Scott LaPlant » Education

Notes from the New Age of Dissent: Committed, literary and stylish journalism

Scott LaPlant — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:09:20 +0000

Virtuosos of the blogosphere – who wrote the following words?

“[Laurie] Penny is… cheered on by the youth for whom she speaks… she expresses the views of many in coherent and well thought out articles… is surely one of the most vibrant young journalists that we have [and] this country would be poorer without her.”

Was it some fawning leftie, overwhelmed by the stylishness with which Penny is expressing everything he/she thinks about the world of UK politics? Or a fellow young hack, not ashamed to show their admiration?

In fact the author is Michael Ezra, Harry’s Place blogger, anarcho-capitalist, self-confessed hedge fund guru, and someone who dedicates a good deal of time highlighting everything that is wrong about British Trotskyism and left wing movements in general.

Such is the power of Penny’s red pen - which she holds in her hand on the front cover of her new book “Notes from the New Age of Dissent”.

The volume is a collection of previously published blog entries piecing together her activism, but also writings on other topics serving as a reminder that, as well as being the “voice of a generation”, she is also a very serious writer all round.

In the heady days of student occupations before and after Christmas 2010, the Jeremy Bentham Room in the University College London (UCL) - an unofficial headquarters for much of the protest movement intelligence - had a dedicated media team drawing up pages of press copy on demand in the hope that it would reach news desks across the country, and play havoc with the bias reportage being presented in the mainstream.

For that team Laurie Penny was a gift from the heavens. Someone who has spent much of her life campaigning on issues key to students’ demands and who has a foot in the door of big press outlets.

This was not just a place where Penny could offer unique insight (though this is true) but somewhere she was really part of.

Unlike Orwell, Penny is fully incorporated into the fold of despair and pessimism for the future, in spite of her upbringing and success as a journalist, because more than the balance of material possessions, what our generation anticipates today is a bleak tomorrow - and, loath as I am to say it, this will affect everybody.

With Laurie hope is important. It’s vague, but that’s because late capitalist society breeds spectacle and inertia.

Today, the problem, as always, is systematic inequality, but it is also personal hopelessness.

Some of the old guard will tell you that in order to understand why this hopelessness will necessitate a different type of resistance than in previous times, it is vital to know the ins and outs of what put Left socialists and vanguardist Marxist-Leninists at loggerheads (see for example the argument Penny had with Alex Callinicos – not, unfortunately, included in the new collection).

This is not so. Laurie is able to put into words the angst and the anxiety that many feel today, in a way which draws on considerable empathy, not loathing or snobbery; indeed, Penny’s unique feature is not that she is young, female or politicised; it is that she is bringing back what journalism wrongly disavowed: committed, literary and stylish journalism.

Anyone who claims Laurie is an example of the “hacktivist” holds the ideological weight of one trying to tar her with the brush of bias. In fact, she is emphasising what Dennis Chase in a 1972 article referred to as “truth” over “facts”. She is the eye in the storm, not the interpreter of facts.

With this truth there is a real feeling of personability. What she does so well is draws you in to her narrative, to the point where on reading her blog posts you find yourself asking questions such as why did she giggle and say nothing? Did she ever contact the policeman on Facebook?

As author Warren Ellis says in the introduction to her book:

“Subjective journalism isn’t a crime [because] reportage needs to be a ‘living thing’.”

But not only that, her style will inevitably break down those barriers between journalist and reader – and even more importantly between activist and reader.

Unlike the conclusions to emerge from the sixties by fashionable post-structuralists, the becoming of the reader does not necessitate the death of the author. Laurie has instigated a co-existence between the two, and the political consequences of this will be crucial.

Gay Talese once said that himself, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson “were the best magazine writers going in the 1960s. They [journalism school students in the 1980s] should be better than us… Nobody is even half as good”. With Penny, may those writers – on whose work she surely styles herself – rest assured that this is no longer the case.

Inflation is worse for the worst off

Scott LaPlant — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:09:20 +0000

When the inflation figures came out last month, one could be forgiven for thinking that the only people surprised were the politicians.

