Killer Arguments Against Citizen's Income, Not (8)

From The Independent:

Finland’s basic income experiment is unworkable, uneconomical and ultimately useless. Plus, it will only encourage some people to work less.

That’s not the view of a hard core Thatcherite (1), but of the country’s biggest trade union. The labour group says the results of the two-year pilot program will fail to sway its opposition to a welfare-policy idea that’s gaining traction among those looking for an alternative in the post-industrial age...

The traditional paladin of workers’ rights would rather tweak the existing system. It has the backing of the country’s biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats, whose Kalevi Sorsa foundation concluded in a 2012 paper that UBI may simply be a means of scrapping minimum wage requirements.(2)

SAK rejects [UBI proponent] Standing’s accusations that the union’s real motive for opposing UBI is fear of a drop in membership or a collapse of its insurance funds. (3) A 2014 report by the German Institute for Economic Research suggested that trade union hostility “may be a result of the threat of losing bargaining power.”

1) Unfair to drag Thatcher into this. According to Christopher Monckton, she was not entirely opposed to the idea (but as per usual never got round to implementing it).

"Thatcherites" as a stereotype oppose all social security systems.

2) Whether we have minimum wage legislation or not is an entirely separate topic to whether we have a welfare system or not and if so, whether a Citizen's Income is the least distortionary and hence 'cheapest' kind of welfare system for a given level of financial support.

3) Standing's probably put his finger on the real reason why so many Trade Unions oppose it; but by their logic, they should be opposing all kinds of taxpayer-funded welfare system which allow the unemployed to survive.

A Right Royal Conspiracy

It is strange that this story here should come up. I have heard about the case and the role of the security services in the Tomlinson union scandal. I was discussing with a friend a couple of days ago, how I assumed that all the extreme right parties: National Front, BNP etc, were actually staffed by MI5 and MI6 agents at the groups' highest level.

I guess if you walked into the room with Nick Griffin and co in the late 70s and 80s, and you did not work for the secret services, then as per Warren Buffet quote: you knew you were the patsy!

I think, in contrast, left wing groups and animal rights groups, etc, were crippled by 'division sowing', Monty Python, 'splitter teams' at the mid and low levels.

As for the journalists here, 50% of them, on a cash in hand basis (another 25% don't know where the money comes from). At the Guardian, BBC and ITV proper salaries on the MI5/6 books paid out by the embassies around the world. Nevertheless, what really surprised me was not Richard not-so-white-now, but the bit about Jill Dando in the comments under the article. I really never knew!

* As soon as I typed 'MI5' this programme started to slow down a great deal, and I have had several problems with the function keys. I am going to stop now, as there appears to be someone knocking at the d....

Rumours that Jill Dando was recruited by MI6

Trade Unions, productivity and wages: cause or effect?

PaulC156 left some interesting comments on an earlier post, to wit:

1. Stagnant median hourly pay in the US over the last few decades coincides nicely with the steady erosion of unionised labour in the States:
http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation/.

2. Strong unions improve productivity. Plenty of evidence in a six nation study here:
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/people/vanreenen/lecture_notes/handbook_metcalf.pdf

3. Though not good for profitability… some good anecdotal on the UK motor industry from this article by Professor David Bailey of the Aston Business school here:
http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/business/business-opinion/uk-car-output-up-down-9902855.

4. CEO compensation is inversely correlated with stronger union presence:
http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/ehllserod/19865.htm

On the facts, I don't dispute any of this, but I question which is cause and which is effect.

From general knowledge, there are certain industry-specific factors which say which people are more likely to belong to a trade union (in the traditional sense) or a guild (for example the British Medical Association, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the National Farmers Union etc).

a) The employer is a large employer and especially a monopoly employer/provider.
b) The business can't go bankrupt (because it is state-run or has a monopoly).
c) There are fixed pay scales.
d) Workers are highly skilled and/or less easily replaceable.
e) There are barriers to entry to that job, profession or business.

