Look at the numbers from the OECD here. Overall union density has halved since 1985, falling from 30% to 15% in 2023/24. On average across 28 OECD countries, 14.3% of women in employment were unionised in 2024 vs. 15% of men. In contrast, unionisation was much stronger in the public sector, with 41.3% of employees unionised in 2024 compared to 10.1% in the private sector. Put this another way. In OECD countries, 9 out of 10 workers in the private sector are not union members. Dig into the numbers, and you will find that private sector membership is concentrated in what can be called “old industries”: food and drink; auto manufacturing; the docks, transport; some retail. But in the newer sectors, membership is almost non-existent.

Which is not to say that there are not a few activists here and there in the newer industries. But increasingly these activists are not concerned with economic issues, the original raison d’etre of trade unions. They are agitated by sexual politics or what they see as moral causes, such as who the company they work for does business with.

The problem is that not everyone believes in the same moral crusades. Go back a bit. There were some unions in the US which opposed the Vietnam War. But there were construction union hardhats who backed Nixon. A recent UK poll showed that about 50% of union members plan to vote for Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party.

Two people in a workplace may agree that they need a wage increase. Money always talks. Beyond that, they may not agree on anything else. Any attempt to try and rebuild unions on the basis of a moral/political strategy is going to go nowhere. Unions work best when they are narrowly focused economic actors. Unfortunately, most union leaders want to be political players. This may have worked in the old days of a predominantly blue-collar working class, most of whom lived in close-knit cohesive communities. But today’s working class, by whom I mean those who live on a weekly or monthly pay cheque, small or big, and who would find themselves in difficulty if the cheques stopped coming, are more scattered and diverse and not easy to organise.

The words from the Springsteen song The River come to mind:

And for my 19^th birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat.

You got the union card, and you held it for life, whatever about the marriage. Because you probably stayed in the one job for life. Lived in the same house, drank in the same bar, supported the local sports team, were part of a community.

Those days are gone. And they are not coming back. Even if manufacturing industries are “reshored” to ensure economic and defence resilience, they will be “jobs light”, run by AI-controlled robots, with a minimum of human intervention.

So unions in the private sector find themselves in difficulties. Public sector unions are a different matter, but public sector unions are not what this piece is about. Private sector unions can no longer depend on a “job for life” cadre but are constantly having to think about recruiting and organising. Which is not easy. Especially when employers are not receptive. And why would they be?

A union representative knocks on an employer’s door. I’d like to come in and talk to your workers about the benefits of joining a union and collective bargaining. What would that mean, asks the employer. Well, we would be pushing to increase the workers’ wages and better their conditions of employment, and we would like to ensure that they had a say in management decision-making.

Let me get this straight, says the employer. You want to come in, organise my workers, increase my costs, dent my profit margins, and curtail my decision-making powers? Do I have that right? That’s about it, says the union organiser. There’s the door, say the employer. Close it on your way out.

In other words, trying to organise workers into a union in today’s world is a tough sell. But then it was never easy. Ask Jim Larkin, Ernie Bevin, or Walter Reuther, just to mention three union leaders from Ireland, the UK, and the US. They all fought difficult and bloody battles. Fights over economic rewards in a capitalist, market economy are never going to be a Sunday picnic. As my friend Rick Warters puts, that's because “everyone wants more”. And if you get more, I may get less. Win/win solutions tend to be hard to come by despite what some of the academic texts on negotiations suggest. There is no win/win when you close a plant and make 1,200 workers redundant, no matter what the “social plan” may provide.

If the industrial leverage that was delivered to the unions by a mass membership is a thing of the past, then they need to find other forms of leverage if they are to continue in business.

Ten or fifteen years back they thought that International Framework Agreements (IFAs) with multinational companies might be a way forward. They saw these agreements as enabling them to recruit on a global scale. At the last count, there are around 300 IFAs, but most of these are with French or German companies. There are no fully-formed IFAs with US companies. In recent months, IndustriAll tore up its IFA with Mercedes because it was of little value to it as the United Auto Workers (UAW) tried to organise the Mercedes plant in Alabama. IFAs turned out to be a false dawn. They appeared to shine brightly but soon faded.

Now, the unions are increasingly turning to the law as a source of leverage. During 2024 and 2025, unions pushed hard for European Works Councils to be able to go to court and ask for injunctions to block management decisions. Member state governments, acting through the Council of Ministers, refused to accede to the demand.

Unions believe that Article 4 of the EU’s Adequate Minimum Wage Directive, which calls for national action plans where collective bargaining coverage falls below 80% of the workforce, will force the hand of governments. But as France shows, you can have near universal bargaining coverage through legal extension mechanisms while still leaving the unions with very few members. Bargaining coverage in France is 98%. Union density in the private sector is around 5-6%. To date, EU governments have shown scant interest in pushing the boundaries of Article 4. See here. More disappointment looms, it would seem.

Unions have also invested heavily in due diligence laws such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), but these have been pared back to the bone through the Omnibus process and are now weak things that, in reality, offer little.

But maybe there are a couple of bright spots.

In the UK, unions are hoping that the Employment Relations Act 2025, with its loosened rules on a legal route to union recognition, will help them rebuild their depleted membership. It remains to be seen if it will.

Unions in the US have managed to get the House of Representatives to pass the Faster Labor Contracts Act. The law would require employers to open negotiations with a union within ten days of the union gaining recognition, most likely through a National Labor Relations Board-supervised election. The parties would then have 90 days to reach an agreement. If no agreement is reached, Federal mediators get involved, with a further 30 days to see if an agreement can be found. Absence an agreement, the matter goes to binding arbitration by a three-person panel, with the resulting imposed contract valid for two years here.

As things stand, it can take 450 days to negotiate a first contract, if indeed one is ever negotiated. The FLCA is designed to dramatically cut that timescale.

Whether the Act makes it through the Senate remains to be seen, and then it would have to be signed by President Trump. Neither seems likely.

You also have to ask if government-imposed terms and conditions through arbitration can be considered collective bargaining as defined by the International Labour Organisation in Convention 98? It seems unlikely that it would be. I presume the union response is that they do not care what it is called if it delivers improved pay and working conditions for their members. But what happens at the end of the two years? Can the employer simply tear up the agreement and walk away from it?

The most significant thing about the Act is that it was backed by 20 Republicans in the House, and the push on it is being led in the Senate by a Republican, Josh Hawley. What happens if the Democrats take the House and Senate in the midterms? Could the US be on the cusp of the biggest change in labour law since the 1930s? Expect significant employer pushback in the weeks and months ahead.

While the unions in the US see “first contract arbitration” as an answer to their problems, the unions north of the border in Canada don’t seem to like arbitration, preferring the right to strike here. Which raises the question: If unions start calling for arbitration in contract negotiations, why not arbitration in all industrial disputes?

Will any of these initiatives turn around the fortunes of the trade unions? I am not persuaded that they will. But if the light of the trade unions is dying, they will not go quietly into that good night. There may be some fight left in them yet.

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But it is not just another June 7, especially for those who take an interest in European labour and employment law, as I do. Taking an interest in these matters is pretty much my day job.

Today is the day by which all 27 member states of the European Union, along with the three member states of the European Economic Area (EEA), should have transposed the European Union’s Pay Transparency Directive (PTD) into national law. The Directive is designed to help eliminate the 12% pay gap that exists between men and women in Europe by making employers’ decisions on pay transparent, by, for example, putting pay ranges in advertisements for jobs.

As of today, just three EU member states have transposed the Directive: Italy, Lithuania, and Slovakia. It is questionable if Italy has properly done so, saying, in effect, that the matter has been dealt with by a series of national sectoral collective agreements. A doubtful proposition at best.

Germany has also pushed the idea that undertakings covered by collective bargaining agreements should be considered to be compliant, a difficult argument to sustain, as it assumes that, by definition, collective bargaining agreements cannot be discriminatory. History suggests otherwise.

Three out of thirty. Within the past week, Belgium has asked the EU Commission for permission to delay implementation by six months. Sweden has gone further and asked that the implementation of the Directive be suspended and that it be renegotiated to simplify it and reduce its complexity. The Swedes have a point.

I have been writing about EU labour and employment law since the late 1980s, when the dead hand of the UK veto was lifted, and the EU Commission under Jacques Delors began to produce a stream of new Directives, covering working time, health and safety, maternity leave, and the one that turned out to be something I would specialise in thereafter, the European Works Council Directive.

There have been other labour and employment law Directives since then. I am not going to list them all here.

With all of these Directives, of course there were some laggards when it came to transposing them into national law, but in most cases the majority of member states did so by the due date, there or thereabouts.

But over all those years, I can never remember a case of 27 out of 30 missing the deadline, while making it clear at the same time that they are going to miss it by a lot. Is the EU Commission now going to start taking infringement proceedings against all of them? Or would it be better off asking why governments are struggling to transpose the legislation? Maybe because it is just a badly written and constructed piece of law. Well-intentioned, hoping to do the right thing, but creating more problems than it offers solutions.

I can’t say I am surprised. The PTD is a complex piece of legislation which seeks to eliminate the estimated 12% pay gap between men and women that exists within the EU. It does this by focusing on pay differentials that may exist within grades and categories of workers. If the data shows gaps of more than 5%, which cannot be justified on objective, non-gender grounds, or which cannot be eliminated within six months of having been identified, then employers have to engage with employee representatives to identify the reason for the gap and to look at ways of eliminating it. The data analysis involved puts a considerable strain on companies and stretches resources.

I have never been convinced that the approach set out in the Directive will go any distance to eliminate the 12% gap because the gap does not exist at what might be called the “micro level” of individual jobs and categories, though undoubtedly, some such gaps will be thrown up. It exists mostly because of “macro level” factors such as women taking more time out of work than men because of childcare and other family responsibilities, which increasingly involves aged care as more of us live longer because of improved standards of living and advances in medical science.

It also exists because of “occupational choice”, with, for instance, more women in nursing and teaching than in finance and engineering, the latter dominated by men and paid more than teaching and nursing. Because of their absence from the workforce, women may not be present when promotional opportunities arise, meaning the upper and better-paid levels in many organisations have more men than women in top positions. The PTD is not going to do much about these issues but will involve businesses in a considerable amount of work with little to show for it at the end of the day.

Let me set out a personal position here. I have never believed that there is some scientific and objective way of determining what jobs should be paid. Schemes of job evaluation have always left me cold. They are little more than pseudo-science.

Pay is determined by value judgements and relations of power in the workplace, and these flow from our wider judgements about what we consider important economically and socially. Are bankers really more important than nurses? Are accountants more important than teachers? Who gets to decide these things? On what basis? Why are women who stack shelves in supermarket shops paid less than men who stack shelves in supermarket warehouses?

No amount of made-up evaluation spreadsheets or hocus-pocus “toolkits” will ever resolve these questions because, at the end of it all, the answer does not come down to “factors” or “weightings”, themselves subject to bias, but to value judgements. The economics of pay in the workplace will always be an area of contestation that cannot be “scientifically” resolved.

I often wonder how many of those in the Council, the Commission, and the Parliament have any first-hand experience of the way things actually work within businesses when they are writing laws. Do they have any insight into the mechanics of the way decisions get made, the complexities involved in trying to determine which jobs fit into which category, what are appropriate pay scales? What attention do they give to the role that collective bargaining, if it exists, which it increasingly does not, plays in all of this?

Here is an interesting fact. The EU Parliament publishes all sorts of analysis about its membership - men/women, political parties, countries of origin, and so on. One thing it does not publish is the occupational backgrounds of MEPs. So we have no way of knowing what workplace experience they bring to the table when employment laws are being considered. When writing something into legislation, they never seem to ask the question: how exactly is this going to work in practice, not in theory, but in practice?

I suspect that the reason many governments are struggling with transposing the PSD into national law is that they are having difficulty in trying to figure out just how things are supposed to work in practice. For example, some EU countries, mostly the older Western ones, have well-established systems of workplace representation. Many member states do not. In those member states without workplace representation systems, who counts as an employee representative for pay transparency purposes? What systems need to be put in place to provide for such representation if joint pay assessments are to be conducted?

With the exception of California, which is a law unto itself, those US states that have pay transparency laws limit these laws to ensuring transparency in job advertising. Put what the job pays out there for all to see. They do not require the bureaucratic burrowing that the PTD does of European employers. The US states have kept it simple. Maybe if the EU had also kept it simple, member states would have transposed the Directive by today.

As I said earlier, I am not persuaded that the PTD is the answer to the 12% gender pay gap in the EU. It is well-intentioned, but it is looking in the wrong place. The issue is not pay discrimination within categories and grades, or between two individuals. It is social and cultural and requires answers that are not to be found in the PTD.

Made the Swedes do have a point. Stop the clock and think afresh about the issue. Put a deadline on it of a year. What’s to lose? Many member states probably won’t have transposed it within the year anyway. Why not pull them together to discuss the problems they are running up against in the transposition process?

As for employers, it is difficult to be getting on with things when you do not know what is required of you. You can’t implement a law that does not exist.

Coda

I am not one of those who believes that the answer to every labour market problem is deregulation. Like the rules of the road, I believe we need strong and robust labour market regulations to ensure the wellbeing of all labour market participants. But not every regulation should be sacrosanct because not everything that comes out of the Brussels legislative process is always fit for purpose. My argument above is that the PSD is not fit for purpose and it should be revisited before it imposes burdens on employers that yield little in the way of results. Maybe even the unions might want to revisit it to build in some collective bargaining safeguards. Maybe some genuine social dialogue around the issue is what is needed. Negotiations in the “shadow” of a bad law might be no bad thing.

Let’s run a check:

1. Is Iran any less of a theocratic regime run by ideological hardliners than it was on February 27? No, it is not.

2. Has Iran’s nuclear program been degraded? Not so far, at any rate.

3. Does Iran still have the capacity to launch attacks against its neighbours around the Gulf? Yes, it does, and it regularly launches such attacks.

