Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Real legacy of recession in UK is falling wages and productivity per study. Another triumph for billionaire backed Bill McKibben and his anti-productivity group '21 hours' for 21 hr. work week to save the planet, growing incomes is 'unjust'

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6/12/13, "Underpaid and underworked: Real legacy of recession is falling wages and productivity," UK Independent, K. Dutta "Workers settling for less just to stay in a job, survey claims."
"Britain is experiencing the lowest productivity levels ever recorded in a recession – despite more people staying in work and enduring lower wages, a new study claims today.
The Institute of Fiscal Studies report dispels the idea that the recession has led to soaring unemployment. Instead, it suggests, productivity is suffering as workers endure sharp wage cuts just to stay in a job. According to the data, one-third of workers have suffered a wage cut or freeze in the recession.

The think tank’s study, which examined data from 90,000 companies, found productivity levels fell most significantly among firms with less than 50 employees. It also suggests that competition for jobs has sharpened because single parents and older workers have not withdrawn from the job market as in previous downturns.

Claire Crawford, of the IFS, said: “The falls in nominal wages during this recession are unprecedented, and seem to provide at least a partial explanation for why unemployment has risen less, and productivity has fallen more, than might otherwise have been expected.

The paper also said that fewer workers are unionised than in the past and those who are not protected by collective wage agreements are more likely to have seen their pay cut or frozen.

The research found that since 2008 the UK has seen “the longest and deepest loss of output in a century” but the downturn is different from previous slumps. Also, younger generations have been hit much harder than older workers and consumers. 

To the extent that it is better for individuals to stay in work, albeit with lower wages, than to become unemployed, the long-term consequences of this recession in terms of labour-market performance may be less severe than after the high-unemployment recessions of the 1980s and 1990s,” the study claims.

The findings will embolden advocates for the Living Wage which was introduced in 2005."...

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Fossil fuel billionaire-backed Bill McKibben advocates for the group "21 Hours" and a 21 hour work week.

On June 8, 2012Bill McKibben spoke at a conference put on by the New Economics Foundation. This Foundation seeks "to achieve social justice globally" (p. 6) by making a 21 hour work week standard. They say economic growth must be reduced to save the planet and increase equality:

"21 Hours," by the New Economics Foundation, "Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century"
  

"A ‘normal’ working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life....

There is thus ‘no credible, socially-just,

  • ecologically-sustainable scenario
  • of continually growing incomes
  • for a world of nine billion people’"....
"In 1930, John Maynard Keynes imagined that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the working week could be cut dramatically – not just to 21 hours but to 15 hours. He anticipated that we would no longer need to work long hours to earn enough to satisfy our material needs and our attention would turn instead to ‘how to use freedom from pressing economic cares’.1 Keynes was wrong in his forecast, but not at all wrong, it seems to us, to envisage a very different way of using time."

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Bill McKibben and his billionaire partner David Rockefeller are remaking the US without the mess of elections.

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10/5/12, "Reason For Today's Unemployment Rate Plunge: Part-Time Jobs For Economic Reasons Surge Most Since QE1 Announcement," Zero Hedge


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