Those of us who can’t expense our life have noticed the inexorable rise in costs over the past year, and although the eventual figure of 5.2 per cent for the CPI and 5.6% for the RPI may not have been the figure we’d have guessed (for those of us who attempt to predict such things), it is certainly in the same area.

In addition, it looks like even the silver lining of such high inflation figures may be stolen from us. Normally, the September figures for inflation are the ones used to determine how certain benefits are updated, and so a high rate of inflation in this month in particular means that the hardest hit will at least be slightly better off than otherwise.

Except that on Friday, the BBC was reporting that Downing Street had hinted it may use its discretion to cut even that small mercy:

The Financial Times is reporting that chancellor George Osborne has asked officials for alternative models, including a rise in line with average earnings growth of about 2.5% or freezing some payments.

It is understood the government will have “resolved” the options by early December when the uprating of benefits is presented to Parliament. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has calculated that the 5.2% September inflation figure will add £1.8 billion to welfare spending next year. It said freezing all benefits and pensions would save about £10bn and linking benefits increases to wage rises would save £5bn.

A further option of switching from the September inflation figure to an average inflation figure calculated over six months could save about £1.4bn, the IFS added.

Inflation is a statistical measure, designed to capture the general increase in prices for the country as a whole. But in trying to do that, it whitewashes out the fact that the poorest in society have been by far the hardest hit. Even if Downing Street decides that trying to save money by enacting a real-terms cut to social security benefits and the state pension isn’t OK, those relying on them to live will still find life harder this year than last.

To see why, we need to take a look at the actual basket of goods (pdf):

As you can see, the two biggest drivers to the increase in CPI were category 40000, housing etc., and category 70000, transport. Each of these are relatively highly weighted, representing well over a fifth of the basket between them, and they were both much higher than they were this time last year (transport is still on a negative trend, but less negative than in 2010). Almost as highly weighted as housing, however, is category 110000, restaurants and hotels.

Doubtless there are some people for whom restaurants and hotels represent as large a proportion of their annual expenditure as housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels.

Indeed, there are likely some for whom the former is more. But for those whom a 5.2% increase year-on-year for their pension represents a signifiant proportion of their income, the fact that the monthly inflation for their housing is 3.5% is worrying. Yet the CPI weighting suggests that if housing costs are increasing by 3.5% a month while the cost of restaurants and hotels is decreasing at the same rate, then the hypothetical ‘average consumer’ should be exactly as well off.

I do not spend the same amount on restaurants as I do on housing. When the cost of my gas bills goes up by 13 per cent (pdf) in a month, I do not look to the fact that restaurants are staying the same price as a small mercy; rather, I look at restaurants as something that I stopped being able to afford some time ago.

These interesting priorities of the statisticians are mirrored on the level of the goods included; sometimes, they seem to be dry comments on our culture:

Women’s high heeled sensible shoes: Combined with women’s high heeled party shoes since footwear is over-represented in the basket.

But these changes have real effects. Last year, Blu-ray players were added to “recreation and culture” section; as everyone would have predicted, their price has plummeted over the last year, and they will have contributed to the fact that their section showed just 0.1 per cent change.

But again: For those needing every penny of the benefits regrade, how important is the plummeting price of blu-ray players? Is CPI a more accurate measure of their spending habits now that the two categories of “flat panel TV 14”-25”” and “flat panel TV 26”-42”” has been split into the three categories “flat panel TV 14”-22””, “flat panel TV 23”-32”” and “flat panel TV 33”+”?

The inflation statistics almost certainly are an accurate representation of the nation’s collective spending habits – I trust the bulging brains of the ONS statisticians on that matter – but they are woefully unfit for the purpose of working out how much harder life has got for those with the least discretionary income.

It is for this reason that groups which do try to create fair measures of the cost of living for those at the lower end of the wage scale report very different figures to the national inflation statistics. The London living wage increased by 5.7% this year – higher than both RPI and CPI – and that is calculated with reference to the median income, so stagnating wages mean that it did not increase as sharply as the cost of living did.