4. Iran has realised the leverage it has over the world’s economy through its control of the Strait of Hormuz. Not only can it determine which ships pass through the Strait, but it now plans to make them pay to do so. This will bring it in billions a year. The Strait was open and cost-free before Trump began his ill-advised attack.

If you go into any negotiation, or a war in this case, with the objective of reducing the ongoing power of the other party and the other party emerges stronger and richer after the event, then it has to be said that you have failed and failed spectacularly. You can dress a pig up in Hermes and say it is a fashion icon, but it will still be a pig, even if it has a Birkin bag.

As I write this, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defence, though he likes to call himself the Secretary for War, is quoted in the Financial Times as saying:

“He (Trump) wanted me to reiterate how patient he is in ensuring that with America undertaking this kind of historic endeavour [the Iran war], any deal will be a good one. A great one.”

I somehow doubt it. For one, Trump has little leverage over Iran. Certainly, he can resume bombing, but the Iranian regime has shown it can absorb such attacks and keep functioning. The Iranian regime is a totalitarian regime that is not subject to political pressures from its citizens. In fact, it has no compulsion in killing them in their thousands if they step out of line, as it showed in the early part of this year when people took to the streets over record-high inflation, food prices, and currency depreciation. Religious totalitarians have little fear of death, believing as they do that if they are killed for defending their beliefs, they will be amply rewarded in the next life.

On the other hand, and despite his dictatorial impulses, Trump is subject to democratic political pressures. His popularity ratings have tanked in the US, as his tariffs and war have resulted in a spike in inflation, with gas at the pumps now above $4 a gallon. Most of the promises he made during the election campaign, such as slashing energy costs and bringing down food prices, have not been delivered on. There is every chance he could lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, hobbling the last two years of his presidency to a significant extent.

In a war, as in a negotiation, it is difficult to push forward if you do not have your own side on board. There is an inelegant term for it in labour negotiations theory: intra-organisational bargaining, which means getting your own side behind you before you even start talking to the other side. It means you have to have clear objectives and be able to show how you plan to deliver those objectives.

This is never as easy as it sounds. Your own side is made up of multiple stakeholders. Even if they are all sailing in roughly the same direction, they are not all on one ship. It is more like a convey, and it can be tough keeping them sailing together.

When it came to his attack on Iran on February 28, Trump had made no effort beforehand to get US allies on board with what he planned to do. The attacks came as a surprise to many of them. And then he demanded their support for something they were never consulted about. Most of them demurred, resulting in rage on his part. Trump demands unquestionable loyalty. He may get it in MAGA world, but not outside MAGA world in the US and certainly not in the rest of the world. In Europe, we know where blindly following leaders can end up.

To borrow from the Police song, with every move he makes, with every breath he takes, Trump diminishes the US. But then, he’s so vain, he probably thinks that song is about him.

As I said above, if you want to get your allies/stakeholders working with you, you need to have clear objectives and a realistic delivery plan.

It seems to me that with Iran, Trump had neither. I am convinced that he thought he could rerun the Venezuela playbook, where he had special forces go in and grab Maduro, having already probably cut a deal with Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, to take over from him and work with Washington. You have to suspect that the snatch of Maduro was made possible by access to a great deal of inside information. Ambition for the top job has led to many a betrayal in the course of history. Et Tu Brutè, and all that.

On the other side of the table, Iran is not necessarily unified in its approach to the negotiations with the US. This article in the New York Times quotes one Iranian political hardliner as saying:

“Trump must know that Iran, as the victor and conqueror of the field, sets the terms.”

Now, even though I cannot see the US coming well out of Trump’s “little adventure” in the Middle East, I also cannot see it bowing the knee to hardliners in Iran. The idea that Iran can dictate the terms of a settlement is nonsense, but then, that’s where religious fundamentalism gets you. Trying to do a deal to end a war is not easy if one side thinks that God is on their side. Hardline Iranians clearly do. But it is even more difficult when both sides think God is with them. Pete Hegseth sees the attack on Iran as a sort of modern crusade, driven by Christian values. When two religions collide, finding a solution can be intractable. Over the centuries, how long did wars of religion run for in Europe? How many died because people believed that their God was a better God than your God?

No wonder God does not appear on earth all that often. He does not want to have to pick sides. I can’t say I blame him.

If a deal is done to end the Iran war, it will be on terms that Iran can live with, not what Trump would have wanted at the outset. Trump will cry victory, but the cry will ring hollow.

Trump is also pushing for the establishment of a $1.8bn fund to compensate people he claims were victims of “lawfare” by the Biden presidency. Critics see it as a slush fund to enable him to award political supporters.

Trump came to public attention with his book The Art of the Deal. Maybe he should now write a follow-up: The Grift of the Giveaway.

Coda

I am currently reading James D. Boy’s US Grand Strategy and the Madman Theory: From Nixon to Trump. I get how the Madman Theory was intellectually constructed by the academics Schelling, Ellsberg, and Kissinger and then shaped by Nixon, drawing on his own political experiences in the Eisenhower administration. But I am convinced that Trump is not making use of the Madman Theory in any sort of coherent fashion. He is what he is. A T-Bone short of a full BBQ. I will come back to the Madman Theory when I have finished the book.

… AI companies and their models will follow one rule before all others: they will seek to maximise returns for their shareholders, up to the limits set by law. When the law of profit conflicts with the company’s internal principles, profit will win every time.

I think Armstrong’s comment applies to all market economy companies which are intent on profit maximisation. Call it capitalism, if you will. Outside of China and Russia, and a few other countries such as North Korea, it is the system in which we live.

Compared to previous generations stretching over the centuries, most of us have better lives than our ancestors because of the market economy. Which is not to say that it is not riddled with flaws and inequities, but it is better than any of the other economic models that were or are on offer.

For most market economy companies, labour is a cost that they constantly try to minimise. To be blunt about it, companies are in the business of making profits. They are not in the business of creating jobs.

Nowhere is this truer than in the US where employment is “at will”, which I understand to mean that the employer gives you the job as long as you are of benefit to him or her. Once the work you do is no longer seen as adding value, then it is a very quick goodbye. Clear your desk by the end of the day, as they say in the movies.

Europe is different. Once you have the job, the job is yours, and the employer can only take it away from you by going through legally defined procedures. If the US makes it easy to dismiss workers, Europe makes it hard.

Market economy companies are in the business of business, which means producing products or offering services that customers or clients are willing to pay for. Despite what “mission statements” may say, they are not in the business of social justice, unless there is a business logic to being in the social justice business.

This often disappoints those idealists who join companies which say they have a mission beyond just making money and who are then gutted when they find that, in reality, the companies they joined don’t have a mission beyond making money. As Armstrong says, profits will always come first.

Gushing statements about “bringing your whole self to work” quickly disappear when the presence of your whole self stands in the way of business. At the end of the day, it is the Corleone maxim that prevails: Nothing personal, just business.

These thoughts about “real existing capitalism”, as Marxists might put it, occurred to me as I read Noam Scheiber’s book Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.

Scheiber writes on labour issues for the New York Times, and I think it would be fair to say, is sympathetic to the labour movement.

Scheiber’s book covers much the same territory as Dave Kamper’s book Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions, which I wrote about on LinkedIn recently. My answer to Kamper’s question was, well, it is not the unions if you look at the numbers. Union membership in the US is below 10%, and hovers around 6% in the private sector, and most of that membership is in old industries where the unions have been long established.

Scheiber covers the unionisation drives in Starbucks, Apple and at some video games companies, and the strikes in Hollywood of scriptwriters, and the new militancy of the United Auto Workers (UAW) under Shawn Fain. But he does so through telling the stories of individual workers who were involved in these initiatives over several years.

As someone who is steeped in labour relations literature, I found it a compelling read. It has a lightness of touch about it which draws you in and makes you want to continue to read on. It is the work of a top-class journalist, written in clear, simple English, devoid of any sort of academic theorising and empty of jargon. Not that I dislike academic theorising, but this is a book that is better for leaving such theorising to one side.

Scheiber deftly describes the pain and hurt of broken expectations and shattered dreams as the new “college-educated working class” finds that the world is not delivering the jobs and living standards they were led to expect.

Instead of enjoying a pay premium because of their education, they find themselves working in Starbucks coffee shops or Apple stores or waiting around for the next writing gig in Hollywood, which often never comes.

Close your eyes, clap your hands and believe, and it will happen does not happen for them. They do not live in a Peter Pan world. They juggle hours and multiple jobs and still struggle to make rent. Welcome to the college-educated precariat.

Cards on the table. I am an employer-side negotiator dealing with European-level labour relations issues. I have no problem with workers joining unions or with collective bargaining. I have spent much of my life involved in such negotiations, often dealing with union representatives late into the night. It is the nature of the business.

What struck me when reading the book was the naivety of those pushing unions in Starbucks, Apple, and Amazon. At the time of writing this article, the three campaigns have achieved little, though one Apple store did manage to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement, but it did not trigger a tsunami of organising in other Apple stores. There are no union contracts in Starbucks or Amazon in the US.

Collective bargaining is not about whether you have a strong moral case for better pay and conditions. Maybe you do, but it is not going to get you very far. The old manual working class learned that lesson many years ago.

Now, maybe, you can win statutory recognition through procedures provided for in the law, but all that does is to get you in the door and across the table from the employer.

You want a deal? You need leverage, the power to force the employer to offer you terms you can accept. In collective bargaining, that power generally comes down to the ability to call an effective strike, though other “corporate campaign” tactics are available, but these are often dependent on third parties taking action on your behalf.

I know Starbucks workers have called “red cup day” strikes, but when the strike only hits a few hundred shops out of around 16,000, you can hardly say it is effective. The Amazon win at the Staten Island centre died on the vine as those who organised the unionisation drive had no idea how to follow through in bargaining. They thought winning recognition was what it was all about when it was just the first step in a “journey of a thousand miles”.

By way of contrast, the Hollywood strike, even if it went on for months, and the UAW strike against the Detroit auto makers, brought leverage to the table. They hurt the employers’ bottom lines. There was solid organisation on the workers’ side. But that organisation was many years in the making, often forged through past bloody battles. Google “UAW Ford River Rouge” if you want to know more, by way of an example.

The market system is a cruel and unforgiving system. It is profit-oriented. It feels no moral obligation to offer full-time jobs with stable hours and decent hourly pay rates. It will constantly seek to minimise costs and maximise productivity in whatever way it can. There is no point in being blind to that.

It would be socially better if it were otherwise, but this is the reality of the world of the gig economy, and when, to borrow from Yeats, the “rough beast” of AI, its hour come around at last, “slouches” across the land. The Hollywood writers’ strike was about combating the rough beast. The strike may have slowed it, but has it stopped it?

The “social contract” of full-time, well-paid employment, with continually increasing pay packets leading to ever-improving standards of living, defined the thirty to forty years after WWII. We thought it was a forever paradigm. It turns out it was not. It came about because of a unique set of historical circumstances. But even in those unique circumstances, it still took workers to organise to make sure they had a seat at the table.

If, as Scheiber says, the US college-educated are a new working class - the old working class has not gone away, you know - then this new working class will need to figure out for itself how to get organised to defend its interests. I suspect trying to organise Apple store by Apple store, or Starbucks coffee shop by coffee shop will not do it. Even if Scheiber’s book was written to suggest that a new dawn in the US labour movement was breaking, what it really documents is microscopic gains, difficult for the naked eye to see.

Now, before my friends in the US labor movement (I have dropped the “u” from labour for this) say to me, but what about the teachers in Arizona, or gamers at Microsoft, or doctors in some hospital system, or university graduate teachers, yes, I know all about these things. The labour movement has always won some new members here and there as it lost members elsewhere. But the direction of travel is clear. Union membership is in long-term decline.

Maybe, when we reflect on things, unions as we have traditionally known them, will turn out to have been organisations of their time, and that time has passed. But employer-side negotiator and all that I am, I think workers will always want an independent, collective voice in their workplace, a say over their working lives. Who knows what shape that collective voice will take?

Schriber’s book finished abruptly. You turn to the next page, and there is no next page. I suspect that he would have liked to write a next page, but he had no idea what to say on that next page about the future of the US labor movement. His is a book in search of an optimistic ending. But there is no such ending on offer, at least for now.

Maybe some “old heads” from both sides, management and labor, those no longer active in the business, could come together and start a dialogue and explore possibilities. What’s to lose? I’m sure there is some foundation out there that would fund such an effort.

Having entered these caveats, would I recommend Noam Scheiber’s book? Definitely.

In 2024, 6.67 million employees were members of a trade union. As a proportion of all employees, this is a fall from 28.8% in 1995 to 19.9% today. In the 1960s, it was close to 50%. No wonder the unions pushed Labour hard for this law.

The ERA is designed to reverse this shrinkage and to help unions rebuild sagging membership. Whether it succeeds, only time will tell, but there can be little doubt that it is a pro-trade union law from a Labour government. This should come as no surprise, as the Labour Party was founded to represent in Parliament the interests of working people and their trade unions.

I have always followed British politics closely, and there was no better week to be in the UK if you are interested in such matters than last week. Now, of course, in these days of the internet, 24/7 TV news, and social media, you do not have to be in the UK to know the ins and outs of UK politics. But what you miss when you are following things virtually is the conversation in the workplace or, in my case, in the pub. Not just the back-and-forth with your colleagues after the work of the day is done, but the chat with the stranger who sits down beside you. You can learn a lot in a pub if you are willing to listen.

Of course, the big political story of the week was the imminent decline and fall of the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. The writing was on the wall since the disastrous local election results the previous week. Starmer tried to rescue matters with what was billed as a major speech last Monday, but the speech had neither substance nor eloquence. The bland delivering the bland.

I will come back to Labour. The other big UK political story of the week was the revelation that the leader of the far-right Reform party, Nigel Farage, he of Brexit fame, had been given £5m by a Thai-based British crypto billionaire just before he was elected to Parliament. It appears he may have used a £1.4 chunk of that money to buy himself a house for cash, a house he previously stated had been bought with money from his partner’s family.

