The median pay of a chief executive of a FTSE-100 firm – the UK’s blue-chip company index – was £2.69m in 2020, according to the High Pay Centre.

The research also showed that the average chief executive earnings at the nine FTSE-100 companies that used the furlough scheme to pay their employees was £2.39m.

The bosses of Britain’s biggest companies earned 86 times the average full-time wage last year.

The think tank’s research revealed average bonus size was £828,000 last year.

Meanwhile, the average long term incentive plan payment was £1.38m.

 High Pay Centre director Luke Hildyard, explained,  UK’s high chief executive pay reflected a wider gap between rich and poor in Britain than in most other European countries.

Pascal Soriot of drugs giant AstraZeneca was the highest-earning chief executive, making £15.45m last year.

Brian Cassin of credit reference agency Experian made £10.3m.

Albert Manifold of building materials company CRH received £9.92m.

Laxman Narasimhan of consumer goods firm Reckitt Benckiser was fourth with £9.24m

 Rob Perrins of housebuilder Berkeley, made £8.03m.

FTSE bosses earn 86 times more than average worker in 2020 – BBC News

The Masque of Procrustes

(An Afghan Tragedy)

A ghastly vision in myopic minds,

Procrustean rule imposed to excuse

Violence perpetrated on all who refuse

To submit. Pity the free thinker who finds

Reason being utterly discounted

Or worse, becoming a capital crime.

Governance by shibboleth finds its time,

With terror of superstition mounted.

Doubtless, the common weal will be retarded

By whoever wields the Kalashnikov,

Ballots of bullets see opponents off,

While boundaries are strictly drawn and guarded.

As tyranny’s victory is being won,

Capital wonders, what deals can be done?

D. A.

 The U.S.A will begin administering coronavirus vaccine boosters next month.  Beginning September 20, “all Americans” who received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine will be offered a booster starting eight months after their second dose.

WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus condemned wealthy countries for pursuing “narrow nationalistic goals when we live in an interconnected world and the virus is mutating quickly.”

He explained, “The divide between the haves and have-nots will only grow larger if manufacturers and leaders prioritize booster shots over supply to low- and middle-income countries,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, without specifically mentioning the U.S. “In fact, strong national leadership would be to fully commit to vaccine equity and global solidarity, which would save lives and slow variants down.”

Tedros added “Vaccine injustice is a shame on all humanity.”

Dr. Mike Ryan, director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, argued Wednesday that rich nations administering booster shots is akin to “planning to hand out extra life jackets to people who already have life jackets and leaving other people to drown without a life jacket. That’s the ethical reality.” 

 Matthew Kavanagh, a professor of global health at Georgetown University, pointed out, ” Imagining that a booster shot will protect us from a pandemic that continues to rage around the world is more theater than public health. Ending the pandemic is far better medicine than an individual booster.”

Madhu Pai, a Canada research chair in epidemiology and global health at McGill University in Montreal, echoed that argument, tweeting, “The ‘race to stop the Delta variant’ cannot be won by giving repeated boosters to already vaccinated people in a few rich nations. The race will be won when all people in the world have access to vaccines.”

1.3% of people in low-income countries have received at least one vaccine dose, meaning billions of people remain vulnerable to the highly contagious Delta variant and other mutations. Africa, Southeast Asia, and other regions of the world are currently facing alarming surges in coronavirus cases and deaths as they struggle to obtain access to vaccines due to supply shortages.

Due to the massive global Covid-19 vaccine shortage, less than 4% of people on the African continent and just 30% of people across Asia have obtained at least one dose of a vaccine.

In an editorial, the authorative journal Nature endorsed the WHO’s call for a temporary moratorium on booster shots, arguing that “the case for boosters has not yet been proved.”

“In a period of vaccine scarcity, the choice to dole out boosters must be guided by evidence of benefit, and consideration given to the cost of delaying the delivery of vaccines to vulnerable people and health-care workers in other countries,” the editorial reads. “So far, there is little evidence that boosters are needed to protect the fully vaccinated.”

“If vaccines were not scarce, boosters would be less controversial,” the editorial continued. “But to focus on boosters when more than half the world lacks vaccine doses is short-sighted and will only keep the pandemic burning longer. For wealthy countries, this strategy means they will be indefinitely chasing their tails in terms of new variants. And for the rest of the world, it means prolonging unnecessary suffering.”

WHO Decries Vaccine Inequity as a ‘Shame on All Humanity’ as US Moves Ahead With Boosters | Common Dreams News

 As politicians exchange recriminations about the chaos caused by the US withdrawal there is another story not being highlighted in the media. 

U.N. agencies warned of an impending humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan as tens of thousands of people flee from their homes amid spreading hunger.

“We fear the worst is yet to come and the larger tide of hunger is fast approaching… The situation has all the hallmarks of a humanitarian catastrophe,” the World Food Programme’s Thomson Phiri explained.

More than 250,000 people have been forced from their homes since May, 80 percent of them women and children, the U.N. refugee agency’s Shabia Mantoo said. 