In addition, this calculation was made in the spring – before the massive leaps in utility costs which made September’s inflation figures so high – and deals with people who earnt a – comparatively high – £7.85 an hour.

The lower ones wage, the more disproportionately one is affected by the increases in the very basic cost of housing, a cost which is going up by 3.5 per cent each month. For those with money to spend on recreation and culture (0.1 per cent per month) or restaurants and hotels (0.3 per cent per month), stagnation in those areas may help a little; but many do not have that freedom.

If we cannot take them out of that poverty, we should at least make sure that the social safety net we use to help them is uprated according to their needs, not the needs of a mythical average consumer.

What has Europe ever done for us? Well…

Scott LaPlant — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:09:20 +0000

With the eurozone in crisis, Euroscepticism is on the rise; Tony Burke, Assistant General Secretary of Unite, lays out the many, many positives European Union membership has brought us – not least in the field of workers’ rights (that couldn’t possibly be why the mad right loath the EU, could it?!)

The recent EU referendum vote in Parliament opened up self-inflicted wounds for the Tories. Even before the vote David Cameron knew he had to step up the anti-EU rhetoric to try to pacify his anti-EU headbangers. So the day after the vote, a report by Adrian Beecroft, venture capitalist and Tory Party donor, was leaked.

Barmy Beecroft’s report proposed to do away with unfair dismissal rights in order to clear out workers who were “coasting along” and were “impossible to sack”.

Len McCluskey of Unite, the GMB’s Paul Kenny, the TUC’s Sarah Veale (who roundly trashed the report on the Today programme) and Labour’s Chuka Umunna rightly condemned the report; Umunna (a corporate lawyer) said the reports proposals were ‘ludicrous’. The Lib Dems distanced themselves and Downing Street eventually said they had no intention of implementing it.

The report, however overshadowed, comments from Cameron himself, and ministers such as Michael Gove (who had the chutzpah to say the Tories were more united than ever on Europe), who, throwing bones to the baying Tory hounds, said they would be seeking ‘repatriation’ of legislation - notably employment legislation.

Gove is quoted as saying he “would like to see regulations governing whom we can hire, how we can hire and how long they work” taken away from Brussels.

With the right wing media busy cranking up more Brussels bashing it is timely to look at – to paraphrase Monty Python’s Life of Brian - “What Has Europe Ever Done For Us?”

It is important to recall that up until the late 1980s trade unions had been generally hostile to the EU. The TGWU and AEEU had campaigned for a no vote in the 1975 referendum on continued EU membership.

1979 saw the election of a Conservative government and with no legal employment guarantees in the UK, we in the unions learned a hard lesson: A right wing government with a big majority could dismantle the post war consensus, could deregulate the labour market, could impose unimaginable constraints on trade unions and put in place policies designed to dismantle collective bargaining.

In 1988 the President of the European Commission Jacques Delors addressed the TUC congress. He was enthusiastically received when he laid out a vision of a Europe with social and employment rights at its heart. I well recall Ron Todd, then general secretary of the TGWU, in a speech to that Congress saying that after almost 10 years of Thatcherism, the EU was “the only card game in town”.

Now, there are workers - in and outside of trade unions who take for granted the pro-worker legislation emanating from the EU - as thought it has always been there. And there are those who misguidedly express anti Brussels sentiments without recognizing what they could lose.

So lets look at some of the key pieces of legislation, which have benefited working people here in the UK.

They may sound complex, but workers across the UK have received some form of protection by them:

• Individual employment conditions (91/533/EEC) established the employer’s obligation to inform employees of the conditions applicable to the employment contract or employment relationship.

• Fixed term employment framework agreement provided for equal treatment for fixed term contract workers to prevent the abuse of workers subjected to successive fixed-term contracts.

• The part time workers framework agreement required that part-time workers’ employment conditions were not be less favourable than those of comparable full-time workers, with employers, required to take account of employees’ preferences and their requests to transfer from full-time to part-time employment or vice versa. This legislation helped thousands of low paid women workers who worked in part time jobs.