When pressed, Farage gave various reasons for why he was given the money. It was to allow him to beef up his personal protection. It was a gift for his Brexit work, though why a Thai-based billionaire would bung him £5m for that is a bit of a head scratcher. But that is the way with crypto kings. Not for us ordinary mortals to understand the ways of crypto. By the by, I would be grateful if someone could explain crypto to me and how it can be used to buy stuff in a shop.

Maybe the £5m bung will badly damage Farage. Then again, maybe not. As Trump once said, he could shoot someone on 5^th Avenue in New York, and his MAGA base would still vote for him. Maybe it is the same in the UK with Farage. Trump in the US, Farage in the UK, Le Pen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands and the rest of the far right give bigots everywhere a licence to openly express their bigotry, racism, and sexual phobias. They are prepared to overlook the ethical and financial transgressions of their heroes in return for this licence.

But back to Labour. As we Irish would say, Starmer is a “goner”, meaning he will be ousted as prime minister sometime soon. I have seen it suggested that he could serve as a future Foreign Secretary, but I am not aware of any British Prime Minister since WWII who subsequently served in the cabinet of the person who ousted him or her. When you were once top dog, it is almost impossible to return to just being another member of the pack.

I know Willian Hague, a former leader of the Conservative Party, served as David Cameron’s Foreign Secretary, but then Hague never was Prime Minister.

As I have previously written in these Scribblings, I do not comment on UK politics other than when it comes to labour relations laws, my day job, and the UK's relationship with the EU.

We know that Brexit has been a complete economic failure, knocking as much as 8% of UK GDP. When you have done something stupid, the obvious answer is to undo it. Accept that you made a mistake and get on with correcting it. The sooner the better. But even though in recent speeches, including in last Monday’s speech, Starmer admitted that Brexit had badly damaged the UK economy, he could not bring himself to drop his red lines of no to the customs union, no to the single market, no to free movement, and no to rejoining the EU. But he still thought he could put the UK at the “heart of Europe”. Now, I don’t know that you call that, but I call it delusional.

“No, no, no” was bad enough from the UK when it was actually a member of the EU, and the other members had to grin and bear it. But they do not have to do so when the UK is outside the tent. During the “Brexit Wars”, David Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, was often referred to as “Frosty the No Man”. Starmer is the new Frosty.

It seems to me that whoever replaces Starmer as Prime Minister has an opportunity to revitalise the Labour Party by committing to rejoining the EU. I know that cannot happen today or tomorrow, and it may need an electoral mandate to do so, but it would galvanise the membership of the party and put the water of the English Channel, or Le Manche as we call it in France, between Labour on the one side, and Farage and the Tories on the other. Let them explain why they want to keep the UK poorer by staying out of the EU. So Farage can help make crypto kings richer?

Politics and economics are like a horse and carriage. You cannot have one without the other. Much of the political discontent in the UK is rooted in the absence of economic growth and stagnant incomes.

As Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of government at King’s College London, notes in a piece in the Financial Times:

In the years following the financial crisis, incomes have been stagnant. Real wages were below the 2008 level in 212 out of 340 local authorities, according to an April 2024 analysis by the TUC. The Resolution Foundation think-tank has claimed that, had growth since 2008 matched growth before 2008, the average worker would have been around £11,000 a year better off.

When you are no better off than you were 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago, of course you are going to be bitter. Life chances get postponed. How do you start a family? Buying a house is out of reach. Graduates are burdened with crippling student loans. AI is now threatening multiple entry-level jobs. Optimism is in short supply. When the old political structures fail to deliver a better life, you are minded to take a chance on the new and the untested. Jump to the right with Farage, jump to the left with the Greens. Pick your poison.

Rafael Behr had a column in the Guardian which opened with the words: “Removing Starmer solves the problem of an unpopular leader, but without a coherent alternative agenda his successor won’t fare much better.” A return to the EU should be at the heart of that alternative agenda. What’s to lose, and economic growth is there to win.

Oh, and throw in electoral reform as well, to be implemented before the next election. After all, Parliament is sovereign. Is that not what the Brexiters campaigned for?

I’ll be back in London in September, again discussing the Employment Rights Act. And talking politics with who knows who in a pub somewhere.

On May 9, 1950, the then French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, made a speech which laid the foundations for what we know today as the European Union. It first took shape in the Coal and Steel Community. The UK was invited to join the talks in 1951 to establish the Community alongside France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. When the invitation to join the talks arrived, Herbert Morrisson, then standing in as foreign secretary for the terminally ill Ernie Bevin, turned it down, saying, “It’s no good. We can’t do it. The Durham miners will never wear it.” Call it the first British opt-out. It was to take until 1973 when the UK, along with Ireland and Denmark, joined what was then the European Community to reverse Morrison’s opt-out.

According to the Financial Times, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, “will on Monday give a speech calling for closer UK links with the EU, more defence spending, help for young jobseekers and support for households, ahead of a new legislative package in the King’s Speech on May 13.”

It is the “closer links with the EU” that interest me. As an Irish citizen, I would very much like to see the UK back in the EU where it belongs. Not just “closer links”. Properly back as a full EU member state on the same terms and conditions as the rest of us. No opt-outs and no exceptionalism.

But I doubt if it is going to happen anytime soon, and certainly not this side of a general election unless Starmer, while he is still prime minister, is going to tear up his red lines of no to EU membership, no to the customs union, no to the single market, and not to free movement. I can’t see it happening, can you? To Starmer, these red lines are what the Durham miners were to Morrison, except that what is left of the Durham miners are now all voting Reform.

All too often, those in the UK who are enthusiastic about the UK again joining the EU look at things solely through a UK lens. As the business commentator Simon Nixon has recently pointed out (here), the economic case for the UK rejoining the EU is persuasive. He is right. There was never an economic case for the UK leaving the EU, and those who still argue the Brexit case after ten years of failure do so on the grounds that “Brexit was never properly implemented” without explaining what “properly implemented” means. All their economic fantasies dissolve when confronted by the reality that the UK is but a medium-sized country off the northwest coast of the Eurasian landmass. It is not a world power, even if it once was. According to the former Labour European Minister, Denis McShane, the UK navy has more admirals than it has ships.

In any negotiation, if you wish to be successful, you have to ask yourself the question: How does the other side see things? If I were in their shoes, what would I be thinking?

So, here I am in Brussels, by which I mean the EU institutions of the Commission, the Council, and the Parliament, and the questions that cross my mind are these.

I think the first thing I would notice is that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give it its full and proper title, is unsure of itself and that its politics are fractured. This week’s local election results hammer this point home.

Labour has lost over 1,000 seats, less than expected, but a terrible result, nonetheless. After years of dominance, it has been reduced to a rump in Wales. It languishes in Scotland. Both Wales and Scotland will now be governed by parties that have independence from the UK in their DNA, as does Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland. To borrow from the US, Labour’s performance this week can only be described as operation epic disaster.

Can the UK hold together as a country? I would ask myself. And, if so, on what basis? The SNP in Scotland is not going to give up the quest for independence, nor is Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, and, along with the other nationalist/republican parties, will continue to push for a roadmap to a United Ireland. Plaid Cymru may be less bullish about independence than the SNP in Scotland, but that is also its direction of travel. The independence genie is out of the bottle and loose in the land.

The SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and the republican/nationalist bloc in Northern Ireland all see their future firmly within the European Union. Rightly so, because for smaller countries, as the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has pointed out, it makes sense to be in an organised bloc.

Then I would notice that Reform, the current political vehicle of the arch-Brexiter, Nigel Farage, picked up over 1,200 seats in this week’s election. If anything, Reform is a right-wing English nationalist party, whatever about its advances in Scotland and Wales. And it hates Europe with a passion.

But we need to keep things in perspective. The Reform vote is only around 25/26% of the electorate. Would that see it win a national election under the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system when tactical voting to block Farage could play a part? To put this another way. 75% of those who voted on Thursday did not vote for Farage or his party.

But then, the FPTP system, designed for a two-party contest, could well throw up bizarre results in a seven-party contest. Labour currently has a dominating majority in the House of Commons on just 34% of the vote.

Reform, and the Tories, much reduced as the Tories are, both say that if they are in government after the next election, they will tear up any deal Labour does with the EU in the name of “national sovereignty”. How that would benefit British exporters to its biggest market, they don’t say.

So, back to Brussels. What questions are EU leaders going to be asking themselves about the relationship with the UK, and with the Labour government?

First, do we have the bandwidth to enter into negotiations with a UK government, which appears to be deeply unpopular, over a new EU/UK deal that falls far short of membership, only to see that deal tossed aside by a new government after the next election? We need to think long and hard about this, especially given the many other priorities we have on our plate.

Second, as long as the UK has its FPTP electoral system, now that the party system has fragmented, is it likely that we will ever see a consensus for EU membership in the UK that can outlast changes of government? Or will we be dealing with a “Hokey Cokey” European policy of in, out, shake it all about?

Third, we would note that opinion polls suggest that there is a majority among the electorate for the UK to again join the EU. But we would not be 100% convinced, despite what the opinion polls suggest. Why the doubt? Because we think that many people think joining the EU means rejoining the EU on the old terms and conditions, with Euro and Schengen opt-outs and the budget rebate. When the terms of joining are put on the table, would the consensus to join again still hold?

So, if I were a Brussels negotiator, I would be wary of investing too much time in negotiating with the UK as things stand.

Regrettable, but that is the way things are.

Now I have always made it clear in writing these Scribblings that I am of the European social democratic political family and have a very deep affinity with the British Labour Party. So, here is my unsolicited advice. Cast caution to the wind and announce now that at the next election you will be proposing that the UK apply to again join the EU. Put clear European water between you and Reform and the Tories. Build a pro-European alliance with other pro-European parties. It will be a bloody battle, but better a battle than no battle at all. Something to fight for, and something to win. Fight on your ground, not theirs.

The mines are gone, and so are the Durham miners.

On, and by the way, I would also think about planning for electoral reform. The FPTP system is no longer fit for purpose.

Should the business of business be strictly business, or should it be swayed by considerations of political values? I use the term “political values” rather than morals or ethics because this is what is in play when businesses need to make decisions that are deeply political. And, as we know, there is little social consensus on political values. Canons to the right of you, canons to the left. Into the valley of death, as the poem puts it.

These questions are prompted by media reports of some disquiet in Google over a contract it signed earlier this week with the Pentagon. It inked a deal for its technology to be used by the US military for classified work for “any lawful government purpose”, joining OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI in doing so, according to newspaper reports. Other companies signed similar deals later in the week, according to the Financial Times.

Those who are interested in these things will remember back to 2018, when employee objections led to Google deciding not to renew a contract for work with the Department of Defence (now called the Department of War by Pete Hegseth), known as Project Maven, on a system designed to analyse satellite and other imagery to assist special forces operations.

Before Google signed the deal this week, just over 500 employees out of a workforce of over 180,000 sent a letter to Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, calling on him to refuse to let the US government use its artificial intelligence technology for classified military operations.

“We are Google employees who are deeply concerned about ongoing negotiations between Google and the US Department of Defence,” the letter read. “As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralise power and that they do make mistakes.”

They added: “We want to see AI benefit humanity, not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways. This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, but extends beyond.”

Now, as it happens, I tend to agree with the sentiments expressed by the letter writers. We still live in a human world, and I want the decisions that impact my life to be made by humans, and not by some machine that knows what it knows because it has scraped every last bit of knowledge off the internet. I want decision makers to be guided by moral considerations.

But that is not the point at issue here. The point at issue is who gets to decide what companies do and who they do business with. Management or micro groups of activists? For me, the answer has to be management.

500 or so Googlers may have signed a letter protesting the Pentagon contract, but how many of the other 180,000 employees approved of it? Google has about 100,000 employees in the US out of the 180,000 it employs globally.

In the last presidential election, the US electorate split almost 50/50 between Trump and Harris. So you have to figure that even if Googlers lean progressive, many thousands of them must have voted for Trump. The 500 letter signers only speak for themselves. They have no mandate to speak for anyone else.

There may have been a moment back in 2018 when what Alan Wild and myself termed “activist capture” controlled events. By this, we meant that small, highly motivated groups could capture worker representative institutions or frame the narrative because of the indifference of the majority. In the climate of the times, management retreated in the face of such activism.

That time has passed. The logic of corporate capitalism is slowly reasserting itself.

As Robert Armstrong notes in the Financial Times:

… AI companies and their models will follow one rule before all others: they will seek to maximise returns for their shareholders, up to the limits set by law. When the law of profit conflicts with the company’s internal principles, profit will win every time.

Of course, Armstrong is right. With a putative Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion for 2027, what corporation is going to want to pass on a share of that because a handful of employees have moral scruples?

US corporations have been engaged in defence work since the US first had an army and a navy. Companies such as RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin have been manufacturing defence materiel forever, and employ hundreds of thousands of workers in good-paying jobs. Are these workers morally compromised because they work for defence contractors? I very much doubt they think they are. In fact, they probably see themselves as patriotic Americans working to make their country safe.

Would well-paid VW workers in Germany object if the factory in which they work switches from making cars to making tanks or other military vehicles, needed to stave off Russian aggression, because, when it comes to cars, VW can no longer compete with smarter Chinese competitors? I somehow doubt it, if the alternative is the closure of their factory and the loss of their jobs. I cannot see IG Metall taking the position that it would rather see workers on the dole than making drones.

Indeed, the future of manufacturing in Germany may hinge on what has been called in the past “Defence Keynesianism”, governments pumping money into the economy through defence spending. It is often overlooked that it was the splurge of WWII spending that as much ended the Great Depression as Roosevelt’s New Deal.

What is sometimes referred to as the “ordinary working class” has always been fiercely patriotic and finds no problem working in defence industries, whether it be shipbuilding or aircraft manufacture, or producing guns and bullets. They have never questioned what the company they work for does, or who it should be doing business with.

When they are recruiting, companies should make clear: “This is who we are, and this is what we do”. And they should ask: “Are you good with that?” A prospective employee can decide if this is a company they want to work for. If not, they can walk away.

