Journal articles on the topic 'Great Britain. Wages Inspectorate'

The causes of the United States’ exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India. American industrialization in the nineteenth century required tariff protection since the country's comparative advantage lay in agriculture. After 1895 surging American productivity shifted the country's comparative advantage to manufacturing. Egypt and India could not have industrialized by following American policies since their wages were so low and their energy costs so high that the modern technology that was cost effective in Britain and the United States would not have paid in their circumstances.

The article examines the approaches to improving the skills of primary school teachers in the UK. Criteria for upgrading and retraining UK teaching staff are highlighted. Teacher training courses are held at different educational institutions: at institutes of pedagogy of higher educational institutions, with independent advisory groups, with the Department of Education and Science, at teacher centers, with local educational authorities, at school. Short-term advanced training courses are divided into: one-day; three days; five to six day courses; vacation courses. Long-term courses include three-year advanced training courses. During the courses of advanced training teachers are engaged in research activities under the direction of university tutors. The main advisory and analytical body for teacher qualifications is the Royal Inspection Service. It has a widespread network across the country, comprised of local education departments. The inspectorate service is intended, based on the analysis of the quality of educational programs, to identify trends in the development of the system of advanced training, to predict the effects of planned projects, and to prepare recommendations for the Ministry of Education and Science to determine the most relevant and forward looking directions for improving the system of professional standards for teachers. The teacher education system serves a prominent system of public education. Understanding the need for organizing mass retraining of teachers in Britain has been growing in pedagogical circles since the last century, when intensive primary education was developing. Since then and to this day, discussions about the most rational ways of updating the teacher education system are not dying. The main advisory and analytical body for teacher qualifications is the Royal Inspection Service. It has a widespread network across the country, comprised of local education departments. Both local and national authorities of this service are actively involved in the analysis and evaluation of the effectiveness of all work aimed at supporting and developing the professional skills of school teachers. The inspectorate service is intended, based on the analysis of the quality of educational programs, to identify trends in the development of the system of advanced training, to predict the effects of planned projects, and to prepare recommendations for the Ministry of Education and Science to determine the most relevant and forward looking directions for improving the system of professional standards for teachers.

Great Britain and France have experienced a dramatic resurgence of light rail in the past two decades. Beginning in the early 1980s, following a 30-year abandonment of street railways in favor of motorbuses, cities in both countries developed new light rail transit systems as a response to declining transit ridership, faded downtowns in need of revitalization, and the high construction costs of heavy rail and metro. Britain and France have pursued greatly different approaches to the implementation of light rail. The purpose of this paper is to point out these differences and, through the use of case studies, draw conclusions as to the efficacy of each approach. A few cities in each country were studied with secondary sources. Commonality within each country was observed with great divergence between the two countries. In Britain, the requirements for light rail are onerous: a specific act of Parliament is needed for each new start. Each system must achieve full recovery of operating and maintenance costs and contribute toward capital investment while competing against unregulated buses. That some British systems have been built and successfully attract traffic is to the credit of their proponents. France has a more uniform approach published in government circulars. All French cities of substantial size must have a “versement transportes,” a 1% to 2% tax on salaries and wages dedicated to regulated and coordinated public transport. French new starts, which have no need to attain 100% cost recovery (the versement transportes covers operating losses), have been implemented in about half the time of those in Britain.

A major objective of the government during the Great Recession has been severely to restrict public sector real wage growth. One potential advantage of performance-related pay schemes is that they naturally offer greater wage responsiveness to fluctuations in the business cycle. Based on evidence from engineering and allied industries during the Great Depression we show that piecework wages exhibited more flexibility than their timework equivalents. We compare and contrast southern/midland engineering districts of Britain with northern districts. The former region was dominated by piece-rated workers and by modern sections of the industry, such as vehicle and aircraft manufacture. Time-rated work predominated in northern districts where older sections – for example, marine and textile engineering – were clustered‥

