debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
In a joint report [1] to the G20 Labour ministers meeting in June 2012 the IMF, OECD and World Bank together with the ILO managed to produce some remarkably ambiguous language concerning minimum wages. First, there is a positive message: statutory minimum wages may raise labour participation, sustain demand and reduce poverty and all of this [...]
Responding to a piece by Ryan Avent, the noted (and mysterious) German blogger Kantoos asks for help in coming up with ideas about how to reduce Germany’s current account surplus, apart from deregulating services. Let me help him (or her). Germany could go some way to reversing the labour market reforms and the political pressure [...]
Europe is at the crossroads. Either unity or national populism will determine its future. The new union would start as a community of debt. When Alexandre Dumas published Les Trois Mousquetaires in 1844, Europe was in deep crisis. The conservative attempt to restore old legitimacy had failed and the ancient regimes could no longer guarantee [...]
Compressing the wage structure from the lower end would lead to a more egalitarian distribution of income and stabilise the wage share. This can be achieved by a European minimum wage target according to which, in every country, the minimum wage – determined either by law or by collective agreement – should be at least [...]
The author puts forward five principles to establish a more equal gender order against the risks of recessionary cutbacks. These encompass parental support policies, gender-specific impacts of minimum wage and pension policies, women’s rights to economic independence, public sector restructuring, and the need to challenge the power of male elites in the private sector. As [...]
Strengthening labour relations and workplace innovations are prerequisites for sustained recovery and future growth. Enabling workers and unions to negotiate wage growth in line with enhanced productivity growth requires the dissemination of high-performance working practices that engage workers, a raising of minimum standards, and substantial changes to labour law. The global economic crisis had its [...]
As the parties revealed their manifestos last week, there was an unseemly battle over who first introduced the living wage. David Cameron (wrongly) claimed that the living wage was a Conservative policy brought in by Mayor Boris Johnson. This prompted former Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone to remind Mr. Cameron that it was his administration that [...]
In 2002 I published an article on a maximum wage in the centre-left theory journal Renewal. The idea of putting a ceiling on what people could earn was left-field, to say the least. It was more a thought experiment than a serious attempt to influence political debate. The article and the idea sank without much [...]
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