Country Report: United Kingdom

This book chapter forms the basis of an expert UK county report submitted to the European Federation of Building and Woodworkers as part of a 12 country EU project. The project itself was dedicated to an analysis of the theory and practice of the functioning of the Posting of Workers Directive. The key focus was on the practical experiences of compliance authorities, labour inspectors and other controlling bodies. With one of the main conclusions of the project being that the use of the posting mechanism ranges from normal and decent long-established partnership between contracting partners to completely fake letter box practices of labour-only recruitment

An analysis of the North East Worker Registration Scheme Data: A briefing paper for the Regional Migrant Worker Steering Group

It has recently been stated that the opening up of the UK labour market to the new accession countries (A8s) has initiated the largest ever in-migration to these shores . Whilst there are no accurate figures of the precise number of migrants involved in this, there are a number of statistical sources that provide data on it. One of these is the Worker Registration Scheme , which whilst carrying a number of ‘health warnings’ as to accuracy of flows is useful for labour market data. For the North East, though, the publicly available accession reports include Yorkshire and Humber in their overall totals. However, the author has obtained, through freedom of information, the full North East data set . What follows are the key regional headlines and then three more in-depth sections on (1) the nationality of North East A8 workers (2) their age and gender and (3) their occupation. The key regional headlines are: Between May 2004 and September 2006, 4,934 A8 workers registered to the Scheme in the North East. This is by far the lowest number of registered A8 workers of any UK region; Sixty-six per cent of these workers were Polish. This is slightly higher than the overall UK proportion of sixty-three per cent. With the only other notable group regionally being Lithuanians (13%) again slightly higher than the UK proportion (11%);The male:female ratio of registered workers was 64:36. This is a higher male proportion than at a national level where the ratio was 57:43. Seventy-four per cent of registered workers were aged 18-34. This, though, is lower than the UK proportion of eighty-two per cent; The most frequent occupation of A8 registered workers was factory process operative (1,660). A third of all regional registered workers were classified as undertaking this occupation

An analysis of the North East Worker Registration Scheme data: Second briefing paper for the Talent North East Steering Group

This is the second briefing paper for the Steering Group on registrations by A8 workers to the Worker Registration Scheme (WRS) in the North East. It is based on a freedom of information request and contains the full data set for the North East region. This full set includes seven separate periods which allows some discussion of change over two distinct periods. The data does, though, carry a number of ‘health warnings’ as to accuracy of migration flow. This second set of data also has further caveats as it is now provided not with the original postcode of employers but with their postcode already broken down into local authority boundaries. What this means is that (1) currently up to six per cent of those who have registered are not now included. This is because they have originally not provided a completely accurate postcode and are therefore excluded when the sets are broken down into local authority boundaries. The occupation data set also contains only the top ten occupations. In both cases this means that some A8 registered workers who were included in briefing one are now not. For example this is most apparent with the occupation data and in particular the Administrative SOC2000 category which has been reduced from 112 to just 15; (2) the four separate data sets obtained (nationality, gender, age and occupation) have differing final and therefore sub?regional totals. The author has been informed that this is due to firstly people not answering all the questions when registering and secondly that the sets are now rounded to the nearest five as is common to maintain individual anonymity. As other national migration data sources, for example the national insurance number allocations for foreign workers and the labour force survey, also have their own limitations when used in a North East, sub?regional and local authority context. The WRS data still provides useful labour market A8 migration information for the region and is one part of a wider picture of change in our regional labour market since May 2004

Working in the UK: Polish migrant worker routes into employment in the north east and north west construction and food processing sectors

This report presents the findings of a TUC-funded project that sought to identify the main routes into employment for Polish migrant workers in the North East and North West construction and food processing sectors. Its findings show that the two sectors offer real opportunities and challenges for trade unions to organise those who most need help. Indeed many unions in the sectors have already taken up the challenge and have started to see real successes in organising groups traditionally seen as hard to organise

The Closure of LG Phillips : AMICUS reps baseline questionnaire

This report presents the first part of a three part survey of AMICUS LG Phillips trade union representatives. The survey was undertaken during the closure period of the LG Phillips plant in County Durham, AMICUS tendered Northumbria University to undertake a tracking exercise to map out the skills, current employment and trade union activities of representatives as they moved forward following the traumatic closure of the plant. The first part baseline study was administered via a postal and telephone questionnaire, with representatives also asked if they would take part in subsequent research. Only two respondents indicated that they wanted either limited or no further part in the study

Can “compulsory” annuities provide a fair pension?

This discussion paper finds that since 2002 compulsory annuities no longer provide an actuarially fair pension. Hence annuities are a poor investment giving returns of less than 85% in present value terms. The paper uses a data base of annuity rates collected from MoneyFacts monthly reports since 1994. This includes all products available on the market for Male Only aged 55 to 75 in 5 year increments. The present value of future annuity streams and their resultant moneys worth values (MW) are calculated and analysed, with particular attention to the actuarial aspects. The approach and results are independently confirmed giving a high degree of confidence in the findings. The analysis progresses on from the literature review of recent published work The paper plots historic trends of annuity payout rates and their MW values and highlights some significant characteristics of the annuity market. While annuity rates can be expected to fall as life expectation rises no logical reason can be found to also justify the recent and significant reduction in their MW value below the actuarially fair value of 1.0. This research provides a valuable insight for developing strategies to guide the pensioner when formulating his income drawdown plans, especially in the light of. recent A-day changes