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a human resource management perspective of the workforce adjustment strategies implemented at workplaces in Britain in response to the Great Recession. Design/methodology/approach The analysis uses an ordered probit and a series of binomial probits to examine a micro data set from the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study. Findings Not all workplaces were affected equally by the recession. Not all workplaces chose to implement workforce adjustment strategies consequential of the recession, although the probability of a workplace taking no action decreased the greater the adverse effect of the recession on the workplace. Most workplaces used a combination of workforce adjustment strategies. Workplaces implemented strategies more compatible with labour hoarding than labour shedding, i.e., cutting/freezing wages and halting recruitment to fill vacant posts rather than making employees redundant. Research limitations/implications What was examined was the incidence of the workforce adjustment strategies, not the number of employees affected by the implementation of a strategy. Further, what was examined were outcomes. What is not known are the processes by which these outcomes were arrived at. Originality/value This paper concurs with the findings of previous economic studies that workplaces hoarded labour, cut hours and lowered pay. In so doing, however, it provides a more detailed and more informed human resource management perspective of these adjustment strategies.

Exploring issues of the family wage, this paper examines labour markets, family employment patterns and political conflict in France. Up to now, the debate over the family wage has centred mainly on analysing British trade unions and the development of an ideal of domesticity among the British working classes, more or less taking for granted the declining women's labour force participation rate and the configuration of state/trade union relations prevailing in Great Britain. Shifting the debate across the Channel, scholars such as Laura Frader and Susan Pedersen have suggested that different attitudes to the family wage prevailed. In France, demands for the exclusion of women from industry were extremely rare because women's participation in industry was taken for granted. But a gendered division of labour and ideals of domesticity remained and made themselves felt in both workforce and labour movement.

This article constructs new measures of worktime for Europe, North America, and Australia, 1870–1913. Great Britain began with the shortest work year and Belgium the longest. By 1913 certain continental countries approached British worktimes, and, consistent with recent findings on real wages, annual hours in Old and New Worlds had converged. Although globalization did not lead to a race to the bottom of worktimes, there is only partial evidence of a race to the top. National work routines, the outcome of different legal, labor, and political histories, mediated relations between hours and income.

Using the 1888 Cost of Living Survey, I estimate the demand for calories of American and British industrial workers. I find that the income and expenditure elasticities of calories for American households are significantly lower than the corresponding elasticities for British households, suggesting that American industrial workers were nutritionally better off than their British counterparts. I further find that the calorie elasticity differential between the two countries was driven by the higher wages enjoyed in the United States. Additional analysis reveals that the relative price of calories was approximately 20 percent greater in Great Britain than in the United States.

Abstract While the problem of political corruption in mid-nineteenth century Britain has been much studied, the experience of corrupt behaviour in public bodies, both new and long established, is comparatively neglected. This article takes the example of one of the first inspectorates set up after the Great Reform Act, the Factory Office, to examine the extent of corrupt practices in the British civic state and the means whereby it was addressed. It examines the changing processes of appointment, discipline and promotion, the issues of remuneration and venality, and the relationships between inspectors, workers, factory owners, the government and the wider civil service, and the press and public opinion. The article argues that the changing attitudes of the inspectors, especially those of Leonard Horner, were indicative of a developing ‘public service ethos’ in both bureaucratic and cultural settings and that the work of such unsung administrators was one of the agencies through which corrupt behaviour in the civic structures of Victorian Britain was, with public support, challenged. The article concludes that the endogenous reform of bureaucratic practice achieved by the factory inspectorate may even be of equal significance as that which resulted from the celebrated Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854.

AbstractLabour emigrants in the nineteenth century had ever-increasing access to a global employment market. Many of those who left Great Britain looked beyond Europe, to the British Empire and the United States. They took advantage of improvements in transportation, and followed a wide variety of occupations. Decisions to emigrate were often shaped by their involvement in trade unions and were based on concerns about living standards and working conditions. This study considers a selection of globetrotting British settlers and sojourners who went to Canada, the United States and Australia between 1815 and the 1880s. The article analyses the historiography of labour migration; carries out an empirical study constructed around four pieces of analytical scaffolding; and closes by identifying recurring threads in the multi-hued tapestry of labour emigration, highlighting how concerns and traditions about recruitment, wages and working conditions, which had emerged in the nineteenth century, created legacies that persisted into the period after the First World War.

