How trade unions are mobilising around the challenges of Brexit

Not all trade unionists wanted to stay in the EU. Nonetheless, Brexit poses a number of challenges for the labour movement. Steve French (Keele University) looks at the three areas on which unions plan to campaign - the regional and sectoral impacts of leaving the EU, and the risk that future free trade agreements will be negotiated with corporate rather than workers' interests in mind

Civil Service Performance Management Diversity and Inclusion outcomes data 2015-6 – an analysis

This report has been commissioned by the PCS to provide an evaluation of the data provided by Civil Service Human Resources on the variation in performance management rating outcomes for the review year 2015-16. The report, following the structure used in this analysis last year1, examines whether variations in performance management outcomes by gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, age, working patterns or grade are statistically significant, both by Government Department and across the Civil Service

Must Improve’: PCS members’ evaluation of Performance Management.

The release of data on performance management ratings for 2014-15 has raised a numberof serious concerns about the operation of performance management systems in the CivilService. The analysis of the ratings by grade, contract and protected personal characteristics, conducted by the author on behalf of the PCS1, provided strong evidence to suggest that the performance management systems across the 17 Civil Service departments (covering 286,000 civil servants) led to discriminatory outcomes

Civil Service Performance Management Diversity and Inclusion outcomes data 2014-5 – an analysis

This report has been commissioned by the PCS to provide an evaluation of the data provided by Civil Service Human Resources on the variation in performance management rating outcomes for the review year 2014-15. The report analyses whether variations in performance management outcomes by gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, age, working patterns or age are statistically significant, both by Government Department and across the Civil Service as a whole

Between globalisation and Brexit: Migration, pay and the road to modern slavery in the UK hospitality industry

Neo-liberal economic globalisation has promoted deregulation and a weakening of the role of the state in regulating the national economy. The perceived benefits of competition have been used to justify strategies to reduce operational costs and promote a “race to the bottom”. This has led to the development of casualisation strategies, supported by weak labour market regulation, that provide employers with increasing numerical, temporal and pay flexibility. In addition, migration can be utilised by employers to reinforce these strategies. The UK is a prime example of such a neo-liberal state, and labour market practices in the “migrant dense” UK hospitality sector highlight many characteristics of these casualisation strategies. It is argued that these exploitative practices to reduce labour costs also facilitate pathways into modern slavery, where exploitative labour is involuntary and forced. Despite a legal framework to monitor and tackle modern slavery, the problem of resources and political will to enforce this regulation limits the extent to which modern slavery can be challenged, and it is argued that Brexit may create political and economic conditions in which it could thrive.Keywords: Brexit, casualisation, exploitative labour practices, hospitality sector, migration, modern slaver

Negotiating changes to Civil Service Performance Management schemes: An analysis of the proposed Civil Service Performance Management Framewor

This report has been commissioned by the PCS to provide an evaluation of the proposed changes to Performance Management (PM) schemes in the Civil Service, following the running of a number of pilot schemes and ahead of substantive negotiation of new systems at a departmental level

Between globalisation and Brexit: Migration, pay and the road to modern slavery in the UK hospitality industry

Neo-liberal economic globalisation has promoted deregulation and a weakening of the role of the state in regulating the national economy. The perceived benefits of competition have been used to justify strategies to reduce operational costs and promote a “race to the bottom”. This has led to the development of casualisation strategies, supported by weak labour market regulation, that provide employers with increasing numerical, temporal and pay flexibility. In addition, migration can be utilised by employers to reinforce these strategies. The UK is a prime example of such a neo-liberal state, and labour market practices in the “migrant dense” UK hospitality sector highlight many characteristics of these casualisation strategies. It is argued that these exploitative practices to reduce labour costs also facilitate pathways into modern slavery, where exploitative labour is involuntary and forced. Despite a legal framework to monitor and tackle modern slavery, the problem of resources and political will to enforce this regulation limits the extent to which modern slavery can be challenged, and it is argued that Brexit may create political and economic conditions in which it could thrive

Plus ça change: The Coalition Government and Trade unions

One of the first announcements made by the majority Conservative government on coming to power in the UK in May 2015 was in relation to proposed legislation on trade unions. The newly appointed Business Secretary Sajid Javid stated on the BBC Today Programme that ‘We've already made clear, in terms of strike laws, that there will be some significant changes... it will be a priority of ours. We need to update our strike laws. We've never hidden away the changes we want to make. I think it's essential to make these changes’ (BBC News 2015). At first sight, this might suggest that the return to a Conservative majority government signalled a significant change in the way relationships were to be structured with trade unions, reflective of the significant legislative attacks on trade unions under the Thatcher and Major Conservative administrations of the 1980s and 1990s

Recognizing the presence of hidden visual markers in digital images

As the promise of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) becomes more realistic, an interesting aspect of our enhanced living environment includes the availability — indeed the potential ubiquity — of scannable markers. Such markers could represent an initial step into the AR and VR worlds. In this paper, we address the important question of how to recognise the presence of visual markers in freeform digital photos. We use a particularly challenging marker format that is only minimally constrained in structure, called Artcodes. Artcodes are a type of topological marker system enabling people, by following very simple drawing rules, to design markers that are both aesthetically beautiful and machine readable. Artcodes can be used to decorate the surface of any objects, and yet can also contain a hidden digital meaning. Like some other more commonly used markers (such as Barcodes, QR codes), it is possible to use codes to link physical objects to digital data, augmenting everyday objects. Obviously, in order to trigger the behaviour of scanning and further decoding of such codes, it is first necessary for devices to be aware of the presence of Artcodes in the image. Although considerable literature exists related to the detection of rigidly formatted structures and geometrical feature descriptors such as Harris, SIFT, and SURF, these approaches are not sufficient for describing freeform topological structures, such as Artcode images. In this paper, we propose a new topological feature descriptor that can be used in the detection of freeform topological markers, including Artcodes. This feature descriptor is called a Shape of Orientation Histogram (SOH). We construct this SOH feature vector by quantifying the level of symmetry and smoothness of the orientation histogram, and then use a Random Forest machine learning approach to classify images that contain Artcodes using the new feature vector. This system represents a potential first step for an eventual mobile device application that would detect where in an image such an unconstrained code appears. We also explain how the system handles imbalanced datasets — important for rare, handcrafted codes such as Artcodes — and how it is evaluated. Our experimental evaluation shows good performance of the proposed classification model in the detection of Artcodes: obtaining an overall accuracy of approx. 0.83, F2 measure 0.83, MCC 0.68, AUC-ROC 0.93, and AUC-PR 0.91