Some of these categories overlap and some are mutually exclusive. They also operate on different levels (employees vs employers or industry vs customers). But to give some examples:

Historically, the first trade unions were local guilds, higher skilled people who could club together to try and exercise a bit of monopoly power and raise barriers to entry. If you look at the progression to trade unions, it was the higher skilled trades first and domestic workers were the last to be unionised, which never really took off. Higher skilled people are by definition more productive than unskilled people.

In London, buses are run by competing private companies (although regulated by the TfL) and the Tube network (a monopoly) is run by TfL (a government body) directly. Each bus company sets its own pay levels but train drivers are paid pretty much a flat rate. So bus drivers are less unionised than train drivers.

Doctors are very expensive to train up or poach from abroad, the NHS is a state-backed near-monopoly provider, so all doctors are in the BMA (as far a I am aware) and they negotiate from a position of strength.

The importance of pay scales is, if you know that you get paid the same as thousands of co-workers (more likely in large organisations and the public sector), there is no harm in putting up a united front and asking for a collective pay rise. If pay is set individually according to each worker's skills, experience and working hours (more likely in small businesses), it is every man for himself and less likely to be unionised.

The importance of the employer having a monopoly position is, if he doesn't, pushing for higher wages will bankrupt him, as happened to some extent with the UK motor industry in the 1970s or 1980s; all that happened was cheaper cars were imported from abroad. If the government had imposed an import ban on motor vehicles, then the British motor industry - and trade unions - would have survived (producing crapper cars for higher prices and paying much higher wages).

Stock Exchange rules and the Companies Act mean that larger companies have to pay for an audit whether they like it or not; although auditing is not particularly difficult, it can only be carried out by Chartered Accountants (although Certified Accountants rank equally in law, they are brushed off as second class). This is bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy, so those at the top can cream of rental income and impose a strict hierarchy and lengthy training period on new entrants who want to get their snouts in the trough.

There is a limited amount of farmland so there is a limited number of farm owners, they can club together to form the NFU and put pressure on the government to keep the CAP subsidies flowing. Farm workers on the other hand are relatively easy to train up, it is part time and seasonal work and they are unlikely to be unionised.

The importance of collecting rental income/monopoly profits is that it frees up plenty of your time for campaigning, organising and putting pressure on the government to rig things in your favour. Which is why the most vocal groups are people like pensions companies, who live off the tax breaks nominally given to savers.

As a slightly separate topic, the pay of senior people tends to be much higher in businesses which collect 'rent'. So Chartered Accountants (as explained above), home builders/land bankers; oil and gas companies, banks and insurance, entertainment companies, top footballers etc. Top executives skim off some of this rent from their shareholders; if they can depress wages, this boosts profits so gives them more to skim off.

To sum up, it is not that trade unions or guilds lead to higher productivity and wages, it is that higher skills/wages/barriers to entry/profits (whether in the 'free market' or in a monopoly or state-backed organisation) are the fertile ground on which trade unions and guilds (BMA, ICAEW, NFU etc) can flourish.

Ooh the irony...

Boris Johnson came up with another one of his self-aggrandising initiatives a while back, namely the 24-hour Tube service.

Predictably enough, the trade unions didn't like it and decided to stick with an 18- or 19-hour service and stage a 24-hour strike instead.

Shouldn't that be an 18- or 19-hour strike?

Thoughts on Labour Relations

I've been doing a bit of thinking about labour relations in the past and the current situation and thought I'd bounce some things around

1) Unions rose in a time of monopoly employers. Employers treated workers badly, employees didn't have many other options, but what they could do is collectively stop working. And at that time, employers also didn't have many other options but the local workforce, so had to work with the workers, as a group to accept their viewpoint.

2) As industrialisation grew, so did trade unions, peaking in the late 1970s. It could be argued that greater automation reduced the union workforce, but the scale of decline has been far greater than just large factories. It has fallen from 12m to nearly 6m and the remaining trade unionisation is nearly all in the public sector.