• And of course the temporary agency workers directive which aims to guarantee a minimum level of effective protection to temporary and agency workers. Although its transposition into UK law has been controversial, it does provide some protection from the gross exploitation agency workers have suffered over the years. I would suggest this was the ‘hire and fire’ Gove referred to.

• This was coupled with the health & safety in fixed term and temporary employment – an EU directive (91/383/EEC) which ensured that fixed-term and temporary agency workers, who are more exposed to the risk of accidents at work and occupational diseases than other workers, have the same level of safety and health protection at work as other employees.

• Young people at work is an EU Directive which provided the protection of young people at work which insists that EU member states must prohibit the employment of children (i.e. those under the age of 15 or still in full-time compulsory education). Remember the anti-EU rants about schoolkids and paper-rounds?

• Now a personal favourite – the working time directive, a piece of key health & safety legislation, watered down by the Tories with an “opt-out” for individuals and a piece of legislation that New Labour kept at a distance fearful of the trashing they would get by the Mail and the Sun for being seen curtailing peoples right to work all the hours God sends no matter what the consequences are.

One former minister told me Labour would keep the “opt-out” as it “it doesn’t play well on the doorstep telling people they can’t work overtime!”

The fact is that under the EU’s working time directive each member state must ensure that every worker must not exceed working more than 48 hours on average, (over a 52 week period) as well as providing for minimum rest breaks during a shift, minimum weekly rest time and lest we forget – guaranteed paid annual leave, of at least four weeks (28 days a year) – excluding bank holidays.

• Again although currently controversial because of the way the European Court of Justice has interpreted the law, the posting of workers directive ensured that employees being sent to work in another member state their rates of pay and working conditions must be maintained.

• The employer insolvency directive ensured payment of employees’ outstanding claims in the event of employer insolvency. It required member states to set up an institution to guarantee the payments.

• The transfers of undertakings directive (TUPE) is one of the major protections for workers – the Directive stopped the transfer of an undertaking (business) as constituting a valid grounds for dismissal. Rights and obligations under the employment contract pass from the previous employer to the new one although for economic, technical or organisational reasons can alter this.

Remember, there was a time when companies did dismiss and automatically sack their entire workforces upon the transfer or sale of a business.

• On collective redundancies – the EU Directive improved protection for workers who faced job loss. It set out rules on the information and consultation of workers’ representatives before collective redundancies could be made, set out periods of time for consultation as well as provisions on practical support for the employees who may lose their jobs.

Both TUPE and the collective redundancy legislation are under review across Europe – however the Tories are pushing for major changes and shorter consultation periods.

• The information and consultation directive provided for a general framework for informing and consulting employees on major decisions being made by companies including the recent and probable development of the undertaking’s or the establishment’s activities and economic situation, the situation, structure and probable development of employment within the undertaking or establishment and any anticipatory measures envisaged.

It applies in particular where there is a threat to employment decisions likely to lead to substantial changes in work organisation or in contractual relations.

The last Labour government watered down the legislation at the behest of the employers and made it hard for on employees to trigger a request for a company to set up I&C bodies.

• European works councils were set up under the initial EU directive (94/45/EC) in 1994. It was extended to the UK by another directive (97/74/EC) and adapted by a third directive (2006/109/EC) to the accession of Bulgaria and Romania.

Member States must provide for the right to establish European works councils in companies or groups of companies with at least a thousand employees in the EU. EWCs can be powerful bodies if used strategically by unions. Many companies and union members who sit on EWCs see their importance although there are many EWCs set up prior to the legislation, which keep unions as advisors or experts out.

• European company statute provides for a European company (SE) status, allowing companies incorporated in different member states to merge or form a holding company and providing for the involvement of employees in European companies. This is the subject of a special supplementary directive (2001/86/EC).

