should have the right to apply for asylum and to have that application carefully examined.” But reception centres are overwhelmed by the numbers and only 10% of participants in the study had achieved refugee status.

Rohingya children going hungry

 More than 80,000 young children may need treatment for malnutrition in part of western Myanmar where the army cracked down on stateless Rohingya Muslims last year, the World Food Programme (WFP) said.

"The survey confirmed a worsening of the food security situation in already highly vulnerable areas (since October)," the U.N. agency said. About a third of those surveyed reported "extreme ...food insecurity" such as going a day and night without eating. Not one of the children covered in the survey was getting a "minimum adequate diet," the report said, adding that an estimated 80,500 children under the age of five would need treatment for acute malnutrition in the next year.

The liberals' icon Suu Kyi is refusing to grant access to a United Nations-mandated mission tasked with investigating allegations of abuses by security forces in Rakhine and elsewhere. A WFP map shows that villages, where the military was most active, were highly vulnerable to hunger.

Global Solidarity

This blog makes no apologies for offering our solidarity to fellow-workers across the globe. We are indeed "globalists" in the best sense of the word.

We report the death of 10 workers in a boiler explosion at a Bangladesh garment factory that took place on Monday at a plant of Multifabs Limited, a Bangladeshi company on the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka. The firm supplies knitted apparel to clients in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Spain, Netherlands and Britain, including to Littlewoods, one of Britain's oldest retail brands.

Demanding more effective implementation of regulations put in place after the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster that killed more than 1,100 people, workers' unions have called for zero tolerance to such lapses in safety.

"There can be no negotiations on worker safety and no tolerance for such accidents," said Amirul Haque Amin, president of the National Garment Workers Federation, seven of whose members were among the over 50 injured in the factory blast. "After Rana Plaza, the coming together of various stakeholders has brought in better regulation in the industry but casualties in such accidents are still on the higher side. The accident shows that process started after Rana Plaza is far from over" 

Implementation of various programmes since Rana Plaza have been uneven and this accident is a reminder that there has to be greater capacity building on ground," said Raisul Islam Khan of UNI Global Union, a federation of trade unions.

Bangladesh's labour department needs to be strengthened, labour inspectors better qualified and more local initiatives are needed to plug the gaps, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Campaigners say the progress in fixing problems in the supply chain has been slow in the industry that employs 4 million people and generates 80 percent of Bangladesh's export earnings.

They have criticised many retailers for failing to improve working conditions - with long hours, low pay, poor safety standards and not being allowed to form trade unions common complaints from garment workers.

Failing Goals

The Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think-tank, warns that the US, Russia and China are lagging in efforts to meet the United Nations 2030 development goals.  The  Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) roadmap includes ending global poverty and hunger while working towards quality health and education, clean energy and equality, among other issues.

Bertelsmann said industrialized countries are not serving as role models against a background of growing protectionism and nationalism, as more and more leaders adopt "my country first" policies.

Out of the 157 states compared by Bertelsmann in cooperation with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the US came in 42nd place, Russia ranked 62nd and China came 71st.

Developed nations are holding back poorer countries, for example, through their geopolitical and economic policies, protection of tax havens and inadequate funding of development aid.

Aart De Geus, chairman of the Bertelsmann Foundation warned G20 leaders meeting in Hamburg this weekend against repeating modern history. "Protectionism is a one-way street which could not bring us back to the implementation of Agenda 2030, but back to 1930. The G20 states should set a clear signal for global goals and against national egoisms in Hamburg."

The report's results "highlight the need for urgent action on the part of G20 countries in making sustainable development a reality both within and beyond their borders," said Jeffrey Sachs, SDSN director, in a statement. "If the world is to achieve the SDGs, all countries must take up the goals as part of their national development strategies and ensure that they take responsibility for their impact on the rest of the world."

Working under stress

More than a third of the UK workforce is experiencing anxiety, depression, or stress, according to a survey of employees in junior and senior roles.

Mental health problems are said to affect around one in six people in any given week. Of 2,000 workers who responded, 34 per cent said they had a health and wellbeing problem.

The survey found two in five, 39 per cent, of employees said they had taken time off work or reduced their responsibilities due to their health. And nearly a quarter, 23 per cent, said they do not think their organisation takes employee wellbeing seriously.

Of those who had taken time off work for health reasons, 39 per cent said they did not feel comfortable telling their employer about the issue.

Previous research by mental health charity Mind found that nearly half (48 per cent) of all public sector workers have been forced to take time off because of problems with their mental health. 

The Price of Dying

Thousands of people could be let down by poor funeral plans they don't understand, a new report has claimed. As many as 1.2 million people in the UK have pre-payment plans, and the industry is growing fast - up by 350% over the last 10 years.