3) There's a lot of attribution to Thatcher in smashing the unions, but the fact is that membership of unions continued to fall after she left office, as did strike days. They fell under the Blair years with no new union laws.

4) My hypothesis is that the rise in car ownership changed the relationship between management and workers. If you worked in a factory and didn't like the terms, the factory 5 or 6 miles away was now another option. You could just leave and go work for them instead. At the same time, employers could grab employees from further away with skills. The need for a union to resolve your grievances disappears. And so as more and more people got to own cars, more unionised jobs fell.

5) Unions still exist in the public sector because the employer is generally a monopoly.

Thoughts?

Almost as if the whole thing had been scripted.

14 November 2014:

This is the time of year that NHS bosses - and their political masters for that matter - start to look at the weather forecasts.

A bad winter can make a huge difference to the health service. A cold snap increases the number of falls and amount of respiratory illness, while the vomiting bug norovirus can take hold on hospital wards.

And this year, the stakes could not be higher. With little more than six months to a general election, all eyes are on how the health service copes, particularly in England.

15 November 2014:

The alert was issued to people across north east Essex after Colchester General Hospital declared a "major incident".

It came after a surprise inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) on Wednesday where the health regulator raised "safeguarding concerns". It also found that staff were struggling to cope with "unprecedented demand".

17 November 2014:

A number of other hospitals in England are likely to be facing severe problems of staff shortages and patient-demand of the scale that prompted the declaration of a major incident at Colchester hospital last week, one of the country’s most senior doctors has warned.

20 November 2014:

Hospitals have reached record levels of crowding, according to official figures which have sparked fears that the NHS is standing on the brink of a winter crisis.

Experts said hospitals were “full to bursting,” with latest quarterly statistics showing hospitals operating at the highest capacity levels recorded for the time of year. NHS leaders said that many hospitals had become so busy that it would take little more than “a gust of wind” to bring some to collapse.

21 November 2014:

Accident and emergency departments in England saw 92.9% of patients within four hours last week - the lowest percentage since April 2013, NHS data shows.

The government sets a quarterly target for hospitals to see 95% of emergency cases within four hours. A&E waits have been below that level since the end of September.

22 November 2014:

The NHS is heading into an A&E crisis even before winter has begun, patient leaders said after figures showed that thousands more people waited more than four hours to be seen last week.

Emergency units are overflowing and thousands of patients are enduring long waits on trolleys because hospitals are too full to admit them, official data showed yesterday.

24 November 2014:

NHS workers, including nurses, midwives and ambulance staff, have staged a four-hour strike in England as part of a pay dispute.

They were protesting about the decision not to implement a 1% rise for all staff recommended by a pay review body. Members of nine unions walked out at 07:00 GMT in England and at 08:00 GMT in Northern Ireland.

25 November 2014:

The Health Secretary has spoken numerous times to urge the public to avoid A&E departments in all but the most urgent cases and turn to pharmacies, doctors’ surgeries and walk-in centres instead.

But speaking during today’s health questions in the House of Commons, he appeared to go against his own advice. Mr Hunt said: “I took my own children to an A&E department at the weekend precisely because I did not want to wait until later on to take them to see a GP.”

26 November 2014:

Senior consultants in the NHS have told ITV News that the accident and emergency service is heading for a winter crisis.

Four doctors say around 50 hospitals are already struggling - and as the winter weather worsens, they predict the crisis will worsen too unless urgent action is taken.

27 November 2014:

Ambulances could be turned away from a hospital to try ease the strain on a casualty department which is struggling to cope.

The Accident and Emergency department at Northwick Park Hospital in north London has been under pressure following the closure of two other A&E units.

And that's just the second half of November, the ante was upped considerably throughout December, when the scripted predicted A&E crises actually happened - despite the fact that the winter weather was pretty mild and there were no terrible flu outbreaks or natural disasters or anything.

