The number of people relying on ‘platform work’ continues to grow and has been intensified by the pandemic.  According to the TUC, people in England and Wales who said that they performed work they had found via an online platform at least once a week grew from 5.8 per cent of the working population in … Continue reading Young people and ‘click-work’ →

It’s now widely predicted that the economy will enter a prolonged period of ‘stagflation’- where rising prices and slow, or even negative economic growth exist simultaneously. But it’s rising prices ( the 'cost of living crisis') that currently receive most of the attention.  Studies show that a consequence of the current inflation is the widening … Continue reading Stagflation – young people even more likely to be affected. →

The group most hit by the financial crisis and then, a decade later by Covid, young people are the most certain to be hit by increases in the cost of living. More than any other section of the population, their wages have failed to keep pace with inflation (under 21s already experienced a 20% fall … Continue reading No mention of young people in the Spring Statement →

Phil Jones . Work without the Worker. Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism (Verso 2021) This readable and informative book explores the  abusive nature of crowd-working platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and its emulators.  Here under the banner of 'technological progress',  extreme forms of exploitation have developed and a  new generation of  ‘micro-workers’ has emerged.  Forced … Continue reading Review: The Automation debate →

Like almost all of his efforts to shore up support amongst his own supporters, Boris Johnson’s ‘Skills, Skills, Skills’ speech at the Tory Party Conference was little more than rhetoric. Even if unemployment continues to fall, there isn’t a jobs boom and there’s not the slightest chance that the UK will become the high skilled, … Continue reading ‘Skills, Skills, Skills?’ →

This month’s labour market date from ONS shows that if official unemployment has remained at around 5% since the last quarter, the number of people on payroll has plunged by 693,000 since the start of the pandemic, with younger workers under the age of 25 accounting for 60% of the jobs lost since February 2020. … Continue reading The furloughed economy →

What should we make of Anneliese Dodd’s first big speech, last week, on Labour’s economic policies?  The Financial Times (Jan 13th) considered it part of the process of making Labour more ‘responsible’, while parts of the Corbynista press have framed it as yet another example of the Party’s ‘move to the right’. They cite Dodd’s … Continue reading Labour and the economy. →

As this nifty little chart, courtesy of the FT shows, despite denials, the government has been doing what it said it would never do. The huge increase in borrowing needed to support the economy during the Covid crisis,  largely equates with the amount of public debt bought back by the ‘independent’ Bank of England. Whereas … Continue reading Shaking the magic money tree →