19 December 2017

By Professor Keith Ewing and John Hendy QC

I

David Davis has suggested that in place of the EU Treaties, the UK’s relations with the EU should be regulated by a deal which is ‘Canada, plus, plus, plus’. By this he means a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) based on the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) agreed between the EU and Canada. The British people should treat the proposal with revulsion. It contains every one of the defects which led 3.5 million Europeans to sign a petition objecting to the now defunct TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the EU and the USA), a sister agreement to CETA. 

27 October 2017

By Barry Camfield in Australia

The Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) is Australia’s oldest and largest blue-collar trade union, representing over 100,000 working men and women and their families.

24 October 2017

Bill Greenshields, People's Assembly National Steering Committee Member

Tracing the origins of austerity to the policies of government following the 2008 financial and economic crisis – which they claimed to be aimed at "deficit reduction" – the recently published People's Assembly Pamflet In Place of Austerity – a programme for the people says: "Many people now say that austerity policies have failed – and indeed deficit targets are routinely 'missed', and there has been no debt reduction ... in fact it has steadily grown from under 40% of GDP in 2008 to just under 90% in 2017. But the real aim of austerity was to stabilise the post-crisis economy in favour of the bankers and big business billionaires, raising the rate of profit at the expense of the working class. In that they have succeeded, and will continue to do so, if we let them."

10 October 2017

By Sarah Glenister, National Development Officer, Institute of Employment Rights

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has confirmed that the NHS pay cap is to be scrapped, but asked whether the NHS would receive more funding to cover higher pay, he said: "That is something I can't answer right now."

29 August 2017

By Sarah Glenister, National Development Officer, IER

Launching a consultation into Corporate Governance at the end of 2016, the government announced that workers needed a stronger voice to ensure businesses operated with regard to the interests of their workforce, and to tackle excessive corporate pay. But in her foreword, Theresa May reassured employers that her party remains "unequivocally and unashamedly pro-business" and that the motivation for reform was to protect the reputation of the free market at a time of surging wage inequality. It should not surprise us, then, that proposals published today in response to that consultation offer little more than superficial changes that give the appearance of reform without actually affecting it.

31 July 2017

By Michael Ford QC, Professor of Law University of Bristol and Counsel for the EHRC in the UNISON case

As described by one commentator, the Supreme Court judgment in R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51 is "the biggest single victory in the history of employment law". At a stroke, the Supreme Court declared unlawful the fees which for more than four years rendered many employment rights illusory in practice. The judgment also has very important implications for the effective protection of legal rights beyond the workplace, and its reasoning will echo in domestic and international constitutional law for many years to come.