The article examines the key socio-economic aspects of the migration crisis and highlights the main causes of mass migration to the European Union from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The main characteristic of the economic situation in these countries is given and the significant problems faced by the donor States of migrants in the last few years are studied. Among the problems highlighted: high population growth rates, pressure on the environment by residents of Africa and the Middle East, limited access to resources, food and fresh water; the problem of unemployment; the problem of poverty and social inequality; high competition in the labor market; low salaries; difficult economic situation and problems in the financial sector. It is noted that these problem were the main cause of mass migration to Europe. Based on a detailed study of official statistics, special attention is paid to the level of unemployment and poverty, GDP level, the population growth rate, as well as the level of wages in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. These indicators are compared to indicators in the countries of Eastern Europe. Their analysis shows that the standards of living in these regions is below average, that is why residents are forced to leave these countries for the European Union in search of a better life for themselves and their relatives. Among the countries that are of the greatest interest to migrants are: Germany, Great Britain, Ireland and so on.

Plants are essential for supporting human life, providing food, oxygen and medicine as well as benefits to health from interacting with nature. Plants also play a crucial role in ecosystems and in mitigating the effects of climate change. The importance of plants to humans and to the environment is gaining a higher level of attention in today's political and social landscape. The Great Britain Plant Health and Biosecurity Strategy will be updated this year to reflect upcoming challenges for maintaining high biosecurity standards while the Tree Health Resilience Strategy protects our trees going forward, allowing for adaption to environmental change and building resilience to future threats. Additionally, 2020 is the FAO's International Year of Plant Health providing a unique opportunity to raise the profile of plant heath further on a global scale. Critical to biosecurity is the global trade in plants and plant commodities which may offer us the option to grow plants that are more suited to a future, warmer climate and thus more resilient to climate change, but which brings with it an increased risk of invasive pests and diseases. It is important that we protect our native species and minimise the risks of introducing new pests and diseases. The UK's plant health regime aims to manage that risk to protect the value of plants and trees, both as crops and forestry products, as well as ecosystem services and societal benefits. The UK is a net importer of plants and plant commodities and it is the role of the Plant Health and Seeds Inspectorate (PHSI) and the Forestry Commission (FC) to carry out checks on imported material. Given that there are over 1,000 pests on the UK Plant Health Risk Register the challenge cannot be understated. It is unrealistic to expect that we can provide effective protection from all pests and diseases so potentially serious pests which are identified by the UK Plant Health Risk Group are subject to a detailed pest risk analysis (PRA) following internationally agreed methodologies. Import inspections are risk-based and use the outcomes of the PRA as the basis for focusing resource to the highest threats. The experimental statistics released by Defra in March 2020 'Plant Health – international trade and controlled consignments, 2014–2018' were developed to address some of the evidence gaps around plant health related trade and the value of plant health, and to provide users with information on the work of import inspectors.