Of course, companies change course and pivot to new areas of work as markets evolve, and what was once in demand is no longer in demand as new “stuff” emerges to make the old redundant. If you want to stay in business, you need to forget the old and get with the new.

Employees may be uncomfortable with where the company they work for is now going. We are not all on the same ethical or political page. In circumstances where your own values clash with the new corporate direction, exit should be facilitated on appropriate terms. Call it the “ethical exit package”. Let them leave on decent terms.

But it is management that is answerable to the shareholders for what the company does. Management cannot be dictated to by a small minority of activist employees. That’s the system in which we live and work.

It is management which gets to decide whether to make guns or butter.

The movie gave rise to the notion of a “terminator”, a force that is almost impossible to stop and eliminates everyone and everything in its path. I know that at the end of the series, the Terminator is finally destroyed, but it leaves a trail of destruction in its path. And the war between humans, led by the son of Sarah Connor, and Skynet goes on.

The Terminator image came to mind this week as the Financial Times reported:

Meta will cut 10 per cent of its staff next month, or about 8,000 jobs, as the social media platform reduces its workforce to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s AI spending spree.

It also reported that “Microsoft on Thursday told staff it was offering voluntary redundancy to about 7 per cent of its US workforce.”

A little earlier in the month, a piece in the Guardian stated:

As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they have slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. The financial-services company Block eliminated more than 4,000 people, or 40% of its workforce, in February. Meta laid off more than 1,000 in the last six months, and, according to a Reuters report, may cut 20% of all employees in the near future. Just this week, the software giant Oracle laid off thousands of workers. Smaller players like Pinterest and Atlassian also made recent cuts, culling about 15% and 10% of their workforces, respectively. Estimates put the total number of tech layoffs in the past year at more than 165,000, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi .

I am not sure I necessarily want to see any of the “Tech Bros” suddenly appearing naked in an alley, too many dollars in therapy would be needed to get the image out of my head. But whether they appear naked or not, the relentlessness of the “AI Terminator” has now been let loose upon the world of work by the Bros.

I make no judgment about these decisions by these companies. They are what they are. When shareholder value is the guiding principle, companies will always do what they believe to be in their own best interest. I know there are readers of these Scribblings who believe that matters should be organised differently. If that is what you want, go and get the votes in political elections to allow you to implement your vision of how business decision-making should be governed. Otherwise, as they say, it is what it is.

Up until the materialisation of the “AI Terminator” when people in the US tech industry were laid off, they could usually fairly quickly find another position, even if that meant moving across the country. Maybe not this time. What the “China Shock” did to manufacturing, maybe the “AI Terminator” will do to tech cities. Cut the heart and soul out of them and leave workers stranded.

A recent comment from the CHRO Association, with whom I am involved, notes:

The average worker said they had less than a 50% chance of finding a job in today’s economy, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. With high unemployment (4.3%), “3 million employees say they hesitate to quit when job searches can drag on for months” noted a Fortune article.

Studies by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson show that increased free trade with China cost Americans around one million manufacturing workers between 1991 and 2007. They also found that offsetting job gains in other industries never materialised. Closed companies no longer order goods and services from local non-manufacturing firms, and former industrial workers have been unemployed for years or permanently. Other work by this team of economists estimates that competition from Chinese imports cost the U.S. as many as 2.4 million jobs in total between 1999 and 2011.

More than that, the manufacturing jobs that disappeared were often location-specific. The economist, Paul Krugman, uses the furniture industry as an example, an industry that lost about 400,000 jobs from the China Shock. Krugman writes:

That’s a relatively small number in a nation where total employment is more than 150 million. But the U.S. furniture industry was highly concentrated in the North Carolina Piedmont region, and the entire region suffered severe distress as a result of Chinese furniture imports. The region became hollowed out, as some workers left to find better paying work, but many were left behind and saw their incomes fall dramatically.

The creation of these “black employment holes” had political consequences. Manufacturing states which had once voted Democratic swung to populism and handed Trump his win in 2016, even though he polled 3 million votes less than Hillary Clinton.

In response to the “China Shock”, and for other business reasons, US industry moved jobs offshore, often to Mexico, where labour costs were considerably lower. For example, on February 10, 2016, Carrier Corporation, a division of United Technologies, announced that it was moving a manufacturing operation from Indiana to Mexico.

The announcement was made to a general meeting of 1,400 employees, one of whom shot it on her cell phone and posted it online. It went viral. Donald Trump made the proposed closure a centrepiece of his campaign speeches which attacked free trade as undermining American greatness.

After he became president, Trump did a deal with UTC. Some of the jobs remained in Indiana, but most still went to Mexico.

In his current term, Trump has said he is using tariffs to force manufacturing jobs back to the US. So far, there is little sign of this strategy working, and the Supreme Court has recently declared some of his tariffs illegal and ordered that the money be repaid. Even if manufacturing businesses were to come back to the US, they would be “job light” because manufacturing these days relies more on robotics and automation than on people.

It is hard to push against the job logic of technological change. Of course, it is cruel and devastating for the individuals involved, especially if they find themselves in a “black employment hole” with no apparent way out.

Which bring me back to the “AI Terminator” and what it may do to jobs in the tech industry. In a piece in the Financial Times, Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Tufts University’s Fletcher School points to work recently conducted at Digital Planet, a research centre at Tufts, which looked at vulnerabilities across 784 occupations.

The economics are striking: 9.3mn jobs and $757bn in annual income are at risk within five years, rising to 19.5mn jobs and $1.5tn if AI adoption accelerates. But the more consequential finding is the geography of the displacement. The occupations most at risk are concentrated in the “wired belts”: regions that have thrived on data, content and cognitive work. These areas may well become the new rust belts, stretching from the familiar tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Boston and New York to Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix. Suburban knowledge corridors surrounding major US swing-state cities rank among America’s most vulnerable.

19.5 million jobs. That is some potential hit. And the people who will be hit are tech-savvy; they know how to communicate, they know how to TikTok, and they will not be voiceless.

What will be the political consequences when a new class of the “digitally disposed” emerges? As it inevitably will. They will come for the “Tech-Bros” who did this to them. It is written in the stars. They will not go quietly into that good night, to borrow from the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.

Europe will be hit by this as well. As I was writing this, a comment popped up on the left-of-centre website Social Europe. It quotes a stark statistic:

A month ago, the EU’s career office published statistics on applications for its prestigious civil service exam. Two data points stand out. First, a total of 174,922 applications have been filed for 1,500 positions — almost three times the expected number. Second, 45 per cent of them (79,450) came from Italy.

But who knows how all this will play out? As John Burn-Murdoch argues in a Financial Times column, history shows that while developments in technology always destroy old jobs, it also creates new ones. How many jobs, for instance, has internet streaming created for writers and actors?

But here is the thing. There is always a disconnect between those who lose the old jobs and those who pick up the new ones. How many of those who lost their jobs in Carrier in Indiana, are now starring in a Netflix series?

And the shift from the old to the new also takes time. In the meantime, the losers can be very politically sore while the Terminator is in town.

First, on Friday/Saturday, I was travelling and am now in Sitges, Barcelona, my home from home. Trying to write “on the run” was once possible, but now impossible as age slows the reflexes.

Second, the rest of this piece is about the US/Iran negotiations, and I was waiting to see what happened as a result of the meeting between Vance and the Iranians.

Third, I was also awaiting the outcome of the election yesterday in Hungary, an event of significant importance for the European Union, and indeed, for the wider world. Orban is out, losing in a crushing defeat to the opposition. Putin’s biggest European asset is no longer in power. The size of the opposition’s win gives it the power to undo most of Orban’s work over the past 16 years to embed “illiberal democracy” in the country.

More importantly, Orban’s defeat shows that the rise of the populist far-right can be halted and reversed. Orban has been funding the far-right across Europe for years. That funding should now come to an end. So yesterday was a good day for us democrats and social liberals who want a flourishing pluralist society, rich in diversity, as opposed to the narrowness of so-called “Christian nationalism”.

So to the Iran talks

Quoted in the Financial Times (here), Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think-tank in Washington, said:

“It’s one thing to declare a ceasefire on social media and it’s another thing to actually have an agreement where people have a shared understanding of the terms.”

Clearly, there was no such shared understanding because, as I write this, Iran is still blocking shipping passing through the Strait of Hormuz and Israel is still attacking Lebanon.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I was taught when I was a young trade union official back in the mists of time, that you should always finish a negotiation by making sure that the two sides agreed on what they had agreed. “Let me go over it one more time: Here is what we have agreed. Are we both agreed on that?”

Not as easy as it sounds. In the hothouse atmosphere of a negotiation, when outside realities can often get shut out, the parties can easily take opposite or divergent interpretations from what was discussed and agreed upon. We hear what we want to hear, and we seek confirmation for what we bring to the table beforehand. Such is the way of things.

Unless we leave a negotiation with an agreement on what has been agreed, there is every chance that the “deal” will unravel when it comes to implementation and reality bites. How often have you heard the words “But that is not what we agreed” thrown at you during follow-up discussions?

Ambiguity and imprecision may appear to leave “wriggle room” to play about with later, but, in the end, it just results in never-ending negotiations that sap energy and run up costs.

Best to be clear about what has been agreed on the day, even if that means there is not going to be an agreement because the two sides differ on what has been agreed. If you leave the meeting with different interpretations of what has been agreed, then accusations of bad faith take root, and mistrust grows. Getting a clear and agreed agreement is hard work and takes time.

Well then, what did you expect from the talks in Pakistan, arranged as they were on the basis of two widely different interpretations of the ceasefire agreement? The US sent a VP who has never negotiated an international agreement before in his life, along with two estate agents, as its negotiating team, and expected to get a deal to end a bitter war in less than 24 hours. Hostilities that have lasted for over 40 years, one way or the other. Good luck with that.

As I have written before in these Scribblings, the US has lost every war it has engaged in since WWII. Can you call a divided Korea a success? Vietnam is now a Communist state. And the US basically just walked away from Afghanistan and Iraq. So much winning. Kidnapping a South American dictator is small potatoes.

I see Donald Trump quoted a saying that he did not care if VP Vance and his team did a deal with Iran during the talks in Pakistan because the US “had already won”. Well, if that is winning, I’d hate to see what losing looked like.

Just to take stock. It is now pretty clear that the US was sold a “bill of goods” by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (here), promising that once decapitated, the theocratic regime in Iran would crumble, with the “streets” rising up to oust the mullahs. A few bombing raids would do it. Some were sceptical, such as Vance and Rubio, but Trump bought it, lock, stock and two smoking barrels.

What was to be easy turned out to be no such thing. After a multi-billion-dollar attack, Iran is still standing. A theocratic leadership is still in place, a leadership that marches to the sound of a different drum than the commercial transactionalism of Trump. Did Trump really believe that it would be a “beautiful thing” for Iran to levy a $2m tariff on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, provided it split the money with the US, or did he mean, split the money with him? JP Morgan estimates that such a levy could pull Iran in close on $90bn a year. Not a bad outcome from a war that you apparently lost. A $90bn income stream that you did not have before the war began. Such is the cost of losing. Who knows what it would have been if Iran had won!

I have just finished reading a book about Henry Kissinger. Kissinger comes with very mixed reviews, and I would not be one of his biggest fans. But Kissinger was steeped in history and the lore of statecraft and knew what he was doing. Yet it still took him about six years to get the US out of the Vietnam War, and, in the end, the US just gave up and walked away. Today, Vietnam is a Communist state run from Hanoi.

From press reports, it would seem that there are unbridgeable distances in the negotiating position of the US and Iran. Iran seems to have found strength in adversity. The US appears to be trying to return to the status quo ante, the status quo that existed before the war on Iran was unleashed. So, who knows how this thing ends, if it ever does.

But at least this morning it looks like we can welcome a new Hungary back into the European family. Be thankful for that.

Remember, the EU only came into existence in 1958. In the wider sweep of history, what it has managed to achieve in the past sixty years should not be underestimated. Europe is a continent that, over the centuries, has had “forever wars”, some of which lasted more than 100 years. And we killed millions of our fellow Europeans over religious differences. Those who want to bring religion back into politics should remember this.

One country stands apart from the rest of the continent. No, not Switzerland, which is as closely integrated with the EU as you can get without being a member. Switzerland allows for the free movement of people and is in the Schengen regime.

Of course, it is Brexit Britain, a country that decided ten years ago to leave the European Union and go its own way.

Go back and read some of the things that were said by Brexiters at the time. The UK’s leaving would be the trigger that would lead to the collapse of the Union as other countries followed it out. They wanted this to happen, for the EU to fall apart. The UK would then take the lead in building a new arrangement of free trading countries, shorn of all the stuff the UK never liked about the EU, such as its suite of labour and employment laws, not to mention the single currency. The UK would soon be cutting trade deals across the world, not least a mega deal with the US. Sunlit uplands beckoned.

There were no sunlit uplands. Just grey and dismal lowlands, forever enveloped in a fog of lies and uncertainty. Now perhaps, Brexit Britain was unlucky in its choice of leaders, after the man who had called the referendum, David Cameron, cut and run. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and then Rishi Sunak. Hardly a parade of political titans, blessed with the political skills needed to guide the UK through turbulent times.

After the chaos of the Tories’ time at the helm, Labour was returned to office in 2024 with an artificial landslide. I say artificial, because you cannot in your heart believe that 34% of the vote is a landslide, even if it gave Labour an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. But Labour immediately proceeded to squander the power of its majority with a series of ill-judged decisions.

I am Irish and not British, so I have generally tried to avoid commenting on UK government policies, with two exceptions. First, as my day job is working with large US multinationals on labour and employment issues, I take a keen interest in what is happening in this legislative area. For example, the Employment Rights Act is just now of particular interest, especially those provisions which touch on collective bargaining and trade union recognition. I take the same interest in similar laws in EU countries.

As anyone who reads these Scribblings and my previous Brexit Blogs knows, over the past ten years I have written frequently about the relationship between the UK and the European Union.

The world today is a very different place from the world in which the UK narrowly voted for Brexit. The Russian attack on Ukraine has brought the scourge of war back to the European mainland. China has become a major economic and technological power, already dominating many of the industries of the future such as solar, wind power, and EVs. At the same time, its intentions towards Taiwan are uncertain.

