The living wage is not law. No one is obliged to pay it & only about 7,000 employers in the UK do so. Thus there is ‘no requirement’ in the UK just as there is none in the EU.
Contrast the minimum wage ..
.. which, subject to exceptions IS mandatory in those countries which have one.
Setting minimum wages is not an EU competence. Each (sovereign) member state decides whether to have one & how much it should be. This, it is misleading to have an EU column in the graphic ..
.. anyway.
FWIW, France & Germany’s min. wage is about the same as ours. Ireland, The Netherlands & Luxembourg have significantly higher minimum wages. Source:
This is proving easier than I thought. 1st, note that sick pay is not an EU competence. Each (sovereign) member state sets its own. So it’s misleading to compare the UK with the EU. 2nd, the graphic glides over the AMOUNT of sick pay &
.. here the UK ranks pretty much bottom. See the map. Note that German workers receive 100% pay when sick. ..
.. 3rd there is the stupid ‘no minimum’ in the EU column. I don’t follow. The 28 week period for the UK is a maximum. Why are we comparing max. with min? What does that even mean? In fact, the UK compares badly in this field & I’m just going to leave this extract from ..
.. an article in The Independent from 2016. There’s no reason to think anything has changed. ‘The UK is the least generous’.
3 Maternity
The EU sets a minimum level of paid maternity leave at 14 weeks leaving it to (sovereign) member states to advance on that if they choose. This table shows how far each has done so. ..
.. Now, it’s true the UK looks pretty good there but when it comes to pay (which is kinda important imho) there are 2 things:
• the last 13 weeks of UK maternity leave are unpaid, &
• the Daily Mail no less reports TODAY that ‘Maternity pay in the ..
.. nutcases have abolition of the regulations high on their list of objectives. Rees-Mogg said it was the first EU law he would repeal. So the cretin is boasting about a law his party means to repeal.
• and, as with everything else, it’s a lie anyway. Both the regulations ..
.. & the directive provide for ‘4 weeks’ annual paid leave. That cannot & does not mean 28 days in the UK but only 20 in the EU. What it means is that for a worker with a ‘normal’ working week of 5 days on, 2 days off, 20 days paid leave must be provided. If the working week ..
You would have to go a long way to find a more rabid Brexiteer than John Redwood. And what is his vision? An unattainable autarky in which we grow our own food &, it now seems, our own wood.
As the free market left to itself will not do these things (because they are mad) ..
.. John wants the government to ‘foster’ tree planting & introduce policies to grow more food & secure ‘our’ fish.
We’ll be like East Germany before the wall came down, all driving around in Trabbants, choking the air with fumes & blackening all the buildings as we pass the ..
.. empty shops with dirty windows & shambling pedestrians in their threadbare clothes hurrying back from their weekly allotment duty with some scavenged wood to feed the stove for a brief respite from the gnawing cold.
There’s a reason Redwood is not in govt. (not even THIS ..
Two quotes from today’s Observer struck me. The first is from Andrew Rawnsley’s comment piece:
‘Remainers struggled to find ways to make technical-sounding issues matter to the public. Among many voters and many politicians, the great benefits of being inside the ..
.. single market were taken for granted right up until the moment when they vanished.’
The second is from an article on the disastrous impact Brexit is having on small businesses that trade with the EU. Andrew Moss runs a packaging & point of sale marketing display business. ..
.. He employs 37 people in Ely & turns over £3.5M. From the article:
‘The last three weeks, he says, have been a living nightmare. “Soft Brexit – there is no such thing. This is horrific,” he says. “We celebrated the Brexit deal with champagne over Christmas but when ..
How to explain these 3 things? My theory is simple - the idea is to play to the bigoted, UKIP base to whom the EU is a Nazi super state with which we are virtually at war. Among the advantages of this approach, which has nothing to do with the national ..
.. interest, is it provides a platform for the blame game as our chickens come home to roost. Our trade is crippled by petty fogging EU bureaucracy not by our own wilful decisions.
The message is, if they want to play hardball, so can we. Never mind the pettiness, to ..
Your observation is just. Capitalist Brexit is about deregulation of employment, consumer & environmental protection, all impossible within the EU. In this manner, what I call the shitty entrepreneur can make more money simply by cutting costs.
.. is how to persuade the EU to let us sit on its doorstep undercutting their model. Having our cake & eating it means precisely this & much of what remains of the negotiations is concerned with it.
Demented free market loons like Redwood & Hannan prefer no deal to one in ..
.. which the UK must align its regulatory regime with the EU or submit to the jurisdiction of the ECJ (the former entails the latter) or accept limitations on state aid (which they would use to bribe companies like Nissan to remain while unfairly competing with EU ..
I watch a Dutch TV quiz called twee voor tweelf on Friday evenings. With Dutch sub-titles on I can follow pretty well. This evening I learned the Dutch have a law which obliges companies with 50 or more employees to have a workers council. This council has various rights ..
.. including the right to be consulted on certain matters.
As a result of this flagrant socialism & recognition that employees have rights & may also have something to contribute to decision making, Dutch society is on the verge of breakdown, as you would expect. Not.
..
..
Several things interest me about this:
• it shows EU member states have wide margins to frame their own employment law, something I already knew. Almost all English & Welsh employment law is home made.
• the Netherlands is one of Europe’s more prosperous countries ..