Word: labouring
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...Tony Blair submitted to his weekly inquisition by MPs in the House of Commons on Wednesday, his opponents sought to highlight splits opening within Labour ranks as its pols jockey for position in anticipation of the Prime Minister's looming departure. But it was a deeper gulf that yawned as Blair used the occasion to shift Britain's Iraq strategy, announcing a planned reduction in troop levels by 1,500 over the coming months from some 7,100 at present, with the aim of pushing overall numbers below 5,000 by the end of the year. Answering unspoken accusations that...
...breathtaking piece of doublespeak. The bill, among other things, strips workers of their right to vote over unionization and instead mandates a “card check.” In other words, rather than having workers vote in a secret ballot monitored by the neutral National Labour Relations Board, a company would have to recognize a union if a majority of its employees sign a public card saying that they want...
...December, and Japan's top three department stores reported declining sales in the run-up to the country's New Year holiday. While unemployment has declined from 5.4% in 2002 to 4.1% at the end of 2006, wages have gone nowhere. According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the average Japanese made $2,881 a month in 2002. For most of 2006, the average monthly wage was only $2,749. "The statistics say that the economy is in good shape, but people can't feel that," says Heizo Takenaka, the architect of Koizumi's financial reforms...
...been done before. When it became clear there weren't enough women at the top, governments across Europe introduced quotas and other initiatives to boost the numbers. Britain's Labour Party adopted women-only short lists in some constituencies for the 1997 election, and saw the number of women in Parliament double from 60 to 120. Without similar measures to bring more European minorities into power positions, huge swaths of the population will always feel powerless. "I wouldn't underestimate the importance of politics as part of this conversation," says Geoff Mulgan, head of think tank the Young Foundation...
Cleaning up British politics--and getting Labour finances, still in a parlous condition, back on track--will be a problem for the next Prime Minister. Blair's challenge is to seize back control over the manner and timing of his departure. It won't be easy. The investigation trundles on, although detectives appear to have shifted their focus from the original accusations of corruption toward the possibility that some of those questioned may have deceived investigators. (World-weary Washingtonians may now recite that old mantra: "It's never the crime. It's the cover-up.") Blair is determined...