Trade union leader talks sense: shock

From an article in today's Evening Standard celebrating the house price bubble in London and the South East:

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “Today’s figures show that the UK’s so-called recovery is based on house price rises rather than growing pay packets, with the cost of properties rising three times faster than wages.

She added: “This may be enough for wealthy homeowners in London but it’s no way to secure a sustainable recovery. With every measure of inflation showing a rise of at least 2.5 per cent, the longest wage squeeze in over a century shows no sign of abating.”

Perhaps she's beginning to see the LMBH?

"We need unions. But not as Labour's bankers"

Lola's brief post, questioning the notion of the "fiscal multiplier" ended up generating 41 comments so far, and DBC Reed kept referring to an editorial in last weekend's Observer. It's a good job he didn't provide a link as Blogger has decided to mark all users who include links as spam, so I'll link to it myself, and let's have a look and see if we can spot any inaccuracies or platitudes in the first two paragraphs...

Effective trade unions are vital components of a strong economy and a vigorous society.(1) Today their weakness is hindering economic recovery.(2) There will be no sustained increase in consumer spending without a rise in real wages,(3) together with the confidence among consumers that these gains are durable.(4) Innovative companies need confident customers whose wages are rising to buy their goods and services, allowing them to break into the virtuous circle of more production, technical innovation and greater spending.(5)

Nor do the positive effects of unions stop there.(6) Efficiency and productivity in the workplace are also closely linked to high trust and trust comes best between partners who are sure they will be heard. Disorganised, atomistic workforces, where workers are disposable commodities always fearful of being sacked, whose voice is neglected or ignored, are mistrustful and low-productivity places,(7) particularly where an employer requires his or her staff to think on their own.(8)

1) Supposition.

2) Although the Thatcherites exaggerate this effect, it is fair to say that in the 1970s and 1980s, the highly unionised industries like car manufacturing fared particularly badly. Or was it that they fared no worse than anything else, but they just kicked up more of a stink? Or was it that the most highly unionised industries were the nationalised industries which had been on life support for decades and Thatcher just pulled the plug?

In the meantime, the number of vehicles manufactured in the UK has gone back up to the levels of the 1970s, but I'm not aware that today's car manufacturing workforce is highly unionised.

3) That's a tautology. Spending = output, consumption = production, and production = wages + profits, and people spend their share of the profits (wages or dividends) and businesses reinvest the profits which are not paid out as dividends (which in turn is somebody else's wages or profits).

4) Confidence is always good.

5) Yes, but that's the same tautology or chicken-and-egg problem as in (3).

6) Woah! The editorial hasn't actually mentioned any "positive effects of unions" yet.

7) Agreed. Trust is good, and good/successful employers know that. They'll do it out of self-interest, recognising that wages are not really a "cost" but a "profit share" and these businesses will thrive. Then there are some employers who treat their employees like shit, these will tend to go out of business anyway.

Nowhere does the editorial explain why trade unions need to be involved in this process. And let us not forget that nowadays, "trade unions" and "public sector employees" are largely synonymous, from BIS/ONS:

Table 1.3 presents trade union density in GB and in UK by gender for public and private sector employees from 1993 to 2010. It shows that trade union density has generally been falling in both sectors during this period.

In 2010, trade union density of public sector employees fell marginally by 0.3 percentage points to 56.3 per cent from 56.6 per cent in 2009, and down 5.0 percentage points compared with 1995. This represented a slight fall in membership of 34 thousand from 2009.

For private sector employees, 14.2 per cent were union members, a decline of 0.9 percentage points compared with 2009, and down 7.2 percentage points compared with 1995.

8) What's so terrible about "requiring... staff to think on their own"? Most jobs are pretty much pre-programmed, but everybody has to "think outside the box" occasionally. Conveyor belts can break down, bus drivers have to decide when to skip a stop (because the bus is full or because the people at the stop look a bit unsavoury), tax advisors have to decide whether it's worth unpicking and resubmitting a tax return because the client later remembers he made a £50 charitable donation.

