Blogs

Forty years after the Equal Pay Act was passed, [a study by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI)] shows that the gender pay gap remains stubborn and that male and female managers will not be paid the same until 2067...

The group's survey shows that women's salaries increased by 2.8% over the past 12 months, compared with 2.3% for men. But with the average UK salary for a male manager currently £10,031 more than that of a female manager, women face a 57-year wait before their take-home pay is equal to that of their male colleagues, says the report, compiled with researchers XpertHR. Its findings, from more than 43,000 employees in 197 organisations, showed male pay still outstrips female pay by as much as 24% at senior level...

Despite four decades of equal pay legislation, Britain has one of the worst gender gaps in Europe. Women in the UK are paid 79% of male rates, while across the 27 countries of the European Union the figure is 82%, according to a report earlier this year from Eurobarometer.

Gender equality groups such as the Fawcett Society blame the UK's poor record on a culture of secrecy around pay. They point to examples such as Sweden, where more transparency has resulted in falling pay gaps. They want the coalition government to set a deadline for closing the gap, make laws more transparent, and force companies to audit their workforces for unfair gaps more regularly.

Equal pay for women not likely till 2067, says research

Ah - no such luck. The blessed coalition has abandoned the part of the new Equality Act which would have required businesses to do just that. The Torygraph is very pleased:

UPDATED:
- letter to Oxfam

Oxfam has the following claim up on its website - under the rubric 'Bin the myth'.

Oxfam spends all its money on admin

This one's definitely not for recycling! The fact is we spend just 10p in every £1 donated to Oxfam on support and running costs – money vital to keeping an effective, professional organisation going. Everything we do depends on it – running efficient projects, getting people, equipment, supplies and funds to where they're needed. The whole life-saving shebang.

Bin the Myth: 'Myth' no 2

I wonder how most potential donors interpret that claim. They probably assume that 90 pence out of every pound donated goes towards direct assistance to those who need it most - perhaps on famine relief, medicines, building wells, buying tools or machinery. Some of them may also realise that part of the money will be used to train and build up the skills of local groups and individuals, and may therefore go towards the salaries of Western consultants or 'experts'. But most will probably assume that Western salaries are counted as 'support' and therefore come out of the 10 pence, rather than the 90. And most will probably assume that 'running costs' include those run-up in the local offices, as well as those incurred by staff employed at central office in the UK.

They would be wrong. The claim does indeed imply that all 'support and running costs' are covered by the 10 pence, not the 90. But support and running costs within each country in fact come out of the 90 pence, not the 10 - as we will see if we look at the small print, hidden away at the bottom of page 60 of Oxfam's 2009 Annual Report and Account, long, long after the pretty picture (on page 42) informing readers how the funds were used:

Inevitably, the Soviet government portrayed its invasion as an act of humanitarian intervention initiated at the “request of the [Afghan] government”. (Pravda, April 27, 1980) The aim was “to prevent the establishment of... a terrorist regime and to protect the Afghan people from genocide”, and also to provide “aid in stabilising the situation and the repulsion of possible external aggression”. (Lyahovsky & Zabrodin, p.48)

Quoted in an alert by Media Lens Invasion - a comparison of Soviet and Western media performance

How close we are...

Dear Sarah Montague

In your interview this morning with General Peter van Uhm, he made the following claim:

‘A lot of people ask me that question [was it worth it], but I keep reminding them of the question why we went to Afghanistan. And it was the government of Afghanistan who asked for help. The United Nations supported that, and in the end Nato stepped in with ISAF.’

This is false, or at the very least, highly misleading - as you must be aware. The government of Afghanistan did not invite the United Nations in to ‘help’ until the end of December 2001, by which time the country had already been devastated by nearly 3 months of Nato’s bombing. The initial Nato invasion was not on the government’s invitation – indeed, the Afghan government made an offer to hand Bin Laden over to a 3rd country for trial in order to prevent the bombing, but the US refused to enter into negotiations. Nor was Nato’s action sanctioned by the Security Council – in other words, it was almost certainly in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, and therefore almost certainly illegal.

Why did you not challenge General van Uhm on this issue, or at least attempt to clarify the point? Listeners have been left with a very misleading impression.

I would be very grateful for a response, and will be submitting a formal complaint through the BBC’s complaints page.

Yours [*]

Correspondence with Johann Hari concerning his article about Megrahi...

Dear Johann
You may be interested, if you don't know it already, in Gareth Peirce's analysis of the Megrahi case at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/gareth-peirce/the-framing-of-al-megrahi. I know you mention in your article that 'there are some serious commentators who argue that Megrahi was framed', but it seems fairly clear that you don't go along with that. I'd be interested to know how you feel confident enough to dismiss it - which is effectively what you do by referring to Megrahi as 'a convicted terrorist - the worst in modern British history'. (You also say that 'Megrahi was sent home to Triploli to be greeted by cheering crowds after serving eleven days for each person murdered'.)

I also think that for those few people who still don't acknowledge that Iraq was about oil (and surely they're relatively few by now, aren't they??) I'm not sure that what I understand to be your main argument will be all that convincing. You seem just to be saying that Blair is unscrupulous (which we knew), that he was prepared to trade a convicted terrorist for oil, therefore he must have been prepared to go to war for oil. (A simplification, of course, of your words, but isn't that the essence?). In a way, I think that by linking this single example of Blair's duplicity and self-interest to the Iraq war, you are almost less likely to convince detractors: what is important in the case of Iraq (and indeed Megrahi) is surely the context, including the history of US and British actions in the Middle East, rather than the intentions and actions of one individual.

If one does accept that Megrahi was almost certainly framed, then it seems to me that there are far more important issues than those addressed in your article. These include:

UPDATED

2 months on, and several letters later, the BBC is still determined not to tell us that the Gaza blockade may be a crime against humanity - ie one of these:

Article 7, 1 (k) ... inhumane acts ... intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

It is not a violation of the Geneva Conventions - and definitely couldn't violate this bit:

No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

4th Geneva Convention, Article 33

And it is not a war crime:

Article 8, 2 b xxv: Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions;

Rome Statute

In the BBC's view, the important thing about the siege, the label that deserves official attribution to UN officials is that the siege is grim and deteriorating.

Ah, grim. We grin and bear grim things: they cannot be crimes.

In the name of balance, the BBC is also kind enough to tell us that the blockade has been 'referred to' as collective punishment - widely. What constitutes collective punishment, whether it is regarded as a war crime, how 'widely' it has been referred to as such, and whether the width extends to the UN officials mentioned in the next sentence - we are not told. We are told that Israel says there is no problem.

But though we do not count, we can be sure that Saddam killed more than we did, or would have done had we not killed him first.

A good new report by Landmine Action looks at the attempts of the Bliar government to make sure no-one else's counting of Iraqi deaths was taken seriously. Because we also knew, without counting, that however many deaths we caused, they could not be excessive 'in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated'. That advantage was just too greedily anticipated - too great to be exceeded.

The basic obligations under international humanitarian law as regards civilian casualties in an armed conflict are set out in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions [...] In particular, indiscriminate attacks are prohibited, and this includes any "attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated".

This obligation under international humanitarian law has been fully complied with by the United Kingdom in respect of all military operations in Iraq.
[…]
In many cases it would be impossible to make a reliably accurate assessment either of the civilian casualties resulting from any particular attacks or of the overall civilian casualties of a conflict. This is particularly true in the conditions that exist in Iraq.

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw 17 November, 2004 (Hansard)