Chancellor Rishi Sunak is hoping its third time lucky with his latest post-furlough scheme plans. First he argued that no replacement for the furlough scheme was needed on 1 November. Then, as pressure grew, at the end of September he proposed a “Job Support Scheme”, which was more like an unemployment creation scheme. Now, the original […]
Jobs
What unites Liam Gallagher, Ian Rankin and Badly Drawn Boy (no, I don’t know who the last one is either)? They all had a go at Chancellor Rishi Sunak yesterday after he appeared to say that some workers in the Arts sector need to re-train and do other jobs. In an interview with ITV, Sunak […]
Give us a gig
The title of what Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced yesterday, ‘Job Support Scheme’, flatters to deceive. The key thing to be aware of is that employers are being asked to pay one-third of the topping up of a worker’s wage who has been moved from full-time to part-time hours, which many of them are not going […]
Sunak’s ‘Job Support Scheme’ is a deception
Vinnie Collins looks at the example of Green Jobs Oshawa in Canada, where a coalition is looking to repurpose a closed General Motors plant into a Green New Deal manufacturing hub, and finds there may be lessons to learn for the case of Alexander Dennis in Falkirk. Scotland and Canada have a lot in common. […]
Vinnie Collins: From Canada to Scotland, we need to bring the fight for decent jobs and climate justice together
Ahead of the pupil protest outside the SQA’s HQ today, it is worth thinking about the structural disadvantages facing young people from deprived communities in the broader context of this economic crisis. Economics commentator Aditya Chakrabortty wrote yesterday about the enormous ‘Covid jobs crisis’ to come when the furlough scheme finishes at the end of October, with […]
Cecilia’s Cs
A flurry of forecasts of economic doom arrived yesterday, though there’s good reason to think they were over-optimistic in their doom-mongering. The IMF have predicted a 3 per cent slump for the year globally, presuming the world can get out of lockdown by summer without a second spike. In the UK, the Office for Budget […]
Forward to the hibernation economy
Let’s develop a little scorecard on where we are with the economic measures in the UK and Scotland to cope with our new pandemic-world. For corporations, we have 80 per cent of the wages they owe workers affected by Covid-19 covered by government. That’s a significant drop in their costs, overnight. For banks, we have […]
The bailout scorecard
There are signs of some positive steps in the Scottish Government’s approach to this crisis which hopefully bode well. The setting up of an independent expert group separate from the UK Government, which will at the moment “supplement” the UK-wide expert advice but could ultimately lead to different policies being taken in Scotland, sounds like […]