So in summary, although historically trade unions were A Very Good Thing indeed, most of what they reasonably demanded - redundancy protection, maximum working hours, health and safety, pay equality, minimum wage etc - has been enacted in law. Maybe the law goes too far for some and not far enough for others. Personally, I think it's gone slightly too far but broadly speaking, it's "about right".
------------------------------------------------------
The reason we are in a bloody great recession has nothing to do with all employers suddenly turning into evil bastards....

[Don't forget that the supervisor is also an employee, and the supervisor's manager is an employee and so on all the way up to the Board of Directors (admittedly, most of them live in a separate universe and collect rent/ransom rather than actually working, but hey). It wasn't just the humble check-out assistants at Woolworth's, Comet and HMV who lost their jobs, everybody did. Those retailers did not go into administration because they weren't paying their employees enough money. They simply didn't have enough money to pay them their existing wages, let alone giving them all an increase.]

... and everything to do with the fall-out of the credit bubble, aka Home-Owner-Ism. It's the massive indebtedness, high rents and high taxes on earnings and output which are dragging everything down, and no amount of trade unionisation is going to change that.

Healthcare Assistants

From The BBC:

There is no minimum standard of training for healthcare assistants before they can work unsupervised, an independent report has found.(1)

Some were doing tasks usually performed by doctors or nurses, such as taking blood.(2) The Cavendish Review was set up by the government to study the role of healthcare assistants (HCAs) in England after the Stafford Hospital scandal.

HCAs provide basic care in hospitals, care homes and at home. They should go through a universal training system and gain accreditation before they can work unsupervised, the report said.(3) Currently, there is no consistent qualification or training for HCAs, with employers deciding for themselves what training is needed.(4)...

There are more than 1.3 million frontline staff who are not registered nurses, according to the Cavendish Review. They provide some of the most personal and fundamental care such as turning people in bed so they do not get pressure sores, helping people to eat and wash and to get out of bed and get dressed. But the review says the quality of training and support that care workers receive in the NHS and social care system varies between organisations and, in some cases, is lacking.(4)

It calls for a new Certificate of Fundamental Care for fully-fledged HCAs - a qualification that would link HCA training to nurse training, making it easier for staff to progress up the career ladder should they wish to. All new recruits would need to obtain the certificate and existing HCAs would need to prove they had the equivalent training.(5) And in recognition of the important job HCAs do, they should be called Nursing Assistants.(6)

Journalist Camilla Cavendish, author of the review, said: "Patient safety in the NHS and social care depends on recognising the contribution of support workers, valuing and training them as part of a team. For people to get the best care, there must be less complexity and duplication and a greater focus on ensuring that support staff are treated with the seriousness they deserve - for some of them are the most caring of all."(7)

Peter Carter, of the Royal College of Nursing, was concerned that without mandatory regulation there would be a danger that any staff who were found to be unsuitable could move from one employer to another unchecked. "The priority must now be to underpin the recommendations made by Camilla Cavendish in the regulatory structure which governs care," he said.(8)

Christina McAnea, of Unison, said that in some hospitals HCA's have been treated as "cheap labour".(9) "Common training standards across health and social care are long overdue and welcome."(10)

1. They're assistants. The whole point of an assistant is that they are people working for someone else, rather than people with responsibilities. You tell them to do something, they do it. But if they screw up, you, the person in charge of them take it in the can.

2. Yes, because they're assistants to doctors and nurses. Who can show them to do something, and have to take responsibility for their work. And actually, taking blood isn't brain surgery.

3. Great, so instead of hiring someone with a reasonably active brain and getting them to work by a nurse or doctor showing them the ropes in some basic care, we're now going to have an accreditation scheme, driving up costs.

4. How much training does someone need in turning a patient or feeding them? Millions of parents seem to be able to manage this.

5. Right, so that means not only spending money training new recruits, but also certifying existing recruits. What's that going to cost?

