Ikea to pay UK workers more than National Living Wage in 2016
Swedish furniture chain Ikea has signed up to pay its UK employees the living wage, as set by the Living Wage Foundation, from next year, becoming the first national retailer in the UK to pay its staff above the government’s new ‘National Living Wage’. Ikea said it would pay all its 9,000 UK workers at least £7.85 an hour (£9.15 in London) from April 2016, compared to the new compulsory rate of £7.20 an hour for workers aged 25 and over. Rhys Moore, director of the Living Wage Foundation, said: “This is a huge step for the British retail sector and we hope that many other businesses will follow the leadership IKEA is showing on the issue of basic pay.” The Living Wage Foundation, which has calculated a UK Living Wage since 2011, described the government’s rate earlier this month as “effectively a higher national minimum wage and not a living wage”. (BBC)
Factories in Myanmar that supply major Western clothing companies are fighting a government proposal to set the country’s first-ever minimum wage at roughly $3.25 a day. At the same time, the brands themselves – Gap Inc. and H&M among others – have declined to say where they stand on the proposed rate, which amounts to 40 cents an hour. The Myanmar Garment Manufacturers Association, representing about 350 factories, says the government’s proposed wage is too high and will force employers out of business. It wants its own industry-specific rate of about $2 a day instead. Starting pay in factories currently hovers around $1 a day. The newly arrived Western companies, especially Gap and H&M, have trumpeted their support for improved working conditions, voicing concerns over issues such as forced labour, unfair overtime demands and unpermitted subcontracting, while backing the idea of a national minimum wage. (IBTimes)
Corporate Reputation
Mitsubishi Materials apologises for using US POWs as slave labour
Construction company Mitsubishi Materials has become the first major Japanese company to apologise for using captured American soldiers as slave labourers during World War Two, offering remorse at a ceremony in Los Angeles for “the tragic events in our past.” In all, about 12,000 American prisoners of war were put into forced labour by the Japanese government and private companies seeking to fill a wartime labour shortage, of whom more than 1,100 died. While previous Japanese prime ministers have apologised for Japan’s aggression during World War Two, private corporations have been less contrite. “This is a glorious day,” said 94-year-old veteran James Murphy, who survived working at Mitsubishi Mining’s Osarizawa Copper Mine and the infamous Bataan Death March in the Philippines. “For 70 years we wanted this.” (Reuters)
Environment
Climate talks advancing faster towards December deal
A groundbreaking UN climate-change deal is edging closer, according to a French government document, as countries scramble to avoid a repeat of the last big summit on the issue in 2009, which ended in acrimony. Diplomats are making more progress than they have formally disclosed in public, although many important differences remain over the precise costs, legality and timing of the deal due to be signed in Paris in December, the five-page paper seen by the Financial Times shows. This means that any final accord could still be too weak to slow global warming. However, the paper repeatedly refers to “common understanding” and “shared recognition” on the basic shape of an agreement requiring virtually all countries to take voluntary but progressively tougher action from 2020 to stop global temperatures rising more than 2C from pre-industrial times. (FT*)
Peatland emissions from oil palm conversion highly understated
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is drastically undercounting emissions from the draining of peatlands in Southeast Asia to make way for oil palm plantations, according to a new report. Researchers from the University of Minnesota’s (UM) Institute on the Environment and from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), who published their findings earlier this month, say they set out to discover new ways for measuring soil-carbon loss in plantations built on drained peat – a dense, marshy material that holds carbon. A previous study found that, though peatlands cover only about 2–3 percent of the Earth’s land surface, they store about a quarter of the world’s soil carbon. Over the past 15 years peat forests have been increasingly cleared, drained and burned for new oil palm and pulpwood plantations. This exposes the upper peat layer to oxygen, which spurs decomposition and pumps carbon into the atmosphere. (Eco-business)
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