The purpose of the article is to analyse the engineering labour market on the example of the profession of design engineer in modern conditions of the construction market in Ukraine and abroad. It is also necessary to study the formation of the integrated view of the structure, state and dynamics of the labour market in design enterprises; qualification requirements for engineers; compliance of the vocational education system with these requirements. Design is a type of labour activity in construction as a branch of professional activity. The article contains statistical indicators of wages that characterize the profession of design engineer, and innovative activities of design enterprises. The indicator of the level of innovative development of design enterprises is the quality of products (projects). One of the main characteristics of design is the price of the product. It includes the Customer’s assessment of all other design properties. Pricing issues have been and continue to be one of the guiding problems of the country’s construction industry, including design and the salaries of design engineers. Methodology. The design market in Ukraine has a situation that reflects the overall state of the construction industry. The development of this type of business and its participants is differently influenced by many factors. Project market participants in Ukraine can be classified: by the form of ownership – state departmental institutions and commercial structures; by the volume of work – design enterprises and design institutes that act as general designers, who mainly perform all stages of the project. Architectural workshops, mainly specializing in the stages of “sketch project” and “project”; design departments at the construction and assembly organizations performing stages “working design”, “working documentation”, separate sections of projects or only detailing for production. There were about 70 design enterprises and about 200 architectural workshops in Kyiv in 2016, according to the Association of Design Enterprises. The potential of Ukraine as a “technical” state, that is able to solve complex problems and generate complex solutions and products with high added value, is due to the potential of the educational field of technical direction. Accordingly, in 2016 in Ukraine, the relative number of graduates of technical specialties was 2 times more than in the UK or Poland, namely, in European countries, thousands of people: Ukraine – 130; France – 105; Germany – 93; Turkey – 75; Great Britain – 71; Poland – 66; Spain – 56; Italy – 48; Romania – 39. In 2015-2016, training in the fields of construction specialties in Ukraine was carried out by 49 higher education institutions. Today, one of the shortcomings of education is the lack of modern curricula; technical fields are getting excessively humanitarian and detachment from practice, in particular, the application of European standards. Some Western academic subjects are not taught in Ukrainian universities at all, which reduces the competitiveness of graduates. Certification of responsible executors of design works in construction in 2012 was a significant step towards the liberalization of the market of design services. The responsibility of engineers was personified and strengthened, but at the same time their object and financial possibilities were increased. As of December 2015, more than 22,000 design engineers have been certified in Ukraine. It can be stated that for the period 2016-2019, a fairly developed market of design services has been formed in Ukraine. Its key features are the attraction to large cities, diversification by specialties and grounds on the existing, including the Soviet, experience, as well as concentration and duplication of functions, in particular, design institutes by the commercial sector, etc. Significant potential is due to intellectual capacity, diversity of tasks and the accumulated practice of Ukrainian designers, which provides certain advantages in the international market of design services. Today, the customer is moving away from design technologies, which means that the designer’s work must be built in such a way that the customer understands the need for investment at the design stage of the facility, taking into account further operation. The lack of design and the need to revise salaries affects the value of real estate. The lack of engineers affects the organization of construction and the market as a whole. Increasing the salaries of design engineers, creating more favourable working conditions lead to an increase in the cost of construction work from 9 to 15%. Understanding the difficulties faced by the design industry, it is logical to think about the ways to overcome them in the near future. Conclusion. Nowadays, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the analysis of the engineering labour market in construction allows to understand the innovative activity of the project enterprise and to mark the course of further development of the market of design services in Ukraine. Reducing unhealthy competition among designers is possible due to new approaches to work aimed at optimizing and improving the performance of design companies. Stories of design engineers having to leave their favourite profession to make a living are a thing of the past. Now it is a prestigious and profitable speciality. To be relevant in the profession, you must, first of all, learn foreign languages, read technical literature in English. Self-education, i.e. the ability to independently search and analyse information, to develop oneself as a specialist, is of great importance. High erudition is a quality possessed by the Soviet-era engineers and often lacking in many modern design engineers. At the same time, it is of great importance because the building is a single organism, and the design engineer must understand not only construction, but also related fields. The main feature that distinguishes a design engineer is a certain mindset. And the work must be highly paid for this. Considering the issue of the engineering labour market in Ukraine, it is safe to say that there are temporary professions that are in vogue, and there are those that will always be in demand, and the profession of design engineer is one of them.

