Six-day work weeks may become standard for workers in the private sector, according to a leaked email sent to The Ministry of Labour from the troika on Friday.

The email called for several changes in labour regulations preceding the next bailout. Most significantly, it proposed a reduction in the cost of hiring and firing workers, and increased flexibility in worker schedules.

The troika suggested that employers should be able to fire employees more easily. Specifically, they proposed cutting by half the amount of notice that employees receive before being fired, from 4-6 months to 2-3 months. Similarly, they asked that the compensation workers receive upon retiring be reduced by at least 50 percent, if they receive another pension, and that compensation for workers who are fired be reduced by up to 50 percent.

In terms of worker flexibility, the troika called for looser regulations governing working hours, so that employees might work for six days a week, with a minimum rest between shifts of only 11 hours. They also proposed to lift restrictions on switching workers between morning and evening shifts.

The troika’s demands are expected to cause increased conflict in the already tense relations between the General Confederation of Greek Labour (GSEE) and the government. (Athens News, le)

Troika = the NWO in action.
Bankers up-front running a country, determining it's policies and fuck the electorates wants or needs.

United States influence

A second criticism is that the United States’ transition to neoliberalism and global capitalism also led to a change in the identity and functions of international institutions like the IMF. Because of the high involvement and voting power of the United States, the global economic ideology could effectively be transformed to match the US's.

This is what convinces me Greece is some kind of European testing ground. Greeks aren't exactly renowned for stoically accepting external interference in their lives; I fear it's a case of "If we can get away with it there the rest of Europe will be a doddle" type thinking on 'their' behalf.

Looks like riot season may soon be upon us again!

It does seem that Greece is being used as a testing ground but that's not to say that similar isn't happening elsewhere. In Britain for example we have recently seen pensions crippled, relaxation of regulations on hiring and firing etc. It's just that it's being done that bit quicker in Greece imho.

The government's drug rationing body, Nice, is to be stripped of its power to turn down new medicines for use in the NHS, ending emotive battles with patient groups but raising the spectre of a postcode lottery for care.

The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, believes that Nice, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, should continue to write guidelines for doctors on the best treatments for their patients, but the Guardian understands he will remove its controversial power to ban the use of drugs it considers too expensive for the benefit they offer.

The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald's and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg's, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease, the Guardian has learned.

In an overhaul of public health, said by campaign groups to be the equivalent of handing smoking policy over to the tobacco industry, health secretary Andrew Lansley has set up five "responsibility deal" networks with business, co-chaired by ministers, to come up with policies. Some of these are expected to be used in the public health white paper due in the next month.

The Liberal Democrats were drawing up plans to abandon Nick Clegg's flagship policy to scrap university tuition fees two months before the general election, secret party documents reveal.

[...]

A month before Clegg pledged in April to scrap the "dead weight of debt", a secret team of key Lib Dems made clear that, in the event of a hung parliament, the party would not waste political capital defending its manifesto pledge to abolish university tuition fees within six years. In a document marked "confidential" and dated 16 March, the head of the secret pre-election coalition negotiating team, Danny Alexander, wrote: "On tuition fees we should seek agreement on part-time students and leave the rest. We will have clear yellow water with the other [parties] on raising the tuition fee cap, so let us not cause ourselves more headaches."

The document is likely to fuel criticism among Lib Dem backbenchers and in the National Union of Students that the party courted the university vote in the full knowledge that its pledge would have to be abandoned as the party sought to achieve a foot in government. Within a month of the secret document, Clegg recorded a YouTube video for the annual NUS conference on 13 April in which he pledged to abolish fees within six years.

Looking back, senior FSA sources identify those Unilever House meetings as the "beginning of the FSA abolition movement". They could see the writing on the wall for their traffic light labelling scheme, despite the research that showed it was the most helpful one for consumers.

Nevertheless, they were startled when newspapers reported in July that Lansley was planning to abolish the FSA altogether. They were startled not least because he had no powers to do so. Labour had set up the agency in 2000 in the wake of the BSE and E coli food crises by an act of parliament as a non-ministerial government department. It could only be abolished by parliament.

The FSA's chair, former Labour minister Lord Rooker, had been told by Lansley just before the election that the agency would lose its public health and nutrition role, which he himself would take back, and that it would go to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) if the Conservatives won.

The FSA's proposal to introduce traffic light food labelling on processed foods that would put a red light on foods high in salt, sugar or fat was where the companies drew their line in the sand. They thought a red light would be understood by consumers as "stop", and were not prepared to negotiate on a device that would damage their sales.

Although some retailers such as Sainsbury's, Asda and Waitrose accepted the FSA's scientific research supporting the value of traffic lights and introduced a version of them, Tesco and Morrisons were adamantly opposed.

The response from manufacturers to all these public health measures was a lobbying effort of unprecedented intensity, both in the UK and in Europe, according to senior sources from the regulator and Whitehall. Tesco, Kellogg's, Unilever and Kraft led a campaign to derail the FSA's labelling scheme by launching their own rival system based on guideline daily amounts (GDAs), which FSA research showed consumers found GDAs harder to understand.

The industry also spent hundreds of millions of euros lobbying against traffic lights at European level.

"It was appalling the way manufacturers and Tesco conspired to defeat traffic light labelling despite the willingness of other retailers to give it a shot," said Richard Ayre, a member of the FSA board for seven years, adding that tensions between the FSA and the Department of Health had existed from the beginning.