The utter unpredictability of the US president, Donald Trump, makes for a nervous world. When it comes to Trump, I am reminded of the conversation between Alice and the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass:

Alice: “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

The Queen: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Which is what Trump does and then changes his mind before dinner in the evening. Call it Trump Through the Looking Glass: 10 Impossible Things in One Day.

It is no secret that the overwhelming majority of Labour Party members want the UK to again join the EU. However, before the 2024 general election, the leadership committed to three red lines in an attempt to appeal to Brexity working-class voters: no to the customs union; not to the single market; and no to free movement. The leadership will not move off these red lines, even as the economic evidence stacks up about the damage that Brexit has done to the UK economy, estimated by a team of US researchers to amount to as much as 8% of GDP. See also these comments from the former chief economist at Goldman Sachs: here.

The leadership position defies logic. If you were aware of something that was wrecking your economy by as much as 8% in lost GDP, would you not move to put an end to it and reap the financial rewards in extra taxes flowing into the public coffers? As John Maynard Keynes is reputed to have said: “When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?” Stick with the red lines, it seems.

UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, seems to think that the UK will be able to gain access on a sector-by-sector basis to the EU Single Market.

“It is increasingly clear, as the world continues down this volatile path, our long-term national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe and with the EU,” he said. (here) and (here)

But, as the Financial Times (here) notes:

As Reeves and Starmer have both made clear, improving ties with the EU is also an increasingly important pillar of the government’s growth plan. But the party’s strategy to seemingly cherry-pick arrangements with the bloc will make substantive progress on negotiations difficult.

Since the days of the Coal and Steel Community in the early 1950s, through the years of the Common Market, and then the European Union, the UK has always wanted to be in and out at the same time. In for the things it liked and out for the rest. It finally got to the point when it could not stomach staying in, even for the things it liked and left.

From the perspective of the members of the EU, once bitten, twice shy. Does a leopard ever really change its spots?, they will ask. Rightly so.

Sometimes, you get the impression that the UK government thinks it can negotiate a deal with the EU Commission to “slip in the back, Jack”, to borrow from Paul Simon. But when it comes to the really big decisions, it is the member states that decide, not the Commission.

Why would member states agree to give the UK, which walked out of the EU in a huff, access to the Single Market on a sector-by-sector basis on the cheap? Or any other basis for that matter. You only have to ask the question to know that they won’t. They are not going to give the UK a competitive advantage over their own businesses. Especially when the UK wants to keep sectors where it thinks it is ahead out of the Single Market. The phrase “cherry picking” may be a little hackneyed by now, but it remains true, nonetheless.

Further, with all else it has on its plate, is the EU going to spend time and resources negotiating with the UK when people in Brussels can read UK newspapers and UK polls and know that Starmer is politically tanking?

I wouldn’t. Would you?

Three final points. First, despite all of the above, the change in tone from UK leaders towards the EU is welcome if, for the moment, that is all it is, a change in tone.

Second, if you are going to open a negotiation with another party, then you need to know exactly what it is you want and be prepared to spell that out when the discussions start. And it is not helpful if, from the get-go, you lay down red lines which you will not cross, but then you expect the other party to cross their red lines to give you the deal you want.

Finally, the UK’s approach to the EU, as set out by Starmer in last Wednesday’s speech, is the same as it always was; membership is just an economic and financial transaction to be decided by the balance of pounds and pence, preferably in the UK’s favour. No hint of any buy-in to the ideals of the wider European project.

But then, as Napoleon is reputed to have said, the UK is little more than a nation of shopkeepers, open all hours.

We talk about the need to have clear objectives, do thorough preparation and planning, get a mandate approved by stakeholders, and have a detailed plan of execution. And focus on the follow-up. You need to have identified your options if the negotiations fail. You should also try to put yourself in the shoes of the other party and work out in advance how they will react to your proposals and what they will do if the negotiations breakdown. You should not be surprised by anything that happens. If you are surprised, then you haven’t planned.

I think if you turned that paragraph into a checklist, there is not one of the items on the list that could be ticked off.

It is clear that Trump thought he could pull off “Venezuela 2.0,” decapitate the regime, install a compliant thug as the new leader - because Trump only likes dealing with thugs - and all would be well. And while the US and the Israelis did manage to decapitate the regime, the rest of the Iranian governing apparatus clearly had not read the script and declined to play the subservient roles Trump has in mind for them. They fought back and started hitting targets throughout the Gulf. Trump expressed surprise that they did so.

The Iranians are waging a guerrilla war against the Americans and the Israelis. Not the same sort of guerrilla war the Viet Cong fought against the Americans in Vietnam, but a twenty-first-century guerrilla war using drones, mines at sea, and small boats capable of attacking large resource-carrying ships. And who knows what else they might have available.

It has long been a truism among historians and military strategists that in the long run, superior force will always win out, and there is no more superior force than the US. But is this necessarily true? Russia is not winning against Ukraine. What was to have been a “smash and grab” campaign has turned into a long war. Neither the Russians nor the US prevailed against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The French had to quit Algeria. Even earlier, the British had to leave Ireland.

Size matters, but so also does the ability to take the political pain of a long conflict. There is no question but that the bulk of the populations of the US and Western Europe backed the Allies in WWII. And during the Cold War. But look at the civil and political turmoil in the US during the years of the Vietnam War. Or the demonstrations in the UK during the Iraqi War.

How long can Republican politicians in the US who support Trump and his “little adventure” against Iran take the political heat, especially with the mid-term elections coming up and the price of oil and oil-derived products such as fertiliser ratcheting up? This week, the Democrats flipped a Florida House seat from the Republicans, a seat that includes Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s country club and the unofficial “Winter White House”. In the words of the song, if the Democrats “can make it there, they can make it anywhere”, it is just up to them to do so.

The politics of democracies are different from those of dictatorships, like Russia, or medieval theocracies like Iran, whose ruling cliques are not under daily pressure from disgruntled citizens or 24/7 media. There is a limit to the political pain that the leadership in democracies can take. There is no limit for the likes of Russia or Iran when citizens and soldiers are ruthlessly sacrificed in the cause of ideology or theology.

The attack on Iran may have flattened and degraded a great deal of its conventional military resources. It no longer appears to have an air force or a navy. But, as I said above, it is still capable of waging a drone guerrilla war and inflicting serious damage on those it attacks. As I write this, the Financial Times is reporting:

Drone and missile attacks continued after 12 US troops were hurt in an Iranian strike on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, one of the most significant attacks on US forces of the conflict.

More importantly, the attack on Iran has highlighted the critical importance of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s supply of oil has to pass. It was always recognised as a chokepoint, but the attack has underscored just how critical a chokepoint it is. The Iranians now know this and in future are likely to put a “tollbooth” across it. Pay to pass. Before the attack, ships sailed through freely. But the fact that the Iranians might make use of the leverage that the Strait gives them never seems to have occurred to those who planned the attack. They never put themselves in Iranian shoes and asked the question: What would we do if we were them? Well, now they know.

In response to Trump’s 15-point peace plan, as the Observer puts it:

Tehran has countered with its own demands: reparations for war damages, an end to attacks not just against Iran but its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, and recognition of its “exercise of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz”. This last point indicates Iran’s desire to formalise its biggest point of leverage – its ability to choke Gulf energy supplies and hold the world economy to ransom.

I have long had a rule-of-thumb in labour negotiations: If I can think of something, then so can someone on the other side. Best to work out in advance how you are going to respond when they do think of it. Because they will, even if it takes time. It did not take the Iranians long to figure out the leverage now and in the future that the Strait gives them. That leverage was always there. But Trump’s “little adventure” brought home to them just how important it could be.

Trump is now demanding that allies whom he failed to consult before he launched his “little adventure” come to his aid and help him safeguard the passage of ships through the Strait. He berates and insults them when they decline to help dig him out of the hole he has dug for himself. A sure way to get them to help him.

In any war or negotiation, you should have a clearly defined, measurable objective before you start. A precise, well-planned campaign to achieve that objective, stakeholders on board from the get-go, and contingency plans in place if the plan is knocked off course. Who was it who said that you can have a well-defined fight plan until you get hit with the first punch to the face? Mike Tyson, I think it was.

No matter how well you plan, you will always miss something. It is just the way things are. But if you have planned properly, you will have the resilience to cope with the unexpected, the unknown or unknowable.

It is just that Trump and his “warrior” Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, could not plan their way out of a paper bag. But Trump, who infamously dodged the Vietnam draft five times, now has a guerrilla war all of his own making to deal with.

But he will never put himself on the front line. To borrow from the title of an Irish book, Trump will always fight his wars “on another man’s wounds”.

I am Irish, from Dublin, and I would be quite happy to see a “merger”, as Trump puts it, of the two parts of the island. The sum would be greater than the parts, I believe. Nonetheless, while I was raised in a staunch Irish republican household, I came to realise a long time ago that “simplism” when it comes to nationalism is a dead end. I am under no illusions about how difficult a “merger” would be. I lost those illusions many years ago.

For the question is this. What constitutes a nation? Who determines that some particular piece of land should be one country? History, geography, language, religion, culture, tradition, or some mix of all of these. Are nations simply “imagined communities”, as Benedict Anderson puts it?

Is it not the case that practically every nation on this earth was born, or shaped, out of violence, whether war or revolution? Perhaps the “velvet divorce” of the Czech Republic and Slovakia might count as two countries being created peacefully, but it is the exception and not the rule. Maybe you could also include Switzerland.

There is no question that Ireland had a violent birth, as did the USA. France had the Revolution of 1798, Russia in 1918, and China had the civil war after WWII. That war is still unfinished. German and Italian reunifications in the 19^th century were not exactly bloodless. I could go on, but you get the picture. Polite moral codes rarely apply in these matters. When these nations were created, democratic means of looking to change things were generally not available.

Whatever about the past, surely today it might be argued, we are more civilised, and we have international conventions about the right to self-determination. For example, the UN Charter (1945), Article 1(2) sets the foundation, listing self-determination as a core UN purpose.

But who gets to “self-determine”? That is the critical question. In many countries, this is not a settled matter. I’ll come back to Ireland, where the issue is slightly more complicated than elsewhere.

Within the countries that make up the European Union, is the question of nationhood settled? No, it is not. In Spain, is every region happy to be ruled from Madrid? Don’t many in Catalonia or the Basque Country want their own independent nations? Is this regional desire for independence not a source of continuing tension in Spanish politics, with Castellans asserting that Spain is one, indivisible country and others disputing this?

I live in the north-east of France, a few kilometres from Belgium. I have lived in this part of the world for about twenty-five years. For as long as I have lived in Belgium and France, the question of the continued existence of Belgium as one country has been hotly debated. Between the Flemish in the north and the Wallonians in the south, there is constant rivalry, indeed bitterness. Not surprisingly, in Belgium, one of the homes of surrealism, the current prime minister, Bart De Wever, a Flemish nationalist, does not believe in the existence of Belgium as one nation. He wants to see it broken up. Only in Belgium could you have a prime minister who does not want his own job to exist.

The UK is no longer a member of the European Union. By a narrow majority, ten years ago in 2016, it voted to leave. It thought it would be better off on its own. As is by now well documented, that has not turned out to be the case, with one US study suggesting that GDP is some 8% lower than it would have been had the UK stayed in the EU. Many UK politicians know and accept this, but they lack the courage to try to lead the UK back into the EU. They are held hostage by English nationalism, a minority of the population, but a well-funded, vociferous minority.

The UK is a country, but it is not one nation. There are four parts to the UK: England, the dominant part, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. There is a strong movement in Scotland to see it go its own way, cut loose from the UK, and join the EU. We will see this coming May just how strong this movement is when the Scots vote for their regional parliament.

Could we also see a significant independence vote in Wales? Ever since anyone can remember, Wales has been a Labour stronghold, where they weighted the Labour votes rather than counted them. Out of Wales came Nye Bevan, who built the National Health Service while serving in the post-war Attlee government. Now, it seems the Labour vote in Wales is going to collapse. According to polls, Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, may be on course to lead the next Welsh regional government. Like the Scottish nationalists, they want to break away from England and lead Wales back into the EU as an independent, sovereign nation.

Political earthquakes could be coming in the UK. The now evident political limitations of the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, make this all the more likely.

Which brings me to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has two distinct political/religious groupings, which can roughly be categorised as Protestant/Unionist and Catholic/Nationalist. I know things are not as neat as that, but it will suffice for this Scribbling. These are rambling thoughts on a Sunday morning, not a profound and researched policy paper.

If within the UK, Scotland and Wales just want to go their own way, separate from England, this is not true of Northern Ireland. The statelet was created to deliver a “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People”, a land in which Catholic/Nationalists would always be in a minority. Except history plays cruel tricks, and it is now the Protestant/Unionists who are in the minority.

The Catholic/Nationalists want Northern Ireland to quit the UK and join with Ireland, merge, in Donald Trump’s words. The Protestant/Unionists want the province to stay with the UK. At some point, a referendum on the matter will be held, but who can say when? A democratic way of determining the future, though whatever the outcome, one side or the other will be bitterly disappointed. Will losers’ consent be forthcoming?

This is what makes Northern Ireland different from Scotland and maybe Wales, and Catalonia and Flanders. They all want to be independent, sovereign states. The two sides in Northern Ireland want to be part of another country, Ireland or the UK. There is no push for an independent Northern Ireland. For good reason. Northern Ireland is economically dependent on the UK. Northern Ireland, as an independent state, could not pay its own way.

Whether the calculus will change on the Protestant/Unionist side if Scotland and Wales break from England remains to be seen. The population of NI is close to 2 million. Let’s say that it is roughly 50/50 between Nationalists and Unionists. The population of England is now somewhere around 58 million. The population of Ireland is 5.3 million. Maybe it might be better to be citizens of a country, Ireland, where you can have a real say in deciding matters than to be a small minority in a country, the UK, where polls consistently show that a significant majority do not care for you and would wish you gone, and an increasing majority of your fellow citizens in Northern Ireland want to go anyway.