Sales representatives have targeted at least six million adults over the age of 50, using what the report describes as "high-pressure" techniques. Some people have been subject to aggressive telephone marketing or in-home visits, it claimed. In some instances, funeral plan firms pay commissions and fees of up to £1,000 for each policy sold - around a quarter of the total plan cost.  It said the scale of unscrupulous sales practices in the market was significant and growing.

Consumer group Fairer Finance said people who paid for their funerals in advance could find their relatives faced extra costs after they died. The report also said there was very little transparency over what happens to clients' money after they had paid it. The average cost of a pre-paid funeral plan is about £4,000, according to the report. But many plans do not cover costs such as embalming, limousines, a funeral service, a wake, burial plots or memorial stones. In some cases, families are left having to find an extra £2,000, even though they expect such items to be included. 

"In our view, the current lack of comprehensive oversight is allowing sharp sales practices and a lack of transparency to flourish in parts of the market," said Alison Crake, president of the National Association of Funeral Directors. "Members have reported numerous instances to us where funeral plan providers have not acted in the best interests of either the public who have paid for funeral plans, or the funeral directors who will care for them."

Tougher at the bottom

Rising inflation and less generous state benefits have made it harder over the past year for families on tight budgets to enjoy what the public considers a decent standard of living, according to one of Britain’s leading thinktanks, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). 

Despite an above-inflation increase in the “national living wage”, low-income families were falling further behind a minimum income standard. The thinktank said less generous in-work benefits had made life tougher for all low-income families with children, and that lone-parent single-breadwinner families were the hardest hit.

The minimum income standard is based on feedback from the public on what it thinks people need to achieve a decent living standard. It includes money for school trips, Christmas presents and swimming lessons, and is updated annually to take account of economic trends and policy changes. The research found that despite the national living wage rising from £7.20 to £7.50, the gains had been offset by the rise in the cost of living, the freeze on tax credits and benefits, and wage increases being clawed back through reduced in-work benefits.

The JRF said a single person now needed to earn £17,900 a year to reach the minimum income standard. A dual-earner couple with two children needed to earn £20,400 each, while a lone parent with a preschool child had to earn £25,900. Developments over the past 12 months had made achieving these targets more difficult.

 A single-breadwinner family was £120 a week short of achieving the minimum income standard this year, up from £103 a week in 2016. An £11.24 pay rise from the national living wage had been offset by a £9.03 reduction in tax credits and housing benefit, and a £1.25 increase in tax and national insurance payments. The resulting 96p a week increase in pay had been dwarfed by a £17.75 rise in living costs, widening the gap between income and outgoings by £16.79 a week.

A lone parent was £55 a week short of the minimum income standard in 2016, but the shortfall widened to £67 a week in 2017. An £11.24 pay rise from the national living wage had been offset by a £3.51 reduction in tax credits and housing benefit, and a £1.44 increase in tax and national insurance payments. Net pay rose by £6.29 a week, but living costs added £18.55 to weekly expenditure, widening the gap with the minimum income standard by £12.26 a week.

The JRF said the gap for a working couple on low incomes had widened from £50 to £59 a week over the past 12 months.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of the JRF, said: “Struggling families tell us, as well as juggling the bills, it’s things like after-school clubs and swimming lessons that have to be sacrificed to cover the essentials.

“With the Bank of England forecasting inflation will increase even higher this year, families are facing no respite. We need the government to take action and ensure living standards do not fall backwards. Lifting the freeze on working-age benefits and tax credits must be the start, along with allowing people to keep more of their earnings.”

Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, said: “The government needs a proper plan to get wages rising. Ministers must stop holding down the pay of public sector workers, and give them their first proper pay rise in seven years. The minimum wage needs to rise faster, to reach £10 an hour as soon as possible.”

Amnesty International Condemns EU Migrant Policy

 Amnesty International has blamed "failing EU policies" for the soaring death toll among refugees and migrants in the central Mediterranean.

In a report, it said "cynical deals" with Libya consigned thousands to the risk of drowning, rape and torture.

It said the EU was turning a blind eye to abuses in Libyan detention centres, and was mostly leaving it up to sea rescue charities to save migrants.

More than 2,000 people have died in 2017 trying to get to Europe, it said. Interceptions by the Libyan coastguard often put refugees and migrants at risk, the rights group warned. It said that there were serious allegations that coastguard members were colluding with smugglers and abusing migrants.

"Rather than acting to save lives and offer protection, European ministers... are shamelessly prioritising reckless deals with Libya in a desperate bid to prevent refugees and migrants from reaching Italy," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty's Europe director. "European states have progressively turned their backs on a search and rescue strategy that was reducing mortality at sea in favour of one that has seen thousands drown and left desperate men, women and children trapped in Libya, exposed to horrific abuses." He continued, "The EU must rethink its co-operation with Libya's woefully dysfunctional coastguard and deploy more vessels where they are desperately needed." Mr Dalhuisen stressed that "ultimately the only sustainable and humane way to reduce the numbers risking such horrific journeys is to open more safe and legal routes for migrants and refugees to reach Europe".