Working time and careers

At the TUC conference last week, the General Secretary Frances O'Grady offered a striking  comparison, between the C19 struggle for the 8-hour day and what she sees as the equivalent struggle in this century - for a 4-day working week.  Some commentators felt that her ambition was a little modest, as she put the target date for achievement only as the end of the century.  But I think O'Grady is absolutely right to bring the issue of working time centre stage.  (I'm anyway a fan of hers for showing such leadership on the People's Vote, but that's another issue.  Well, actually, only partly another issue as the EU provides the…
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Payback!

It's 10 years since the Lehman Brothers crash, and all that that brought with it. On Friday   I'm going to see the Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre , to see how a quality dramatisation of events can shed new light on what happened.  I'm not sure how good it will be for my blood pressure, but I'm looking forward to it in any case. In this post I want to draw attention to another literary work - Payback, by Margaret Atwood.  This was published exactly at the time the world was crashing into financial chaos, and its subtitle is stunningly prescient: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.  I found it a simply…
Read More

Working time and careers

At the TUC conference last week, the General Secretary Frances O'Grady offered a striking  comparison, between the C19 struggle for the 8-hour day and what she sees as the equivalent struggle in this century - for a 4-day working week.  Some commentators felt that her ambition was a little modest, as she put the target date for achievement only as the end of the century.  But I think O'Grady is absolutely right to bring the issue of working time centre stage.  (I'm anyway a fan of hers for showing such leadership on the People's Vote, but that's another issue.  Well, actually, only partly another issue as the EU provides the…
Read More

Payback!

It's 10 years since the Lehman Brothers crash, and all that that brought with it. On Friday   I'm going to see the Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre , to see how a quality dramatisation of events can shed new light on what happened.  I'm not sure how good it will be for my blood pressure, but I'm looking forward to it in any case. In this post I want to draw attention to another literary work - Payback, by Margaret Atwood.  This was published exactly at the time the world was crashing into financial chaos, and its subtitle is stunningly prescient: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.  I found it a simply…
Read More