Topicality. Local taxes and fees are a means of filling basic budgets not only in the direct sense, when the fiscal function of such taxes is performed but also when the regulatory function of such taxes is activated and local authorities have the opportunity to improve the business climate of their economic mesosystem and change its structure, giving preference to the most promising types of economic activity. Currently, Ukraine has adopted a general institutional framework that makes it possible to conduct economic cooperation of territorial communities, but the provisions of legislative, methodological, advisory nature on the use of local taxes as stimulators of interregional cooperation and activators of cooperation agreements that are based on added value and effective involvement of local resources in the process of exogenous economic exchange have not yet been developed. Therefore, solving such scientific and applied problem as the development of guidelines for the use of local taxes as tools of stimulation of economic cooperation of communities and increase the added value generated in their territorial and economic systems is actual topic of national and international research on regional systems for developing or developed countries, where the role of local economic and administrative initiatives is incompletely realized. Aim and tasks. The purpose of this paper is to identify the scientific and methodological basis on the use of local taxes as regulators of business activity and activators of economic cooperation and means of increase of added value, establishing of the list of key local taxes through which it is possible to implement regulatory measures and identify types and groups of taxes, which are the most effective means of influencing business activity, from the standpoint of stimulating economic cooperation and the formation of horizontal ties between the participants of cooperation and division of labor in territorial communities. Research results. Theoretical, institutional and scientific-applied bases of economic cooperation of territorial-economic systems in Ukraine and other countries of the world are considered. It is established that the implementation of interregional, intraregional and international cooperation of communities has a positive effect on the level of economic development, as the formation of points of concentration of capital and business activity increases economic growth, uses local resources more efficiently, increases added value and depth of raw materials processing and there is the active involvement of territories in the processes of the international division of labor. Due to the points of economic growth formed based on economic cooperation in the form of agglomerations, clusters, subregions and other forms of territorial economic associations for the developed countries of the world (Austria, Spain, Germany, Great Britain) the predominant of gross product creation (from 50% to 70 %) became characteristic in such territorial and economic associations. Based on the analysis of the regulatory framework and other components of institutional support for economic cooperation in the developed world, it is determined that the general institutional framework and legalization of the instrument of cooperation for effective economic development is not enough, as levers of state regulation and realization the supporting means should be introduced. In this aspect, special attention is paid to local taxes and fees, because the initiatives of local authorities must be supported by certain powers to regulate the economic development of communities. The most effective at the present stage of development of domestic territorial and economic systems in Ukraine as regulators can be used such local taxes as a single tax on entrepreneurs, land fees and real estate tax. A mechanism for stimulating economic cooperation in communities with the use of personal income tax, which is national, but ensures the incomes collection of local budgets by almost 60%, has also been identified and proposed. An approach to the implementation of simplified and reduced taxation of a number of local taxes in promising investment projects is proposed. But such means are provided only for the projects that keep the level of wages 2.5-3 times higher than the average wage in the region, which will increase the welfare of the population and will provide filling local budgets by increasing the base for personal income tax. Conclusion. Scientific and methodological recommendations for tax incentives for economic cooperation of territorial communities in Ukraine are still under development and formation, but the solution to this problem is a promising area of research. The list of basic local taxes that can be used to enhance cooperation between local communities, the key incentives for the application of targeted benefits from local taxes, should be supplemented by regulatory policy means in further research on this topic.

PurposeDistinguishing what employers in different areas of Great Britain need to pay to attract and retain labour has been a central component of public-sector resource allocation decisions. This paper examines how changes in the pattern of spatial wage differentials following the global financial crisis have impacted on the formulae which allocate government funding to local government and health providers in the NHS.Design/methodology/approachUsing employer-reported data on earnings, we examine spatial patterns of private-sector wages in Great Britain between 2007 and 2017. The method permits the analysis of finely defined geographical areas and controls for differences in industry and workforce composition to distinguish those differences that are attributable from unmeasured characteristics, such as differences between areas in the cost of living and amenities. These standardised spatial wage differentials (SSWDs) underpin the funding allocation formulae.FindingsThe analysis shows that since 2007 private-sector wage dispersion, both within and between regions, has reduced: lower paid areas have experienced a relative increase in wages and higher paid a relative decline. Over the period, there was a significant reduction in the London wage premium.Originality/valueThis paper demonstrates the importance of ensuring established policies are applied using contemporary data. The SSWDs used to distribute government funds have not been re-estimated for some time. As a result, the current resource allocation model has overcompensated the London region and undercompensated others during this period.