6. Someone now has to go through every piece of documentation and change it. No more healthcare gets done, no more pay to nurses, just some more bureaucracy.

7. None of this means that these people will be more valued. If a doctor looks down on someone who turns the patients, they're still going to look down on the accredited people who turn the patients.

8. Well, yes. Once you get people with accreditation, they'll need a union to try to raise the salary of them.

9. Which is exactly what they are, and they only exist because we made nurses more expensive by turning it into a degree-level job, resulting in the workaround of creating HCAs. If we make the HCAs more expensive, we're going to have to create a new job like Nursing Dogsbody.

10. No, they aren't. Not for assistants doing feeding and turning patients. You want flexible people who can do what nurses and doctors tell them to.

Stone Mason: Egypt needs "Giza Necropolis" approach to economy

Egypt should replicate the success of Giza 2560BC by picking industrial "winners" and embarking on a Pyramid-level infrastructure spree, according to the leader of the Stone Mason's Union.

He said that the success of the construction of the tomb for the Pharoah to travel to the stars in the afterlife showed that targeted funding could work if directed at sections of the Egyptian economy. Speaking at the annual union conference in Memphis, he said the Pyramids proved the "market doesn't always deliver" and vindicated the state's role in the Egyptian economy.

"It's right to celebrate the Pyramids, but it's even more important to learn from them, for the central lessons of these 20 years – that private isn't always best and the market doesn't always deliver – surely need to shape future policy," he said.

"We can't muddle through with our trip to the afterlife – we need investment, planning and a Giza-style national crusade. We won't build up industrial strength unless we work out what we do best as a country, whether it's temples to Isis, Osiris or Horus"

He said the rest of the Egypt also needed a Giza-style infrastructure boost, not just in terms of burial  tombs, but also in new palaces.

Conservatives: Ban MPs With Low Turnouts

From the Daily Telegraph

Conservative MPs are urging the Government to change the rules so that parties cannot govern with a low ballot turnout.

They accused politicians of “being out of touch with the people” and said it was being “deeply unrepresentative”. The Conservative government was formed despite only a 65% turnout of the public taking place. Of that, the government was formed despite only 36% per cent of people voted for the Conservatives - which means that the party was only backed by 23% of the electorate.

Dominic Raab, the Tory MP, said: “These unrepresentative and damaging governments strengthen the case for electoral reform, so a minority can’t hold onto power. It can't be right that a bunch of chinless morons can run the country into the ground, when just 23% of the electorate support them."

Aidan Burley MP, a founder of the Electoral Reform Commission which is pressing ministers to curb politicians influence in Whitehall, said the electoral system should be changed. “The current two party setup is selfish, shameless and spineless and the first past the post system should be phased out." he said.

Priti Patel, the Tory MP, added: “Any ballot in which fewer than a quarter of those eligible to vote choose the party of government should be ruled invalid. Our electoral system is only kept in place by those who are once again putting their own interests before that of our county.”

Conor Burns MP, who led the rebellion over Lords reforms, added: “The idea that these chinless wonders can hold the public to ransom on a vote of 23 per cent is grotesque and anti-democratic.”

Matthew Hancock MP, an unofficial adviser to Chancellor George Osborne, added: “The majority of the public did not vote for this outrageous government. Shameless party leaders who want to run government should not be allowed to stand for parliament when only a minority of the public voted for them".

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From yesterday's Evening Standard:

You quote critics who slam the RMT and TSSA as "greedy" and "unpatriotic" over their Olympic bonus claims. On the same day there are reports that hotel rates in London have broadly tripled for the Olympics. In the interests of balance, would you now print an attack on "greedy unpatriotic hoteliers" holding London to ransom?

Stanley Knill, London N15.

Bob Crow does irony

From today's CityAM:

COMMUTERS returning to work today have been hit by yet another hike in rail fares, after the average ticket price rose by 5.9 per cent with the new year, sending season tickets rocketing...

