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Czech Republic Interior Minister Vit Rakusan says that the country has taken in over a half a million Czech refugees without overburdening or crashing our health and education systems. 100,000 have jobs in the labor market using admission mechanisms for this purpose and 50,000 children are in Czech schools. This puts the country at the forefront in taking in Ukraine refugees and integrating them in relation to its population.

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Hyundai's labor union is opposing the night shift for plant workers and says the promise by the company made earlier to end the night shift has not been kept.

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Keir Starmer of Britain joins president Joe Biden as two leaders pursuing similar goals to rebuild their countries after the pandemic, and tackle climate change, and build infrastructure and public services. Labour and FDR inspired Biden Democrats have much in common.

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What is the Winter Fuel Payment in the UK? The Independent provides some answers. It was introduced in 1997 by a Labour government in Britain. It now provides 200 pounds to people over age 66, and 300 pounds to people over age 80. To get this payment pensioners and retired people have to be eligible for pension credits. This is possible if your income level is - Income at £11,343.8 a year if single, or a shared income of £17,313.4 for two or a couple is what qualifies one for this winter fuel allowance. The British energy authority says winter fuel costs will rise by about 300 pounds. This means a 500 pound hit to budgets of pensioners who are not eligible for winter fuel allowance under the Labour plan. The Labour plan is to do this because of the hole in public finances left by the Tories of 22 billion pounds. Starmer and Reeves say this is needed and the responsible decision. One million pensioners face a loss of Winter Fuel allowance and Age UK says: “Older people in this group often tell us they really struggle financially; the proposed change will make it even harder for them to afford to stay warm when it gets chilly. ...

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The full report on the BBC's future funding by a committee of the UK parliament on the 100th birthday of the BBC in November 2022. The universal license fee is being abolished in many European countries. It generates 5 billion pounds that meet 75% of the cost of the BBC. Giving open access to all as done by BBC and Manchester Guardian is still a viable and necessary model in a democracy such as ours. Yet the increasing costs for poorer households can be offset with other ways of limiting the cost for the households at lower incomes. The other hurdle for BBC is to increase its viewers beyond the 60 plus years older viewers as the choice is now wide and prolific in channels and apps. Under Conservatives BBC was getting less support. With Labour the BBC gets a new opportunity to revive its programming and fulfilling its vital function of serving the people of Britain and English speaking countries around the world.

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Improvements in birth rate and more immigrants in Germany are making the demographic picture look better in Germany. About 13 million people are expected to reach retirement age in just a few years, according to Prof Enzo Weber, Institute of Employment Research. This means 13 million new pensioners. Birthrate today is about 1.4 children per woman. At this level of birthrate and even a low rate of immigration of 100,000 per year Germany's population of 83 million today would decline over time. Between 1990 and 2008 more people left Germany than came in with a net outflow. Some level of immigration would be the only way to keep the level of people in the workforce of 43 million today to become stable in the future. This would be needed to support the increasing number of pensioners. Yet the general aging of the population is expected to continue. And a high level of immigration in too short a time such as from the Syrian refugee crisis creates other tensions in the social fabric of society. Germany's very homogenous society faces a challenge that goes beyond the politics of the refugee crisis of today. Too many immigrants in too short a time is not the solution, immigration has become too politicized in today's context, good and early integration of immigrants through language and culture training needs to be established. Prof. Weber points out that the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe has helped the labor market, and there is no reason that the labor market could not dry up with the number of people retiring soon. Tackling that will involve making family and career life choices easier and enabling flexible work-life choices, increasing retirement age, and some level of healthy immigration. A demographic summit will be held on March 16th in Berlin to look at the problem. ...

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Britain's prime minister Cameron faces the prospect of a split in the right wing vote between the Conservatives and the UKIP party. This will increase the prospects of the Labor Party in the 2016 election. The economy is recovering but working class people say they are not seeing the benefits.