• There is new legislation that provides for transnational company agreement concluded by one or more representatives of a company or a group of companies and one or more workers’ organisations (unions). They cover working and employment conditions and relations between employers and workers or their representatives.

• On data protection at work there are two general EU directives on personal data protection, which apply to workers. One (95/46/EC) concerns the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and the free movement of such data. The other (2002/58 which amends 97/66/EC) is about the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector.

• On equality legislation, parental leave is part of a framework agreement, which extends the period of parental leave to at least four months for each parent. It applies to all workers and to all types of employment contract.

• The EU directive on equal pay prohibited all discrimination on the grounds of sex in relation to pay and called upon the member states to eradicate any discrimination laid down in national laws, regulations or administrative provisions and to inform workers of measures taken in application of the directive.

• The equal treatment in employment and occupation directive put in place a general framework to ensure equal treatment of individuals in the European Union, regardless of their religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation, as regards access to employment or occupation and membership of certain organisations.

• And finally there are numerous directives relating to health and safety at work The health and safety at work directive from 1989 established the introduction of minimum measures designed to improve the working environment, in order to guarantee a better standard of safety and health protection.

The directives and legislation emanating from the EU has been - on the whole - beneficial to working people and trade unions.

No doubt the Tories will try to appease the anti-EU brigade with more myths about employment rights and talk of getting laws back from those pesky Europeans – supported by the media and the usual suspects among employers referring to all this as “red tape”.

Lets hope the Labour front bench in BIS are prepared to fight back and defend this legislation as important protections for workers with far less protection than workers elsewhere in the EU.

career advice needed

Scott LaPlant — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:09:21 +0000

Hi TZers

I’ve been commissioned to write a book in the career advice arena and though I have lots of material from my own expereince and from published sources I’d love to hear some ideas from TZ readers.

So what was the best piece of career advice you ever received?

What would be the best advice you would give to someone either starting out or looking to change their career?

What did you ever see or hear that made you really think about your career?

career advice needed from

Materials to help with training in writing responses to complaints

Scott LaPlant — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:09:21 +0000

I’m looking for some training materials to help with training on writing replies to complaints. I need exercises etc so that the delegates can practise in the training room.

I’ve previously used the SCRAP mnemonic- so anything using that would be particularly helpful.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Karin

Materials to help with training in writing responses to complaints from

Fireworks Safety With Mario Balotelli [infographic]

Scott LaPlant — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:09:22 +0000

Infographic by: TutorCare

Fireworks Safety With Mario Balotelli [infographic] from

5 essential leadership qualities

Scott LaPlant — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:09:22 +0000

Any business, organisation or group is only as good as the person at the helm. It may be a cliche but you can only truly lead by example. If people respect and admire you they will gladly acknowledge the true worth of your knowledge, skills, character and experience by following your lead. Leadership development is a fine goal for any individual to aspire to and you can help develop yours by studying the following five awesome leadership qualities.

5 essential leadership qualities from

Is the customer always right?

Scott LaPlant — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:09:22 +0000

A recent experience prompts me to wonder whether we have a say in the way our customers treat us…

Is the customer always right? from

Managing Talent

Scott LaPlant — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:09:22 +0000

As we all know, the strength of any business comes from it’s people. Success depends on the talent we have and how that is nurtured within, on top of what we may engage from ‘outside’. How do you:

Identify those rising stars within your organisations?
develop them into the leaders of the future?
fast-track them through the company?
provide support and structure for them to self develop – what does that framework look like?

What does that toolkit look like or contain?

Managing Talent from

Businesses urged to make long term investment in work based training and apprenticeships

Scott LaPlant — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:09:22 +0000

Managers and senior HR professionals were yesterday (2 Nov) told that there is still more to do to get the UK working, with investment in training and apprenticeships crucial both to boosting the economy and business success.

Delegates at ‘Getting the UK Working’, a conference run by Middlesex University and the CBI, heard that there was still too much talent remaining untapped, particularly amongst young people, but that the business world could play their part in nurturing these skills.

Businesses urged to make long term investment in work based training and apprenticeships from