The fare increase on Transport for London services levels out at an average of 5.6 per cent, lower than was expected due to an extra £136m secured by mayor Boris Johnson from the government. The Tube, which carried a record 1.1bn passengers last year, will see its fares climb by an average of six per cent...

Transport trade union RMT’s general secretary Bob Crow called the price hikes "daylight robbery on the tracks" with "fat profits for the train companies while the public pay through the nose."

From The Guardian, three months ago:

Tube drivers in the capital will see their pay go over the £50,000-a-year mark under a four-year wage deal negotiated between London Underground and union leaders... Under the deal, staff will get a 5% pay increase this year followed by RPI inflation plus 0.5% in the subsequent three years.

Industry sources said that if RPI inflation stays reasonably high, some tube staff will receive a pay rise approaching 20% by the end of the settlement period... The RMT said the issue of a payment for working during next year's Olympic Games in London was separate to the four-year wage deal.

General secretary Bob Crow said: "We saw major movement from LU and we now take this improved offer back to our local reps. In these days of austerity we have shown … trade unionism is the best defence from attacks on jobs and living standards. I doubt you will find a better offer than this anywhere else in the public sector."

Fun Online Polls: Idiot commenters and public sector strikes

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll and left comments (none of them idiotic, I'm happy to say), results as follows:

What's the best way of responding to idiot commenters who post personal insults?

Ignore them, but allow their comments to stand - 34%
Delete their comments - 26%
Respond to their insults politely - 24%
Insult them back - 9%
Other, please specify - 6%

So there's no hard and fast rule. It seems to me that a simple warning or two and then subsequently deleting all comments from the idiot(s) concerned seems reasonable. Engaging in tit-for-tat insults is fun but pointless, and from bitter experience, trying to engage these idiots in serious debate is pointless as well, although they sometimes provide raw material for future posts :-)
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Public sector pensions, ho hum, big topic. All things considered, I'm with the government on this one. Public sector pensions aren't the biggest problem facing us - the UK government spends five times as much on corporate welfare - but it's still a problem that will have to be addressed sooner rather than later.

What particularly annoys me is that the government has gone out of its way to explain that only public sector employees currently paid £15,000 or more will have to make the additional 3% contributions (3% is nowhere near enough, but it's a start) but the trade unions keep saying exactly the opposite, that these changes will hit 'low paid hard working public servants especially women' etc etc, I suppose that's their version of the Poor Widow Bogey.

Perhaps this summary is accurate, i.e. that the £15,000 is annualised, so if you work half-hours and are paid more than £7,500, you'll have to pay 3% more for the privilege of your gold-plated, final salary, index linked pension, I don't know. If true, all that does is reduce the number of public sector employees not required to make the additional contributions, fair enough, if you ask me.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll, do you think today's strike was justified? It's a straight 'yes' or 'no' this week.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Winter of disco'n'tent

Ah well. At least the caricaturists aren't on strike...

Bob Crow

HOP

I took the kids to see this film yesterday.

It was quite good fun really, I thought it was better than Alvin & The Chipmunks (the nearest comparison), both in terms of quality of jokes and how the real life characters and the CGI characters interact. And thankfully it wasn't in 3D either.

Plot: Carlos is an overgrown chick who is the factory foreman and is 'the baddie'. He wants to be appointed 'Easter Bunny' (i.e. the boss) and so he tries to stir the little worker chicks into rebellion - instead of giving the children Easter eggs, he wants to give them baskets of bird seed and tasty worms. He temporarily grabs power by a coup d'état but is then ousted again by the original kindly Easter Bunny, who is a paternalistic Victorian-style factory owner of course.

Sub-plot: don't trust trade union leaders, they are only in it for themselves.

Bob Crow: Man of Principle

I see that the Homeys have got it in for Bob Crow. From The Metro:

The militant head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) is believed to pay half the market rate for his taxpayer-subsidised house (1) despite being paid £145,000 a year. (2)

Mr Crow rents the three-bedroom home for an estimated £150 a week while estate agents say it would cost £300 a week in the private sector. The union firebrand has benefited from a loophole in housing rules (3) which do not consider an occupant’s income once the family has a tenancy.