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The platform sector of workforce is now an accepted part of the Chinese economy. Le Monde looks at actual cases of workers and their families and why they end up choosing platform work with Didi as drivers, or as home delivery workers for other companies. 84 million platform workers 1 in 5 workers in China in 2025, and 420000 civil cases filed in Courts in China over period 2020-2024 for excessive hours, safety, injury and lack of social insurance. Workers send money home to rural areas and work upto 90 hours a week to make about $1 per delivery in China and strive to make about $1220 a month with excessive hours and little in benefits. This sector acts as a backup to absorb labour when companies close such as the bankruptcy of big property construction companies such as Evergrande. In 2024 the government set rules to regulate abuses in this sector. As China shifts from dependence on construction, and as exports to the US face resistance and tariffs, laid off sorkers end up in this sector with few benefits. The government regulates it to reduce social tensions. ...

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The U.S. Labor Dept. reported that nonfarm payrolls increased by 243,000 in January 2011. Of this number the private sector made 257,000 job additions and the government sector suffered job losses of 14,000. The professional-business-services industry added 70,000 jobs, including an increase in temporary workers. Manufacturing employment went up by 50,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped by two tenths of a percentage point to 8.3%. Another measure of unemployment the U-6 rate which includes job seekers and those in part time jobs went down by one percentage point to 15.1%. The U-6 reached a high of 17.1% in Sept. 2010.

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Labor conditions in Chinese factories that supply Walmart, Disney, Dell and other companies and in China's manufacturing in general.

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Greg Ip and other experts say the US economy is different today because nothing like the collapse of supply chains and the pandemic leading to shortage of workers has happened in the last 50 years. One has to go back to 1947 in the postwar period to see how the nation adjusted between supply of labor after World War II and supply of goods, to understand today's economy, says Greg Ip in the WSJ.

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The union representing 75000 nurses and pharmacists and other workers in California reached a settlement after a 3 day strike. Julie Shu, acting Labor secretary participated in the negotiations. Kaiser Permanente has 40 hospitals, medical offices and 213,000 employees other than doctors, serving 12.7 million people on the West Coast of the US. A sticking point was outsourcing. It is the largest strike of healthcare workers in the US for wages and benefits.

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Nocera says the National Labor Relations Board and the Obama Administration's action to prevent Boeing from using a North Carolina non-union assembly plant for the Dreamliner is a clear case of regulatory "overreach. Precisely the kind that is not needed as the U.S. focusses on creating jobs and building manufactuing industry. There is no "retaliation" against the union in this case because Boeing is facing long delays and needs the additional facility to meet orders. The action of the NLRB as a government agency to prevent a company from locating its plants anywhere in the country- when Boeing has added jobs in Washington state as it expands- is incomprehensible.

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The former CEO of GE (General Electric) says why he is skeptical about the decline in the unemployment rate to 7.8% as shown by the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He says the economy has to have grown at breakneck speed for unemployent to drop from 8.3% to 7.8% in 2 months. The dozen companies he is working with are seeing third quarter 2012 results worse than the second quarter. The labor force participation rate declined to 63.5%, the lowest since Sept 1981- fewer people looking for work accounts for the drop from 8.3% in July to 8.1% in August 2012. Other numbers that look implausible are the BLS figures of federal state and local governments adding 602,000 workers to their payrolls in Aug and Sept 2012, the largest 2 month increase in 20 years. And the BLS figure of overall 873,000 workers being added in Sept. 2012, the largest one month increase since 1983. All this he calls implausible. Part of the problem is the way the data is collected because someone who for example says he got a job baby sitting for from anywhere in the range of 1 to 34 hours is a parttime worker, so that working 1-2 hours would be counted as employed parttime in the BLS methodology....

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The gaps between myth and reality of the Conservatives continues to grow says this view from Labour expressed in The Guardian. With the chaos in the Conservatives and three prime ministers out in a short period- first with Brexit, then with the factions supporting and against Boris Johnson who led the fight to take Britain out of the European Union, the promises made to the North of England that led to Johnson's win in the election are falling by the wayside. There is no real progress in levelling up wealth and development gaps between regions in Britain, the commitment to tackling climate change is wavering and inconsistent when the rest of Europe and the US is moving forward with clear intent and funding, and the effort to tackle the cost of living crisis lacks conviction and plan changing by the day.     