But who can know the future and the hold of political traditions on the mind?

One thing is certain, however. The future of both parts of the island of Ireland will be decided in a democratic manner. The days of violence are, hopefully, behind us, never to return. The violence of the IRA failed to deliver on its prime objective, to “liberate” Northern Ireland from the UK. For now, at least, it is still part of the UK, even if the power of the “Unionist Ascendancy” has forever been broken.

Where democratic means are available, even if they can be frustrating and take time, violence can never be acceptable.

Nationalist tensions across Europe are not going to go away anytime soon.

In our book, Respect, Thoughts on Workplace Collective Bargaining (here), Rick Warters and I lay out a systematic approach to the preparation and conduct of negotiations between management and employee representatives, whether the representatives be a trade union, a works councils, or some other form of legitimate representatives of employee in the workplace, as provided for by national law or practice.

We talk about the need to have clear objectives, do thorough preparation and planning, get a mandate approved by stakeholders, and have a detailed plan of execution. And focus on the follow-up. You need to have identified your options if the negotiations fail. You should also try to put yourself in the shoes of the other party and work out in advance how they will react to your proposals and what they will do if the negotiations break down. You should not be surprised by anything that happens. If you are surprised, then you haven’t planned.

All of this involved much work. If you launch a negotiation without having put in the hard yards, you are either bound to fail or else come up with a second-best agreement. You can’t “make it up as you go along”.

In looking at what has been happening in the Iran war, I am using the framework that Rick and I set out in our book.

The Guardian columnist. Jonathan Freedland says:

The goals identified by Donald Trump have shifted daily, if not hourly. One minute he wants regime change, the next he seeks merely an end to Iran’s nuclear programme. At breakfast, he insists on unconditional surrender; by lunchtime, he’s open to negotiation. here

In other words, there was not one clearly defined objective before the strikes on Iran began. When you do not know what you want, you are never going to get it, or probably get anything for that matter. You end up with a mess from which it can be difficult to find a way out.

There definitely does not seem to have been any in-depth planning before the strikes were launched. It appears that the working assumption was that if the US and Israel dropped enough bombs in wave after wave of blitzkrieg strikes, Iran would quickly collapse and surrender. That did not happen and was never likely to happen.

As an aside, here is a question. Since the end of WW11, is there any war in which the US has engaged that it has actually won? By victory, I mean that there is a stable, democratic government responsive to the needs of the people of the country in place after the war ends.

Can you describe what happened in Korea as a win? The country remains divided into two parts, and the bad side has atomic weapons. It definitely did not win in Vietnam, which today is a one-party Communist state. Nor did it win in Afghanistan, probably the most backwards-looking country in the world. And I am not sure that you can describe the current state of Iraq as a US victory.

Snatching Maduro from Venezuela was no victory as the country remains in the hands of a bunch of thugs, except they are thugs more responsive to US demands, especially when it comes to oil. Venezuelans are not any freer now than they were when Maduro held power.

In all of the wars listed above, there were countless US “boots on the ground”, and still the US did not prevail. Did Trump and his team think he could do from the air what former US presidents could not do from the ground? It seems they did. But then, when you have a reality TV star for president and a Fox News channel presenter as “Secretary of War”, what can you expect?

They seem to see the whole thing as some form of TV spectacular. As Trump said to ABC News: “I hope you are impressed. How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?

When it comes to anticipating how the other side might react, the administration seemed shocked that the Iranians might strike back. As Francis Fukuyama puts it, Trump and his associates:

... failed to anticipate Iran’s capacity to strike back, as it launched rounds of missiles and drones at U.S. allies and bases in the region, disrupting Gulf economies and raising gasoline prices in the United States.

In an interview with NBC News, President Trump said he was “surprised” that US allies in the Gulf have been targeted by Iran. He said it was “the biggest surprise I had of this whole thing.”

It would seem that Trump thought that if he took out the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, he could replace him with a compliant leader who would bow to American demands, as he had done earlier in Venezuela. That was never going to happen. While the theocratic regime in Iran, like Venezuela, is also run by a bunch of thugs, who thought nothing of gunning down around 30,000 protesters in January of this year, it has deep theological and ideological roots. Iran is run by true believers, and true believers cannot be easily bought, like some second-rate thug in Venezuela.

One Khomeini was replaced by another, harder-line Khomeini.

Further, as it has done, Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which a substantial amount of world oil supplies pass. In any conflict, you use all the leverage you have, and Hormuz gives the Iranians some significant leverage. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, in a somewhat bizarre comment, said that the Strait would be open for shipping if only the Irianians would stop shooting:

“The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that”.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told Fox News that one of the reasons President Trump launched Operation Epic Fury was that the Iranians might close the Strait:

“The fact that the terrorists are holding the global oil industry hostage by threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz just underscores the need for President Trump to launch this operation in the first place”

The Strait was open for business before the attack began. The attack is the reason it is now closed. There is some flawed logic in Leavitt’s statement.

In other words, as Hegseth sees it, the Strait is not open because the Iranians will not stop shooting. A bit like you starting a fist fight and then complaining that the other guy is hitting you back. You would be winning only for the fact that he is fighting back. How unfair.

The UK-based writer, Nick Cohen, reports the comments of a former US defence official who told CNN that every previous US president had focused on the danger to oil and gas shipments through the Strait:

“Planning around preventing this exact scenario…has been a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” he said as he watched the oil markets go haywire. “I’m dumbfounded.”

Unlike previous administrations, it is clear that those who started the war never put themselves in “Iranian shoes” and figured out what the Iranians might do in response.

As I write this, the media is reporting Donald Trump as saying that other nations will be sending ships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and that it should have been a “team effort” from the start. But how can it be a team effort if you do not inform and consult with your allies beforehand? If you expect them to be stakeholders in what you plan to do, you need to tell them and get their input. You cannot expect them to blindly follow.

Stakeholder buy-in beforehand is always critical to the success of any project.

Finally, President Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on Thursday that he isn’t concerned about what comes next after the war with Iran.

“Forget about next,” he replied to a question about the future of Iran, Karl reported on X. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”

Another pile of rubble in the Middle East. A sure basis for peace and stability. Some operation. Some plan. Some success.

As an example, take the current Israeli/US attacks on Iran, a war between the two sides, with others drawn in. When I turn on my computer, my screen is full of denunciations of what is happening as an “illegal war”, waged by a “deranged” madman in the White House and an Israeli prime minister trying to keep himself out of jail for corruption.

All of this may well be true. But is there any such thing as a “legal war”? Aren’t all wars “illegal” in one way or another? Certainly, Ukraine is more than entitled to defend against Russia’s brutal invasion of its territory and its stated intention to grab a chunk of Ukraine for itself. But is not what Russia has been attempting to do to Ukraine, going back to its annexation of Crimea in 2014, “illegal”?

The question is this. When it comes to what happens between countries, who gets to decide what is legal and what is not? The immediate answer to this question is usually “The United Nations”, but, to be completely honest, the United Nations is largely a failed institution and one of dubious moral value. Russia and China, hardly shining examples of liberal virtue and democratic practices, sit permanently on the Security Council. Are they to have a say in declaring a war legal or illegal? Of the 193 members of the UN, how many are autocracies or dictatorships? Is there a democracy anywhere in the Arab world? How many member countries of the United Nations are renowned for their lack of respect for human rights? Is ICE in the US well-regarded for its adherence to the rule of law?

The world is not morally black and while. It is shot through with deep shades of grey, if indeed there are any shades at all. Sometimes there are just moral black holes.

So, who gets to decide if the US/Israeli attack on Iran is legal or illegal? To further complicate the answer to this question is the fact that Iran is not exactly a model of good governance, dedicated to the welfare of its people. It is a brutal theocracy, run by a bunch of people, the mullahs, who believe that God is directing their actions and they alone know God’s intentions. Now, leave aside the question as to whether or not there is a God; I generally distrust people who believe they hear the voice of God in their heads and are filled with righteousness because of this. How many thousands of its own people did the Iranian regime slaughter earlier this year when they took to the streets to protest? Some put the number at around 30,000. Is it illegal to attack such a regime, especially when that regime is attacking neighbours through a bunch of proxies, such as Hezbollah?

It is worth making the point that there are people in the MAGA movement in the US who would like to turn the country into a Christian theocracy. Read the works of Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, or Stephen Wolf, if you doubt what I say. A recent book from Woolfe is called The Case for Christian Nationalism. I suspect that many in the MAGA movement have a sly regard for Iranian theocracy. It is just the wrong sort of theocracy, Muslim instead of Christian. There are some in the UK, in Farage’s Reform Party, who would like to work to a Christian nationalist agenda also.

Irish people of a certain, older age, who lived through the 50s and 60s, will know what it was like to live in a quasi-Catholic theocracy, which is what Ireland was in those years. The same is true of clerical fascism in Spain in the Franco era. Most of us do not want to see a return of those days. But there are some who do, such as Vox in Spain. There are those out there who want to reunite church and state, as was the case before the European Enlightenment. Liberal pluralism needs constant defending.

In 1648, after the Thirty Years’ War (1618 – 1648), the rulers of European countries, kings and emperors for the most part, signed the Treaty of Westphalia. It laid down the principle of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. Countries were to respect one another, not invade one another, and not interfere in one another’s internal affairs. It was more honoured in principle than in practice. How many European wars have there been since 1648, with one country attacking another?

A major driving force in the establishment of the European Union in the 1950s was to end the fetishisation of “national sovereignty” through the pooling of elements of that sovereignty in the name of the common European good. It has worked to considerable effect, and we Europeans are the better for it. Of course, the limited surrender of sovereignty was too much for many in the UK, and the recovery of sovereignty was a part of the rationale for Brexit, a desire to “take back control”. For many of the Brexiters, “taking back control” seems to mean following blindly where the US goes. Take back control from Brussels just to give it to Washington.

The European Union is a very imperfect institution, often very slow-moving in coming to decisions. But it is the only institution in the world where a group of countries have agreed to work together through genuine, common decision-making with a significant degree of democratic participation through national governments and the European Parliament.

But even the European Union takes morally dubious decisions, such as the way it behaves at times over migrant flows. But even in such situations, who decides what is the right thing to do? Before anyone points me in the direction of international courts, such as the ECHR and the ICC, let me say that I am not persuaded that such courts are capable of making what are complex moral and political decisions. Would you regard the current US Supreme Court as morally impeccable, and it is probably the most powerful court in the world?

My point is this. It is not always easy to know what is the right thing to do. Other than the mundane, all major political decisions involve a degree of moral judgement. Unless you have a black and white moral code, then doubt and uncertainty will always come into play. We grope in the dark to find the light. It will always be that way. The world is a deeply imperfect place. It will never be any other way.

Labour would be better announcing that it intended to apply to join the EU after the next election and take on the bitter Brexiters. Better to go down fighting than not to fight at all. At least, it is a strategy. Does anyone in Labour have a better one? here.

Well, some in Labour thought they had a better strategy. Tack to the right and take back those socially conservative voters lost to Reform. Be tough on immigration, including those already in the country, even though the UK needs immigrants to staff its hospitals and social services. Make it clear that the UK was not going back into the EU. Labour would hold the progressive left-of-centre vote because they had nowhere else to go. A win-win game plan.

Except after this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election, it turns out to be a lose-lose strategy. The socially conservative Brexit vote stayed with Reform. The left-of-centre vote went to the Greens. Gorton showed that left-of-centre voters do have somewhere else to go after all.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them

Labour is riding into the Valley of Political Death. The Charge of the Labour Light Brigade.

I am an Irish citizen. I hold an Irish passport. I live in France. I am as European as they come. I have been either a member of or affiliated with the Irish Labour Party since 1968. I am a European social democrat. I have had a deep interest in UK politics for as long as I can remember. And, of course, my sympathies are with Labour. Most of my many UK friends are Labour. That tends to be the way of the world. I want to see a Labour government lead the UK back into the European Union, where it rightly belongs.

But today, UK Labour is rudderless. It is a ship adrift on the political seas with no sense of direction, no guiding north star. The captain of the ship appears to believe that he is entitled to be captain of the ship even though he does not know where he wants to go. Heave the ship to the right? Which is what Labour has been doing. But it is clear that that way lies dragons, and most of the passengers on RMS Labour do not want to go that way anyway. Come the next port of call, they will disembark and rebook on RMS Green.

So-called Labour strategists thought that left-leaning Labour voters had nowhere else to go and could be taken for granted. But Zack Polanski and his Green Party have now holed that strategy below the waterline, to stick with the shipping metaphor.

To the right of Labour is Reform. It would seem that the Tories, the Conservatives, are already somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. Their by-election result this week was the worst in their long history. Yet they released a statement which said: “... only the Conservatives have the experience, the plans and the team to ensure a stronger economy and a stronger country”. When you are as delusional as this, you are in a bad place. The Tories must already be smoking the grass the Greens want to legalise.

Reform is now the coming dominant force on the UK right. It is a party of little original thinking. It increasingly mirrors the US MAGA movement. In essence, it wants a return to what it believes was a golden age of a white, Christian Britain, where men were men and women were in the kitchen, and the country was a power in the world.

The Reform candidate in the by-election, the former academic and now rabid right-wing would-be influencer, Matt Goodwin, believes that just because you are born in Britain does not make you British. Presumably, he and Reform get to decide on a “blood and soil” basis who is entitled to call themself British and who is a lesser breed without the law. Not really a great pitch in today’s multicultural UK. It may appeal to barroom bigots, but there are only a limited number of them.

In the by-election, Reform’s candidate came second with just under 29% of the votes. The Tories got 2%. Between them, the Greens on 41% and Labour on 25% got 66% of the vote. Now, maths was never my strong point, but I make that 2 to 1 for the left-of-centre parties. Still, in the UK’s absurd first-past-the-post electoral system, 29% of the vote could get you into government. Electoral reform should be on Labour’s agenda.