Mr Crow and his partner Nicola Hoarau have lived in the north-east London property since 2001 and saved an estimated £78,000 on renting costs. (4)

Housing minister Grant Shapps said: ‘With nearly 5million vulnerable people languishing on housing waiting lists, I would have thought a highly paid union baron would feel somewhat awkward taking advantage of publicly subsidised housing.’ (5)

The RMT said Mr Crow ‘turned down the opportunity to buy his council house at a substantial discount because he believes social housing stock should be available for future generations. (6) Bob Crow makes no apology for living in social housing,’ the union said.

1) It's not taxpayer-subsidised at all. Don't tell me that the cash cost to the council of maintaining that house is anywhere near £7,800 a year. And if you want to argue that rent foregone is a 'cost' to the taxpayer, then so is the fact that owner-occupation is not subject to taxation (Schedule A or Land Value Tax).

2) Yes, he is a militant, what relevant does that have (and no, I like neither his politics nor the strikes he calls once or twice a year), and he appears to be vastly overpaid, but that's up to RMT members - and on that sort of salary, he must be chipping in about £70,000 a year in PAYE, NIC and VAT, so he's more than paying for any subsidies he does get (to the extent he gets any, which he doesn't) and a damn' sight more than most people.

3) It's not a loophole, FFS. Those Are The Rules. If the social rent is set at £150 then it's £150 regardless of income - if you earn very little or nothing, then they don't reduce the rent, what they do is allow you to claim Housing Benefit. Could we arrange this better? Yes of course: to the extent that social housing is undersupplied, we could charge the lower of market rent and (say) twenty per cent of a household's income, that seems more sensible.

4) Sure, he has so far paid £78,000 less than he would have paid had he been renting privately, but what if had bought a similar house privately, which might have cost £100,000 ten years ago? Instead of receiving £78,000, the taxpayer would have received precisely £1,000 Stamp Duty and f- all else. And he's not married? So f- what?

And if our Bob stays there for another ten years, he'll have paid £156,000 to the taxpayer and still own nothing, and he will still have to pay something - to the taxpayer - for the rest of his life. If he'd bought privately, he would easily have paid off his mortgage by then...

... which leads me to the conclusion that a lot of people in social housing have ended up paying more for their housing than owner-occupiers; so it's not social housing that's subsidised at all - if anything, owner-occupied housing is subsidised, because they pay net nothing to the taxpayer (and on the whole, make tax-free capital gains) but social tenants, on average, do pay something (however little).

5) Shappsy has made a fair few quid off the housing bubble (fair play, so did I) so that's a tad hypcritical. And if he's so bothered about the one family whom Bob Crow has displaced, he's free to divert the £7 billion a year currently wasted in Housing Benefit for private tenants (yes, that is a real cost to the taxpayer) into building 200,000 new units of social housing every year. Twat.

6) Like I said, Bob Crow may be vastly overpaid, but he appears to have some principles. If the scoop had been that he owns half a dozen buy-to-lets, then things would be different.

FakeCharity Du Jour

The BBC wheels out its template yet again...

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is proposing to reduce unannounced workplace inspections by a third, the BBC has learned. A leaked letter from the HSE outlines plans to withdraw inspections from entire sectors of industry, including some where "significant risk" remains...

The move has caused concern among health and safety campaigners. Professor Rory O'Neill, editor of the safety magazine Hazards, believes it signals a fundamental departure from the HSE's role as safety watchdog. "The HSE's job is to make the workplace safe, but now it's being explicitly instructed not to do that job right," he said, "The implication for health and safety is that workplaces will become deregulated."

The HSE are in my bad books for perpetuating myths about white asbestos, but who be the publishers of Hazards?

Ah... their website says "Sponsored by National Union of Teachers, Unite The Union and Unison - The Public Services Union.