Other UN officials reported even more dire data.

The U.N. resident coordinator in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov,  told The Associated Press on Monday that the recent fighting had displaced some 600,000 people, and that because of the fluidity of the situation, humanitarian teams are not able to help everywhere.

“They are sleeping in the open, in parks and public spaces,” Jens Laerke, spokesman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “A major concern right now is simply finding shelter for them.”

A World Health Organization official expressed concerns about shortages of medical supplies.

Afghanistan on brink of ‘humanitarian catastrophe’: U.N. (trust.org)

Thousands of garment workers in Los Angeles, USA,  who make pants, shirts, blouses and other clothing for a variety of well-known fashion labels are paid less than minimum wage through a piece-rate payment system that compensates workers just a few cents per article of clothing. The majority of the more than 46,000 workers in the Los Angeles garment industry are undocumented immigrant women from Latin America and Asia who work long hours for very low wages with few or no breaks 

They typically work from 7am to 6pm Monday through Friday, and an additional five hours on Saturday – about 60 hours a week with no overtime pay, which results in overall wages at $5 an hour or less, far below California’s statewide minimum wage of $14 an hour for companies with more than 26 employees.

“We work non-stop. We don’t take any breaks, but make anywhere from $250 to $300 per week,” said one worker.

“It’s very sad to live off of a salary that is $250 to $300 a week. It’s not enough to survive on. I have a mom, dad, and daughters in Guatemala, and I’m here paying rent with these wages. I can’t afford shoes or choose to move anywhere else,” the worker added.

A second garment factory worker explained that workers have to spend their brief meal breaks eating in a kitchen infested with rats and cockroaches, and when workers get injured they are expected to take care of themselves.

“Something that happens very commonly is the sewing needle will actually break through and impale one of your fingers, and many factories don’t even have a first aid kit,” said the worker.

“There’s not even a Band-Aid for you, so it’s up to you to pull the needle out of your finger. And there’s no health insurance for us. It’s really up to us to fix ourselves.”

During the pandemic, factories in the garment industry continued operating without enforcing Covid safety protocols, moving sewing machines into a windowless basement to hide production from regulatory authorities.

One factory – operated by Los Angeles Apparel – was ordered to shut down in July last year after a Covid-19 outbreak among workers resulted in more than 300 positive cases and the deaths of four workers.  During the pandemic, many workers were laid off and not recalled to work until they were vaccinated several months ago, but because they are undocumented, they received no unemployment or stimulus benefits while out of work.

Though most clothing brands rely on outsourced garment workers abroad, part of the market is based in Los Angeles, so brands can quickly turn around immediate orders and tout their clothing as “Made in America”.

In 2016, the US Department of Labor conducted an investigation of the garment industry in Los Angeles, finding labor violations in 85% of the 77 factories randomly inspected during the investigation. More than 80% of garment workers in Los Angeles have experienced wage theft. 

Ayesha Barenblat, chief and founder of the nonprofit ethical fashion advocacy group Remake said: “Because the fashion industry has long pandered and catered to fast fashion and discount brands, one of the focuses of the industry has been to keep prices really low. And that means … that manufacturing employers find ways to reduce the take-home pay of garment workers…The rock bottom prices brands pay result in factories cutting corners and essentially passing on all the risk to workers in terms of wages,” Barenblat said.

 Elizabeth Cline, advocacy and policy director at Remake and author of Overdressed and The Conscious Closet, explained that big brands at the top of clothing supply chains have hundreds of manufacturing factories competing for attention through a race to the bottom for who can offer the lowest prices.

“It’s concentrated brand power combined with the lack of any sort of real accountability for workers’ rights, and it just keeps driving wages down in factories and causing these sweatshop conditions.” She added, “In a $2.5tn global industry that is the most profitable sector in retail, don’t tell me that brands can’t afford to be more accountable to the people in their supply chain.”

‘We work non-stop’: LA garment workers toil for top brands and earn paltry rate | Los Angeles | The Guardian

 New audio uploads for SUMMER SCHOOL 2021 – AFTER THE REVOLUTION: Life in a Socialist World held at Fircroft College, Birmingham, 6th-8th August 2021.

01 ‘Socialist Recipes’, Richard Field, 6th August 2021

02 ‘New News From Nowhere’, Glenn Morris, 7th August 2021

03 ‘Do Utopias and Works Of Sci-Fi Offer Appealing Visions of a Socialist World?’, Leon Rozanov, 7th August 2021

04 ‘Socialist Decision Making and the Rule Of Three’, Paddy Shannon, 8th August 2021

 Millions of Johnson & Johnson vaccines produced at its Aspen factory in South Africa will be exported to Europe, at the very time that Africa is grappling with its deadliest wave of Covid-19 infections yet.

Africa needs vaccines immediately. 

South Africa is still waiting to receive the overwhelming majority of the 31 million vaccine doses it ordered from Johnson & Johnson. It has administered only about two million Johnson & Johnson shots. That is a key reason that fewer than 7 percent of South Africans are fully vaccinated.

Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson has been exporting millions of doses that were bottled and packaged in South Africa for distribution in Europe, according to executives at Johnson & Johnson and the South African manufacturer, Aspen Pharmacare, as well as South African government export records.

Many Western countries have kept domestically manufactured doses for themselves. That wasn’t possible in South Africa because of an unusual stipulation in the contract the government signed this year with Johnson & Johnson. The confidential contract, examined by The New York Times, required South Africa to waive its right to impose export restrictions on vaccine doses.

Popo Maja, a spokesman for the South African health ministry, said, “The government was not given any choice. Sign contract or no vaccine.”

Critics say the shortfall in South Africa partly reflects a power imbalance between a giant company and a desperate country.

“The disproportionate amount of power that Johnson & Johnson has exercised is really concerning,” said Fatima Hassan, a human rights lawyer in South Africa. “It is harming our efforts to get speedy supplies into the system.”

Johnson & Johnson had always planned for some vaccines produced by Aspen to leave Africa, but it has never disclosed how many doses it was actually exporting. The export records show that Johnson & Johnson shipped 32 million doses in recent months, although that does not capture the full number that has left South Africa.

Glenda Gray, a South African scientist who helped lead Johnson & Johnson’s clinical trial there, said companies needed to prioritize sending doses to poorer countries that were involved in their production. “It’s like a country is making food for the world and sees its food being shipped off to high-resource settings while its citizens starve,” she said.

Covid Vaccines Produced in Africa Are Being Exported to Europe – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 Covid working from home has caused an “epidemic of hidden overtime” and it is particularly affecting women, according to a report from Autonomy thinktank.

 Unpaid labour is a growing problem at a time of increased home working, with women at a greater risk of negative health impacts and mental distress. The study found that women are 43% more likely to have increased their hours beyond a standard working week than men, and for those with children this was even more clearly associated with mental distress.

 The report proposes legislation that would create a “right to disconnect”, based on French law, which stipulates employees do not have to take calls or read emails related to work during their time off. It proposes an employer should “not require a worker employed by him to monitor or respond to any work-related communications, or to carry out any work, outside the worker’s agreed working hours” or subject the worker to any detriment for failing to do so. There would be proposed exemptions for industries where that is not feasible and where the employer has made all reasonable steps to minimise working outside agreed hours.

Will Stronge, the director of research at Autonomy, said the Covid pandemic has “accelerated the need to create much clearer boundaries between work-life and home-life”.

UK workers need right to disconnect amid ‘overtime epidemic’, says report | Working from home | The Guardian

  A Spanish power company drained two reservoirs during a heatwave and drought in order to profit from exceptionally high electricity prices.

Both reservoirs are now a desert, according to Javier Aguado, the mayor of San Cebrián de Castro. In another, San Pedro de la Nave-Almendra, the water level is so low the pumps that extract drinking water have become clogged with mud and the filters have to be cleaned twice a day.

Iberdrola, the country’s second-biggest producer, drained the dams in Zamora and Cáceres provinces in western Spain over a period of a few weeks to produce cheap hydroelectricity while the price to consumers is at a record high.

Electricity prices in Spain are fixed on a daily basis through what is effectively an auction as power generators bid for their slice of the market based on expected demand. A base price is set by the cost of nuclear power and renewables such as wind and solar because they are the cheapest, and then the rest – hydro and fossil fuel generators – make their bid. The net effect is that the higher the demand, the higher the price, with fluctuations making it almost impossible for consumers to budget for their electricity bills.

 Spain remains in the grip of a heatwave and recorded its highest ever temperature on Saturday, 47.2C (117F), in Córdoba in Andalucía. Air conditioners and fans are running flat out. With the heatwave expected to continue for several more days, most of the country faces temperatures ranging from 30 to 44 degrees.

The minister for ecological transition, Teresa Ribera, described Iberdrola’s actions as scandalous and said, “Water is a scarce resource which is just as important for the wellbeing of families and the economy as it is for generating electricity.” Ribera said Iberdrola’s actions as irresponsible, but that they were not illegal because the company was allowed to use a fixed quantity of water a year whenever it wished and regardless of climatic conditions.

Spain launches inquiry after dams drained for profit during drought | Spain | The Guardian

 Fewer than a quarter of UK companies struggling to hire staff after the easing of pandemic restrictions intend to increase the wages they offer to lure new recruits, according to a report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

When employers with hard-to-fill vacancies, which are most common in sectors such as hospitality and healthcare, were asked how they would deal with the gaps, however, as few as 23% said they would raise wages. 

The CIPD’s survey indicated that employers’ pay intentions were little different from pre-pandemic plans.  It showed the median employers’ expectation of basic pay settlements remained at the 2%reached last quarter, after four consecutive quarters at 1%.

 81% of employers planned a pay review between now and June 2022. Among them, 33% expected a pay increase, 12% a freeze and 1% a decrease. Thirty-seven per cent said it was “hard to tell” and 17% that they did not know.

Few UK firms facing staff shortages plan to raise pay, survey finds | Work & careers | The Guardian