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On Sun, 2008-05-25 at 22:18 +0100, Chris Bell wrote:<BR>
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<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000"> It seems there was a recent ammendment that gives temporary workers with</FONT></TT><BR>
<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">over 12 weeks continuous employment the same rights as permanent staff.</FONT></TT><BR>
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<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000">Temp workers to get equal rights after 12 weeks | The Register</FONT></TT><BR>
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<TT><FONT COLOR="#000000"><A HREF="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/21/uk_agency_workers_government_agreement/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/21/uk_agency_workers_government_agreement/</A></FONT></TT><BR>
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Interesting. Hadn't heard that had been accepted - last I heard was Blair had dismissed it as a possibility few years back. <BR>
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I thought the Govt. had specifically opted out of EU social legislation back in the late 90s (another of Blair's "betrayals" of old labour values... not that I was ever an advocate of the dinobour movement, being a green anarcho-syndicalist at heart really >;). Some things must be EU binding, or its the Brown influence being brought to bear.<BR>
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And what a political tragedy he's turning out to be - somehow manages to make everything he does *seem* to look like a pratfall, when if you actually examine the *real substance* of policy principles and outcomes the Brown inspired elements of the last 11 years have in general been very successful indeed - some of the most successful - probably the most successful - in all of the Anglo-Saxon economic models. Meanwhile the "impossible in the modern globalised corporate world" Scandinavian socio-economic model grows in strength and vigour year on year - just look at the stats in black and white. <BR>
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Someone likened it to the bumblebee - aerodynamically impossible to achieve flight but no one has managed to tell the bumble bees that yet so they just keep on doing it in magisterial disdain of classical economic theory. Only now we know better - whoops our aerodynamic theories were a crock of sh*t and the bees knew better all along how to make things work!! >;><BR>
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Campbell is my local MP. So far all I've heard from the local triumphalist tories is nothing of any material substance and mostly on slinging mud at Brown - and I have a horrid feeling from my experience of pressing them for some beef they don't have anything of material substance to put forward and will by default fall back onto the old nostrums of the 80s, and let (US mostly) corporations rule the land even more completely (and I consider selling out to foreign corporations de facto treason). <BR>
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I notice the green chameleon rhetoric has disappeared. <BR>
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It really seemed that for a moment Campbell may have "got it" about the economic local cycle enhancement and its massive - truly massive! - LOCAL job and small firm foundation growth that would come to pass from a German style shift to microgeneration of electric energy and whatever carbon biomass or liquid fuels we can do without hitting food production too much. Alas looks like he too is giving up on this and will instead give 5000 intinerant labourers jobs for a decade or so building nukes, give a couple of hundred third rate technicians jobs to run them (what first rater would want to simply monitor or grease monkey a power station for the rest of their lives??) and pour 10 times as much billions of quid into the coffers of US and French energy consortiums than the microgeneration network would cost to give the same number of watts and employ hundreds of thousands of Britons. <BR>
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Have they been convinced that microgen can't deliver (in which case someone had better tell the Germans - and when it comes to tech policy who do YOU trust - the British Oxbridge Arts Tripos civil service advisors, or the Doctors of Engineering who advise the German government ... and who's track record would you cite?).<BR>
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So if not convinced technically - WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN THREATENED WITH BY THE CORPORATIONS if they don't accede to letting them steal the taxpayers money and send it abroad for the corporate shareholders benefit rather than spreading the money over all of the British people and hundreds of thousands of forever lasting jobs that can't be shifted overseas, but are an essential element of indigenous economic resource supply and the "endogenous growth theory" Brown was so (unfairly by people utterly ignorant of what was meant by endogenous economic cyclicals) lampooned for back in '97 & '98?<BR>
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Sounds like Microsoft all over again to me. Only more expensive and on biosphere corrupting scale. <BR>
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Sorry I'm stoned out of my skull on opiates and rambling even further off topic than usual this evening - bad weather brought a nasty bad hit of autoimmune illness - and slipping back into my "other role" as local economic development and environmental economist and technology policy wonk...in the mists of time...
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