Despite what UK PM Keir Starmer said in a statement on Friday, the Greens are not extremists. Many of their domestic and economic policies are where Labour once was before it drifted rightwards. They are unashamedly for the UK rejoining the EU. I know there are questions about their Israel/Gaza stance, but has anyone got an unproblematic position on this? Yesterday’s US/Israeli attack on Iran makes Middle East political issues even more complicated. who knows where we will be ina week’s time?

A couple of weeks back, Labour said goodbye to Morgan McSweeney, who was Starmer’s chief political strategist, because of his links to Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former Labour powerbroker, who this week was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

McSweeney was the architect of Labour’s tack to the right strategy. Several commentators described that strategy as “be seen to kick a woke hippie every day”, and the socially conservative working class will come back to Labour. Well, Labour did kick “woke hippies”, and the work hippies voted Green, and the socially conservative working class voted Reform. McSweeney’s Labour’s strategy can best be described as Labour kicking itself in the face.

A substantial part of the UK working class has gone right, just as many of those in France who once voted Communist now vote for Marine Le Pen. They will not move back left.

Part of the McSweeney strategy was for Labour to continue to pander to the anti-European prejudices of Brexit voters, even though Brexit has inflicted now well-documented enormous economic damage on the UK economy.

The absurdity of Labour’s European position was on full display this week when the Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, demanded that the EU “stop putting up barriers” to trade with the UK. here. Now, if I remember correctly, before Brexit, there were no barriers to trade between the EU and the UK. The barriers were always there for countries outside the EU. It was the UK that decided to put itself on the wrong side of the barriers by leaving the EU.

Labour continues to insist on its redlines of no return to the EU, the Single Market, the Customs Union, or freedom of movement. It is these Labour redlines which keep the barriers in place. Kyle’s position can be summarised as follows: Please, can we be in and out at the same time? Eh, no.

Now, I know the complexities of what would be involved in Labour dropping its redlines and seeking to rejoin the EU. EU member states would rightly be wary of having the cuckoo back into the nest. especially if the cuckoo votes Reform at the next election.

But socially conservative anti-EUism is a dead political end for Labour. Reform has that demographic. And it tops out at around 30%.

When it comes to Europe, Labour needs to change course, change direction. I understand that it is bad faith to break manifesto commitments. But when the facts change, you need to change your mind. Labour also needs to rethink other policies, such as its hard-line Home Office policies on migrants, and it should also consider electoral reform. But I will leave these to others to discuss more fully.

In the late 1980s, when Jacques Delors was the EU Commission president, Labour and the UK trade unions saw a future in the European Union. The UK’s future still lies in Europe. The Churchillian “special relationship” with the US has been blown apart by MAGA, which will still be there even when Trump is gone. Dip into “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” by Laura K. Field to understand why this will be the case. Trump is just the arrowhead of the MAGA right, which has deep ideological roots. I’ll write about this further in the coming weeks.

At the next election, Labour should make the European offer I suggested some weeks ago, as repeated at the top of this piece. And drop the anti-immigrant bigotry. And put real electoral reform on the agenda.

Forget the cannons to the right; be concerned about the cannons to the left.

There is an old management adage: If you want to change the policies, change the people. If Labour need to change the people to change the policies, so be it.

Have a read of this. Here. It is a story from Australia about the Victoria Police Association objecting to a legal right to work from home 2 days a week that is being considered by the government of Victoria. Why are they objecting? Because the police can’t work from home, and if they can’t work from home, no one should be able to work from home.

I was away during the past week with some time on my hands, so I scribbled the following imaginary scene:

The bell rings. The doors opens. A man in a police uniform is standing outside.

G’day mate. My name is Digger Dundee, that is Inspector Digger Dundee to you. I and from the Victoria Police Association. We in the Association have reports that you may be Working From Home (WFH). I am here to put an end to that.

Now, we in the Association know that you may soon have a legal right to work from home two days a week, two days too many as far as we are concerned. We will be pushing to have it stopped. In fact, some of us think that WFH should be made outright illegal.

It is just not fair. Why should you be able to work from home when we in the police cannot do so? Why should you be able to have a better work-life balance that than we can. If we can’t work from home, then no one should be able to work from home.

Do you know that because of WFH there is going to be a dramatic rise in criminal activity? Why? Because the police will not be able to recruit enough new police persons because everyone will want a job where they can WFH, save money on commuting, look after the kids, the dog, and grandad, and generally have a better quality of life. So, by WFH you will be contributing to a crime wave.

Like in the movie, Minority Report, we in the Association think it is better that we stop you before you commit a crime, or facilitate a crime being committed. Preventive policing we call it.

Whenever I see that movie, I always think I look a bit like Colin Farrell, don’t you think. He was in that movie. Did I tell you there is a bit of Irish in me? Back in the day, one of the ancestors came over on a convict ship. So, I know a potential criminal when I see one. Its in the blood. And I am looking at you now as a potential criminal.

So, Inspector Dundee, is it the position of the Victoria Policy Association that if you the police cannot have certain working conditions, no one should have such conditions.

That’s about it, mate. Fair dinkum. No doubt about it. Because you selfishly want to work from home, you will be responsible for a crime wave. We in the police want you to subject yourself to a daily commute, five days a week, better yet, make that six. It will be character building.

But technology allows me to do some of my work from home. It is not necessary that I be in the office everyday. If I can deliver results for my employer, surely that is what counts?

Not in our book mate, and you do not want to be in our book.

If we in the police cannot work WFH then no one should. If we cannot figure out to make the police an attractive career, then that has to be someone else’s fault, and as far as we in the Association are concerned, it is the fault of those who work from home.

Time to end this blight on society. Enough of this woke nonsense. Time for you mate to return to work under the constant beady eye of your manager. That is what they are doing on Wall Street and if it is good enough for Wall Street then it is good enough for Flinders Street in Melbourne.

Remember, we have our eye on you and your name will be going into our book. I’ll be off now. Just finished my shift and I am due to compete in a police golf tournament.

Obviously, I think that the Police Association is wrong in its opposition to working from home but I have written before about what I call the “new industrial divide”, the division between those who can work from home and those who have to be at their place of work every day. Those who have to turn up daily stretch from people working in factories, to those in hospitality and, yes, the police and firefighters, and those who staff our hospitals. But then, every job has different working conditions and often dramatically different pay ranges, and we don’t generally demand that we are all on the same terms and conditions across the board.

There is no doubt in my mind that the ability to WFH offers a better work-life balance to those who can work from home, and it should be facilitated wherever possible.

But, we also need to look at the structure of work for those who have to be there every day and see what can be done to offer them some flexibility. Nothing is impossible, and ways can be found.

My final comment on WFH will probably put me at odds with many. I am not persuaded that there should be a right to work from home. I am very much in favour of WFH, or remote work in general, where it is possible and where the employer is willing to allow it. I have no issue if people work from different countries, digital nomads, if you will. Personally, I work from all sorts of places, but then I am freelance. My own experiences underscore the fact that good and productive work can be done remotely, but it requires organisation and self-discipline.

In what I will call the Western World, we live in either liberal market or social market economies, and the mark of such economies is that it is for the employer, who provides the jobs, to decide how work is to be organised, subject to the terms of any collective agreements there may be. Certainly, the law puts limits on how work is to be organised, such as is to be found in the EU’s Working Time Directive, or pay equality directives, but this is different to giving employees a right to dictate their place of work or letting them decide what days they will come to the office.

Nor should it be for labour courts or employment tribunals to make management decisions saying an employee should be entitled to work from home. Courts and tribunals are not some form of “shadow management” with the power to make entrepreneurial decisions, deciding how a business should be organised.

I am very much in favour of WFH, and I believe that any management that point-blank refuses WFH options will pay a talent price, as some of the best and the brightest who can WFH look elsewhere for opportunities. But the decision to allow WFH has to be a management decision. I do not believe that it is something that should be imposed on an unwilling management. That way only lies trouble.

A Coda: Unfortunately, Inspector Digger Dundee was disqualified from the golf tournament for missing his tee time. Caught in traffic, it seems. Too many commuters on the roads. If only there were some way to cut down on the number of commuters.

Now, back to reading about the week’s other big stories.

But no, it was just another UK Labour politician admitting that Brexit was wrong and economically damaging, but not having the courage to suggest reversing it. Just another suggestion that a way should be found to give the UK all the economic benefits of the Single Market without the concomitant obligation of free movement of people, a cornerstone of the Single Market.

According to the Financial Times:

Rachel Reeves has vowed to seize the “biggest prize” in global trade with a new push to build ties with the EU, as the UK chancellor prepares to pull back from a potential clash with Brussels over habitat rules. Setting out plans for closer economic and security ties with the EU, Reeves on Wednesday heralded plans for an unwinding of Brexit, declaring: “The biggest prize is clearly with the EU. The truth is economic gravity is reality.” Reeves said Britain was prepared to unilaterally align with Brussels’ rules to try to build trade with the bloc.

Speaking at the London School of Economics at an event organised by the Brussels-based Bruegel think-tank, Reeves said:

“There are three big economic blocs: US, China and Europe. “We will always seek every opportunity to grow our economy and these trading relationships but ultimately only one of these is on our doorstep, and so the biggest prize is closer integration with Europe.”

Reeves is also pushing the EU not to penalise British companies with the EUs’ new “made in Europe” plan, saying: “We are Europe too and need to be part of that. The EU doesn’t have the luxury of saying we can exclude countries that share our values.”

All of which begs the obvious question: If all of this is the case, then why did you leave the EU? Further, if all of this is true, why do you not look to rejoin the EU?

We know the answer to these questions. Because rejoining the EU, or even the Single Market, would involve a return to the free movement of people. This is something this Labour government, with its obsession with immigration, cannot accept under any circumstances, and so it ties itself in knots looking for European economic benefits without European obligations. Boris Johnson best described this as “cake and eat it, also known as “cherry picking”.

Now, to be honest, I have never seen anything wrong with attempts at “cherry picking”. It happens all the time in the business world, and certainly in my own field of labour relations. It is a strategy of trying to maximise your benefits while minimising your costs. Nothing wrong with that. It is a rational strategy.

But it will only work if you have the leverage to pull it off. You can only “cherry-pick” from a position of strength, not of weakness. And the UK, with Brexit, has put itself in a position of weakness with the EU, not to mention leaving itself vulnerable to the other two economic superpowers, the US and China. The lingering belief on the part of some in the British elite that the UK is still a world power and not a medium-sized country off the Eurasian landmass unhinges judgment.

During the past week, EU leaders met in a castle outside Brussels to consider how to reboot the EU economy. Now, we need some perspective. The EU is still one of the richest regions in the world, but it faces challenges. The rise of the Chinese car manufacturers, for example, is driving a stake through the heart of the European auto industry, with more than 100,000 jobs on the line over the coming years. Of course, the competition is unfair because of Chinese state subsidies, but that is the world we live in.

An even bigger problem is demographic change. Europe, like much of the rest of the world except for Africa, is an ageing continent. We grow old and live longer because of advances in medical science and because we are well nourished in our younger days. At the same time, the number of births is below the replacement rate of 2.1 per family, well below in the cases of some countries. A declining population drains away the finances needed to sustain welfare systems, especially as public pensions take an increasing share of national budgets.

But the obvious solution, to allow migration to replenish the population, is politically unpopular everywhere. Just this week, it was announced that Switzerland is to hold a referendum to limit the population to 10 million by banning migration into the country. And we have the far-right Reform candidate in a byelection in the UK, the former academic Matt Godwin, on record as saying that families that do not have children should be heavily taxed, so as to boost the “indigenous” UK population, generally taken to mean the white population. Of course, in both cases it is racism by another name.

I know that neither Switzerland nor the UK are EU members, but the positions on migration and population symbolised by the proposed referendum and Goodwin’s views can be found in most EU countries and are behind the rise of far-right parties.

So, yes, Europe has its own problems to grapple with, and there is little or no political bandwidth to listen to special pleadings from a UK looking for bespoke deals. EU leaders can read UK newspapers and know that, as things stand, Labour is on course to lose the next general election. A potential Reform/Tory government would move to reverse any deals that the EU would make with the Labour government. Why make a deal in the knowledge that it will be torn up before the ink is even dry?

Labour would be better off announcing that it intends to apply to join the EU after the next election and take on the bitter Brexiters. Better to go down fighting than not to fight at all. At least, it is a strategy. Does anyone in Labour have a better one?

Sometimes those of us who log onto LinkedIn or Bluesky or other such sites forget that we are in the minority, and quite a small minority at that, and that our preoccupations about “my journey of self-discovery”, or some other such thing, are alien to most. Do they have enough money at the end of the week or the end of the month, or sometimes in between, to make ends meet and be able to provide fire and food, warmth and nourishment, for those dependent on them? This is their main concern.

In recent years, because of the faltering of economic growth and the flatlining of real disposable incomes, for many, too many, that struggle has become harder and harder. That life is not improving year-on-year, as was the case with their parents, helps explain the rise of political populists of both right and left, with their simplistic solutions and the pinning of blame on “others”, meaning migrants, for all economic woes.

But there is little evidence that the nostrums of populists, where they have come to power, and they have come to power in too many places, including the biggest economy in the world, have ever delivered for working people. But discussion on this is for another day.

What I want to consider today is the centrality of work and the way that work gives meaning to our lives. Work is not just what gives us the money to live, it is also the ecosystem which determines the pattern of our daily lives, where we make friends, meet potential life partners, realise ambitions, and experience failures. Sometimes brutal failures.

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, when most of us stopped working on the land, the rhythm of industry has been the organising principle of our lives. “Going to work” is our 9-to-5. We have, of necessity, to structure our lives around this. At times, that can be difficult, very difficult, especially when you have to take on caring responsibilities for the young, the old, or the ill. Which mainly still today, falls to women and which largely explains the gender pay gap of 12% in Europe. Women work less than men because they have to take on responsibilities that men shun.

In writing about work, I am more than conscious that we live and work in a market economy, a capitalist economy if you will, where, while work is central to our lives, our work is directed and controlled by others in the furtherance of economic gain. That is the system, and most people seem content with the system because that is what they vote for in elections. If you want to change the system, make the people an offer they can relate to and go and get the votes. Of course, you would be pushing a rock up a hill, but that’s the way it is. Whoever said that the system was fair?

