Workers getting a smaller slice of the pie | ILO GENEVA (ILO News) – Workers’ share of national income has been shrinking in most countries, causing public dissatisfaction and increasing the risk of social unrest, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has said in a report. “It has affected perceptions of what is fair, particularly given the huge payments some company executives have been getting,” said Patrick Belser, a co-author of the Global Wage Report 2012/13. Simply put, more of the national pie has been going to profits, and less to workers.
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual summary of unionization in the U.S. It reports that in 2012, the union-membership rate of wage and salary workers was 11.3 percent, compared with 11.8 percent in 2011. The trend has been downward for some time: Fifty years ago, the figure was almost 30 percent.
On a warm evening in July, the Chrysler Center Capital Grille in Midtown Manhattan had more than customers to contend with. Inside, diners feasted on a $35 prix fixe dinner as part of the city’s Restaurant Week promotion. Outside, protesters handed out mock “menus”: “First course: Wage Theft. Second course: Racial discrimination.” Some passersby rolled their eyes; others pumped their fists. Dishwasher Ignacio Villegas yelled: “No more exploitation of workers!” His fellow demonstrators—a few co-workers and a couple of dozen staffers and activists from the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC)—picked up the chant, Occupy-style.
The Cabinet Office’s Centre for Social Impact Bonds has developed two new tools to assist the development of the bonds: the 'Knowledge Box' online portal and a template service agreement contract.
However, the nature of philanthropy is also changing, according to Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, the $4bn (£2.6bn) -endowment charity founded by John D Rockefeller in 1913.
“There simply isn’t enough money in philanthropy and in governments and development aid to solve all the problems in the world effectively,” she says.
“So we’ve been looking at ways to unlock private capital and the innovation and the energy of the capital markets towards a social purpose.
“We started to see a number of very wealthy younger investors who were saying that they didn’t want to do their philanthropy with the right hand and their investing with their left hand.