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The new tiered system of tighter restrictions passed in the British parliament 291 to 78 with 51 Tory rebels voting against and 10 Tories abstaining. Labour abstained from the vote getting it to pass. Tory rebels are voting with their constituents in Tory seats in parliament that have lower rate from coronavirus and see the restrictions hurting the lives of people in their areas. The prime minister had to make a special plea to them to get it passed including promising to review in granular detail these areas which needed lifting restrictions because of low infection rates.

Other steps the government is taking are to seek emergency approval of vaccines with the first approval done for Pfizer vaccine. This means Britain will be the first country to start vaccinations in 24-48 hours- December 3 or December 4.

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King's Speech key remarks from Keir Starmer of Labour-

Starmer: we must “turn the page on an era of politics as noisy performance and return it to public service and start the work of rebuilding our country”.

My administration is already “finding new and unexpected marks of their chaos – scars of the past 14 years, where politics was put above the national interest, and decline deep in the marrow of our institutions”.

 At the heart of his plans are lasting transformation and "taking the brakes off for growth of the British economy."

“The era of politics as performance and self-interest above service is over. The challenges we face require determined, patient work and serious solutions, rather than the temptation of the easy answer.”

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Labor in the U.S. stood firm in its opposition to bills in Congress granting fast track trade authority and promoting the TPP trade agreement. The bill failed to clear the House of Representatives as labor unions lobbied hard against the legislation. For the first time public sector unions of teachers, firefighters, and other service workers actively worked with industrial labor unions. This is a result of a realization in labor unions that the decline of communities with the closing of plants reduces the demand for public sector workers, and reduces the revenues of cities leading to cuts in services for firefighters, teachers. The low wages in manufacturing with globalization, also reduces the support of factory workers for higher wages for teachers, firefighters and other public sector workers. Also adding to support for workers is the realization that the investment in infrastructure is now a higher priority, as experts say most of the gains in trade are already behind us. A general feeling that the decline in U.S. manufacturing is not good for the country, the difficulty of competing with countries which do not enforce rules for fair practice and treatment of workers, and a general sense that the lowering of wages in manufacturing is both hurting the middle class and increasing inequality, also have created support in the media....

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An inquiry about misuse of funds at Spain's largest trade union, the U.G.T. The regional head for Andalusia of the U.G.T. resigns after a criminal investigation into misuse of 1.8 million euros.

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Local elections for 181 local councils in Britain in April 2012 show the toll taken on the Conservative party led coalition government of David Cameron from austerity measures and general dissatisfaction with the government. The Conservative party Mayor of London won the election in London over Labor's Ken Livingstone, with a slim majority, largely determined on personality issues. Throughout Britain the Conservatives lost seats in local government. BBC projections with most of the votes counted show Conservative share of the vote dropping from 35% to 31%, Labor moving up from 35% to 38%, and the Liberals remaining at 16%. Labor gained 823 seats, Conservatives lost 405 seats, and Liberal Democrats lost 336 seats. Voter indifference was shown in the voter turnout at 32%, the lowest since 2000, according to the BBC. Cameron said he would continue with his austerity program and cuts in spending, saying "these are difficult times, and there aren't easy answers."

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Justin Lahart of the WSJ says the positive news from the May unemployment report comes as a complete surprise. No one expected the addition of 2.5 million jobs, and the reduction of the unemployment rate from 14.7% to 13.3% for May, as reported by the Labor Department. Lahart says that even though the response rate for the Labor Department survey measuring the jobless rate had only 67%- instead of the usual 82%- it is broadly reliable. About half of the jobs bounceback comes from the leisure and hospitality industry. Some of this from the creative ways restaurants responded by doing an active takeout business and bringing in some of the workers.  Other businesses also responded in creative ways to keep running. As long as the reopening of the economy can be done safely, more people can be back to work. The significant relief from the government for small business could also help these businesses weather the crisis. The Global Vaccine Summit recently opened provided more positive news. Plans are underway for India's Serum Institute to produce 400 million doses of the Oxford vaccine by December, providing more hope for recovery. ...