A key element of the government's NHS reform programme has been branded "disgracefully unethical" by the British Medical Association (BMA).

Dr Laurence Buckman says a system of incentive payments for GPs could be seen as rewarding them for withdrawing treatment.

A couple with two children will be £1,250 a year worse off by 2015 as families "shoulder the burden of austerity", according to an Institute for Fiscal Studies report published on Wednesday.

The study, commissioned by the Family and Parenting Institute charity (FPI), examines the impact of the package of tax and benefit reforms being introduced between January last year and April 2014, including the introduction of universal credit, which brings together benefit and tax credits.

According to the report the income of families with children will feel the most impact, falling by 4.2% in the five years to 2015.

By contrast, families without children will see a loss of only 0.9%, equating to £215, underlining the degree to which spending cuts are impacting on support for children.

The figures suggest families with children under five, families with more than two children, and jobless lone parents will bear the biggest financial pain.

Non-working lone parents lose more than 12% of their income on average – equivalent to £2,000 a year.

The IFS research shows larger families will suffer a disproportionate financial hit. For example, the median household with three children sees income fall by 6.8% by 2015-16, compared with the median household with one child which sees it fall by 3.3%.

As a result ethnic minorities, who tend to have more children per family, will suffer a greater loss of income. For example, the absolute and relative poverty rates for Pakistani and Bangladeshi children increases by more than five percentage points by 2015-16 (the relative increase is from 49.2% to 54.6% and the absolute increase is from 49.2% to 55.8%).

This is what convinces me Greece is some kind of European testing ground. Greeks aren't exactly renowned for stoically accepting external interference in their lives; I fear it's a case of "If we can get away with it there the rest of Europe will be a doddle" type thinking on 'their' behalf.

Looks like riot season may soon be upon us again!

How about putting the fast food and alcohol industries at the heart of gov't policy making on health?

https://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/no...p-health-policy

Did you think that it was only in Victorian England that debtors were forced into the workhouse? Think again. This week a leaked letter revealed that Greece's eurozone creditors are demanding a six-day week as a condition of the latest bailout.

Of all the far-out ideas for solving the Greek crisis, this one surely takes the biscuit. First, it is completely unenforceable. Second, those Greeks in full-time employment already work the longest hours in the European Union. Finally, how does the troika (the EU, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank) propose to provide work for the 25% of Greeks unemployed? And yet, as preposterous as the demand may sound, it needs to be taken seriously – not least as a symptom of a growing belief that Europeans have to work longer and harder to recover prosperity.

The reduction of the working week was one of the great achievements of 20th-century social democracy. A labourer in mid-Victorian Britain could expect to work 60 hours a week – 10 hours a day, six days a week – from adolescence till death. Sundays alone were left free for chapel or gin. The early trade union movement campaigned vigorously against this regime with the slogan "Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest". Its efforts bore fruit. By 1930, weekly hours in Britain had sunk to 47; by 1980, they were down to 40. Sociologists talked of the coming "end of work" and wondered with vague apprehension how the vacant hours would be occupied.

Then something strange happened. Some time around 1980, working hours in most western nations stopped falling. In Britain and the US, they actually started rising again, especially among the rich. This new trend coincided, not accidentally, with the deregulation of markets, the smashing of union power and the growth of income inequality. The world reverted to the earlier, more brutal form of capitalism characterised by John Stuart Mill as "trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels".

The free-market right looks favourably upon the revival of work. Indeed, some say it has not gone far enough. "The British are among the worst idlers in the world," claims Britannia Unchained, a recent polemic by five young Tory radicals. "We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor." The authors conclude with a paean to "the lost virtue of hard graft", now exemplified by the Asian tigers.

The pro-work brigade offer us two arguments. The first is economic: we need to work harder in order to keep pace with the industrious Asians and support our growing population of retirees. The second is psychological: work is enjoyable, or at any rate good for us. If we worked only 20 hours a week, American judge Richard Posner argued recently (in a review of our book), we would "brawl, steal, overeat, drink and sleep late." Slackers need the discipline of work to stay on the straight and narrow.

Neither argument is convincing. The first ignores the fact that prosperity is connected to productivity, not hours of work. The Germans have the most successful economy in Europe despite working shorter hours than the hapless Greeks. Hardly any production was lost in the two months when Edward Heath put Britain on a three-day week in 1974. Many British office workers fill out their long hours with important-sounding but factitious activity: video-conferencing, PowerPoint presentations, "brain-storming" sessions. Remember Parkinson's law: work always expands to fill the time available.

The second argument is a counsel of despair. It pictures us as so incapable of making creative use of our time that we need others to organise it for us. Insofar as this is true, it is an indictment of our civilisation. "There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency," wrote Bertrand Russell in his 1932 essay, In Praise of Idleness.

We have lost the arts of leisure, and so face a stark choice of work or dissipation. Our predicament is that of the world-weary French poet Baudelaire, who wrote: "One must work, if not from taste, then at least from despair. For to reduce everything to a single truth, work is less boring than pleasure."

In 1929 the economist John Maynard Keynes looked forward to a world without work, in which "we shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful". Yet all we can offer our children is insecurity and hard graft. Keynes found his social ideal in the writings of poets and philosophers. How ironic that already wealthy western societies find theirs in the sweatshops of China and the workhouses of Victorian England.