Having said that, I am conscious of the tension that exists in workplaces between managerial authority and employee autonomy. To put it bluntly, no one likes being told what to do. Having to accept being told what to do is the price we pay for having a job. But we bristle at it, nonetheless. By the way, this tension has nothing to do with Marxism or class conflict, or any other left-leaning ideology. It is just human nature.

For all its conflicts and contradictions, work is what largely defines us. How quickly in a conversation with someone you have just met for the first time does the question get asked: “Tell me, what do you do?” Your answer allows them to determine your social status and whether it is worth their while continuing to talk to you. “I am a senior executive with a multinational company” will certainly elicit a different response than “I drive a refuse truck”, even though the refuse truck driver may be adding more social value than the multinational executive.

These thoughts about the centrality of work to our lives were prompted by some recent remarks by a British government minister, In late January 2026, UK Investment Minister Lord Jason Stockwood indicated that the British government is actively discussing the introduction of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to support workers in industries facing disruption from artificial intelligence (AI). He argued that UBI could act as a financial “soft-landing” or safety net for workers whose jobs are eliminated by rapidly advancing AI technology.

UBI is a social welfare proposal in which all citizens receive a minimum income from the state in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e., without a means test or need to perform work.

For a start, let me say that I am not persuaded that AI will be the job destroyer that people think it will be. Of course, some jobs will go; that has always been the way with technological change. Look at the shift from agriculture to manufacturing, and now to services. But as old jobs go, new ones are created. Think of the jobs that now exist that were not even dreamt of twenty years ago. For example, how many jobs has the streaming service, Netflix, created? Sure, they are not the jobs of old, but there are plenty of happy actors out there because of Netflix. Not to mention the jobs it creates in the communities where its series are filmed. Has the North of Ireland done badly out of Game of Thrones? New Zealand out of Lord of the Rings? Some planet somewhere or other out of Star Wars?

As Schumpeter noted, the market economy is in a constant process of creative destruction. New actors come up with disruptive, fresh ideas and technologies that push older business practices aside. Think of the way Amazon has completely changed buying habits. How many people worldwide now make their living from Amazon, one way or the other? Or look at the way Ryanair revolutionised air travel in Europe. Both models have their critics, but you cannot gainsay the way they have changed things.

But my point is this. I am not convinced that getting a handout from the state in the form of UBI will result in people leading meaningful lives. What are they going to do all day? Gardening? House improvements? Watch television? You can only talk to the wall so many times before you get the message that the wall does not talk back.

People need to be with people. We are social animals. And people need to be with people for a purpose. Just “hanging out” does not cut it.

So no, UBI is no answer, though proper welfare payments are a bedrock of a decent society. We will find a way forward. We humans always do. We will continue to find a way to create jobs and give work to those who want to work, which is most of us.

Mind you, the Daily Express is having none of Britain sneaking back closer to Europe. A recent front page said that it was time the UK had a “Proper Brexit”. Maybe no one has told the Express headline writers that the UK has had a “Proper Brexit”. It is no longer a member of the European Union. It has left. That’s what Brexit was about. The UK leaving the EU.

What the Express really means by a “Proper Brexit” is that since leaving, the UK has not implemented a suite of right-wing policies that would further impoverish the country, on top of the up to 8% of GDP that Brexit has already cost it, and further isolate it from its continental neighbours.

But as I say, enough of politics. If you are looking for something to do this weekend, and the weather wherever you are is not great, you could always go to the cinema and see Melania, the $80 million documentary about Melania Trump, the wife of Donald Trump. Mind you, from press reports, there is every chance you could find yourself alone in the cinema. It would seem that the documentary, if it can be called that, is not the winter blockbuster it was hoped it would be. As they used to say, it is a movie that will go “straight to video”, that no one will either buy or rent. No doubt, Trump will claim it was one of the greatest movie releases of all time, but the money taken at the box office does not lie.

Instead of politics, what I want to scribble about this week is a news item that caught my attention about working life.

Factions in Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Party (CDU) are at loggerheads over calls by the business wing of the party, mainly representing small businesses, to ban the legal entitlement that employees have to work part-time. Those arguing for the ban say that those wanting to work fewer hours should need special permission to do so.

They argue that, as the economy is suffering from a lack of skilled workers, no one should have a legal entitlement to do what they refer to as “lifestyle part-time work”.

“Those who can work more should work more,” Gitta Connemann told the news magazine Stern, which obtained a leaked copy of a proposal which is expected to be passed at the CDU’s general conference in Stuttgart next month, at which point it would become official party policy. The party’s leader, Friedrich Merz, recently commented that the country’s prosperity will not be maintained “with a four-day week and work-life balance”. Work not for yourself and your family, but for your country, would seem to be the logic of their position.

The call has been rejected by Denis Radtke, the MEP who leads the social wing of the CDU, and is close to the trade unions.

Currently, every employee in Germany has a fundamental right to part-time work, with many, particularly women, often needing to do so for reasons relating to childcare or looking after elderly relatives. It is the same everywhere, which largely explains why there is a 12% gender pay gap in the EU. Taken as a whole, women work fewer hours than men.

Radtke accused the Connemann wing of getting things wrong:

“Such a restriction amounts to putting the cart before the horse,” he told journalists. He said he would like to see more people who were in part-time work enter or return to full-time employment, but that for many it was perceived as a trap, with employers often unhelpfully inflexible over the hours needing to be worked, people getting paid less and facing restrictions over career development.

Radtke said childcare and care of elderly people had to improve in order to create the conditions for those who wanted to work to do so. But restricting the right to part-time work to caregivers or parents would mean defining the level of care and age of children up to which such care was necessary, when “this can and should be decided by every family individually”, he added.

Now it is not often that I would find myself on the same page as Denis Radtke, but I have to agree with what he says here. I have little time for those who fetishise the 9/5/5 work week. That is, working 9 to 5, 5 days a week. In the office, the hospital, the hotel, the factory, or wherever.

The 8-hour workday, 5 days a week, is a social construct. There is nothing written anywhere which says it is a permanent law of nature.

It is worth recalling that Henry Ford introduced the 5-day, 40-hour workweek for his factory employees in September 1926, changing the standard from a 6-day to a 5-day week, creating the modern work-free weekend. Others soon followed. Before that, the only day off for most workers was Sunday.

In June 1936, the Popular Front government in France, led by Léon Blum, passed a law giving workers two weeks of annual paid holidays for the first time. Whatever about the United States, no European country now limits holidays to just two weeks. The balance between work-time and non-work-time are social and political decisions that vary from country to country. There is no “right balance”, no right answer. What you consider to be the right working time regime is a value judgement, and value judgements are driven by what you value. Europeans value leisure time. Americans seem to think differently.

Personally, I believe in maximum working time flexibility, where possible. Covid showed us that remote work can be just as productive as office-based work, eliminating wasteful daily commutes. I am mindful that remote work is not possible for everyone. I estimate that only about 40% of the workforce can work remotely; the rest have to be at their place of work every workday. But remote work is just one form of work flexibility. Other forms are available for those who have to turn up and be on site.

We will also have to think creatively about the organisation of work as AI crashes, tsunami-like, through our systems. For now, I am not persuaded that AI is all it proponents say it is, and the danger of an AI bubble bursting is all too real, but it is here to stay and will change things one way or the other.

My point is this. The way we work, how we work, and the times at which we work are social constructs. What we once constructed, we can knock down and reconstruct. We should not be afraid of change. And the answer to today’s problems is not a return to some mythical past where everyone worked full-time.

And while we are at it, we should also talk about the age of retirement. I am not one to suggest that people should work until they drop; they should be able to stop work at a reasonable age and have a decent retirement. On the other hand, people should be able to continue working for as long as they feel they can work, if that is what they want to do. We will have to discuss this anyway as the population ages and the birth rate drops.

To put it simply, we need to think about the flexible working life and personal choices within a framework of flexibility. Rigid regimes will not work in tomorrow’s world.

But I do think that the same broad principles apply when you have a negotiation between parties where their interests differ, maybe often widely, but they still also need to maintain a working relationship with one another for whatever reason into the future. That is the difference between a “deal” and negotiations. A deal is “one and done and walk away”. Negotiations assume a continuing relationship between the parties if the agreement is to be successfully implemented.

In any negotiation, there is one fundamental rule that needs to be observed at all times. Never reward bad behaviour. Rewarding bad behaviour only encourages more bad behaviour. If bad behaviour pays off once, the bad actor will try it again. Why not? It would be the rational thing to do. As I put it in last week’s Scribblings, feed a crocodile raw meat and it will surely come back for more.

Bad behaviour is best stopped the first time the bad actor behaves badly. You may have to take a hit and some pain, but standing firm is better than appeasement. In my world of labour relations, it could mean you are faced with a strike, but better a strike than to give in to unreasonable demands that will only encourage more unreasonable demands.

I should make it clear that the vast majority of labour relations negotiations are conducted in a reasonable manner and usually end with an agreement that both sides can be satisfied with. The world of labour relations is populated with decent people who disagree about some things but who know that it is better if they work together and find mutually acceptable solutions.

I use the phrase “mutually acceptable solutions” because I dislike the word “compromise”, the “meet in the middle” approach, with its suggestion that you should sacrifice some things that are important to you simply to get a deal. Good negotiators do not “compromise”. They search for solutions that offer benefits to both parties without having to give in on matters of principle.

Of course, with these remarks about negotiations, I am talking about Greenland and all that has happened in the past few weeks.

To recap, the US president, Donald Trump, said it was vital that the US take control of the island, which is an autonomous Danish territory. He said it was critical to the security needs of the US and that it was at risk from Russian and Chinese predations. He wanted the “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”.

The US has a treaty with Denmark, going back to 1951, that allows it to put bases on the island. At times, during the Cold War, it had 17 bases there. Now, just one. But there is nothing to stop the US from ramping back up its presence on the icy waste.

If the island wasn’t given to him, Trump implied, he would take it by force and for good measure, he would impose further tariffs on those European countries he saw as supporting Denmark. 10% to start with, rising to 25% if he did not get what he wanted.

But if Trump did not need Greenland for genuine security reasons because of the 1951 treaty, why did he want it?

“I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ It’s not different from a real estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly,” he told The New Yorker early last year.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Trump said that US ownership of Greenland was “what I feel is psychologically needed for success”. In other words, I want it because I want it and I need to own it.

Wanting something because you feel you are entitled to it and must have it is not what might be called a “strategic objective”. More like a tantrum that a toddler would throw. Bad behaviour. Give in, and the toddler will keep throwing tantrums. He or she will keep asking for more and more biscuits.

After having tried to appease Trump over the past year, no matter how irrational and counterproductive his behaviour, in the past few days, the Europeans said that enough was enough. They were supporting Denmark when it said that Greenland was not available, either by force or for a fistful of dollars. The good decided to stand up to the bad and the ugly. The stock market, sensing uncertainty, took a dip. Markets hate uncertainty.

At Davos this week, Trump walked back his Greenland demands. Maybe the markets spooked him, who knows? He said he wanted Denmark to give him Greenland, but he would not take it by force. Further, he would not impose extra tariffs on those European countries that had supported Denmark by sending a small detachment of soldiers to the island. He said of Denmark: “So, they have a choice. You can say ‘yes ‘and we will be very appreciative, or you can say ‘no’ and we will remember.”

To decode his words: If I do not get what I want, there will be retribution down the line.

Later in the day, it was announced that the US had agreed on the “framework of a future deal”. “We have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region”, Trump said after meeting Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte.

Now, for an old labour negotiator like me, two questions present themselves.

First, what right, if any, did Rutte have to negotiate anything with Trump? Was there a meeting of European stakeholders concerned with Greenland that discussed the matter in some detail and gave him a negotiating mandate? If there was, I do not recall seeing any reports of such a meeting.

Or was he just freelancing, taking it upon himself to speak for Europe? Rutte is the Nato Secretary General. He does not speak for the EU. Last time I looked, the US was still a member of Nato. So, Rutte was negotiating with Nato’s biggest member off his own bat about a piece of land that belonged to another Nato member. Or so it would appear. I am open to correction if I am wrong. But I do not think I am.

As the Irish Times reports:

Danish defence minister Troels Lund Poulsen, also in Davos, described his own meeting with the Nato head in diplomatic terms as “very useful for Rutte ... about the red lines of the kingdom”.

More outspoken was Greenland MP Aaja Chemnitz, who sits for the island in Denmark’s parliament: “In no way has Nato its own mandate to negotiate anything about us from outside. Nothing about us, without us.”

Which indeed suggests that Rutte was freelancing, negotiating without a mandate. Any “agreement” resulting from such talks has a high risk of falling apart once the parties get into the details of how things might work in practice. And who would be the parties to these talks in any event?

Which brings me to my second point.

How was it possible to negotiate even the “framework of a future deal” covering the entire Arctic in a matter of hours? As any serious negotiator knows, you do not go into discussions without detailed preparation. 90% of negotiations consist of preparation. We have seen how badly Brexit has gone for the UK because it took the decision to leave the EU without working out its options beforehand. Where and when was the preparation done for a framework agreement on the future of the Arctic region? Surely, there would have been newspaper reports of such discussions.

What appears to have happened is that Trump did what he likes to do: a quick deal that could easily fall apart when, later, the parties, whoever they are, get into the weeds of what needs to be done.

So, my negotiating takeaways from what has happened over Greenland are as follows:

• Do not reward bad behaviour. Rewarding bad behaviour does not work. It just encourages more bad behaviour.

• Do not freelance. Make sure you have fully consulted your stakeholders and have a negotiating mandate.

• You cannot negotiate “off the cuff”. You need to put in the hard yards of detailed preparation.

Want to know more about labour negotiations? Download the book written by Rick Warters and me, “RESPECT: Thoughts on Workplace Collective Bargaining”. It is free to download and can be found at this link: https://www.beerg.com/respect/