March 17, 2022

CPI for Canada continues to rise and the financial sector are predicting further increases in the next few months.

The report shows that lower-income workers were harder hit by the recession and shutdowns than other workers. And, therefore, were able to access the benefits provided through pandemic unemployment supports more than higher wage groups.

The unemployment supports worked as they were supposed to by offering the average unemployed worker slightly more money than they were earning the year before to stay away from work during the shutdowns. However, this benefit was not equal across groups. And, these gains were only seen in those receiving benefits. Earnings responded to an increased number of low-waged workers unemployed by declining for the bottom-end of the wage grid.

• The earnings of lower earning workers falls more than that of middle- or higher-earnings workers, especially for women
• Earnings of younger and older workers decline in 2020
• Earnings decline the most in accommodation and food services and in arts, entertainment and recreation

Losses at Deliveroo widened last year after it spent more money on marketing and technology, as the London-based food delivery company warned that it would remain unprofitable at least until mid-2023.

Shares in the company, which have lost more than two-thirds of their value since they were listed in London almost a year ago, rose as much as 7 per cent to 123p in early London trading after Thursday’s results, as Deliveroo reported narrower losses than analysts had forecast.

Shu said that Deliveroo aimed to reach break-even, on an underlying basis, “at some point” between the second half of 2023 and the first half of 2024.

Russia’s finance ministry said on Thursday it made $117mn in interest payments due on its dollar-denominated bonds to Citi in London, but it was not clear whether the payment would be able to reach investors and allow Russia to avoid defaulting on its $38.5bn of foreign debt.

The ministry added that it would comment later on whether Citi — the payment agent for the bonds — had accepted the payment. The coupon payments were due on Wednesday, and Russia will default if it fails to pay up after a 30-day grace period. One European bondholder said on Thursday morning that he had not yet received the money. Citi declined to comment.

• India explores ‘rupee-rouble’ exchange scheme to beat Russia sanctions

  A senior banker briefed on discussions said the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was consulting with the government and state-owned banks to assess the scale of rupee-rouble payments required and which banks would be equipped to provide the service.

Energy prices are all over the place, but increases like we have seen in New York are going to become more common. The marketization of electricity prices has resulted in an odd situation where the consumer pays more and the government pays more for electricity prices that are rather unrelated to costs.

On the climate side, this is also not leading to investment in green energy as high prices drive producers and regulators to lower cost energy.

Across all of New York state, roughly 1.3mn residential customers are behind on payments worth $1.7bn, a historic record, according to the Public Utility Law Project of New York.

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New York state lawmakers have proposed at least $400mn in next year’s budget to assist households that are behind on utility payments. On March 1, Kathy Hochul, New York governor, announced a campaign to raise awareness about energy assistance programmes.

There is a review of Amazon as an employer in an old coal town in the UK. This is a follow-up from the original article published a decade ago.

The main thrust of the article is that life in the town is not dependent on Amazon.

Some select quotes:

Amazon says just under 30 per cent of the 1,100 or so staff at the site come from Rugeley and the surrounding area, with 30 per cent bussed in from Wolverhampton, 15 per cent each from Walsall and Birmingham, and a handful from further away. John says the diversity of the Amazon workforce reminds her of her early days in Rugeley, when the mine drew people from all over the country and beyond. “You had everything, Czechoslovakians, Hungarians, Polish, Lithuanians . . . It was like a little United Nations — more or less what we are in here today.”

When I was last here, Amazon’s starting wage was £6.20 or so an hour compared with the adult minimum wage of £6.19. Now it pays better: a minimum £10 an hour compared with the adult minimum wage of £8.91 an hour. The division between “blue badges” and “green badges” has gone too, though the company’s preference for having a chunk of its workforce on temporary contracts has not. Now Amazon hires temporary workers at the Rugeley site directly on fixed-term contracts rather than through agencies. They are eligible for all the same benefits as permanent staff.

Amazon says the ratio of “perm to temp” is roughly 80 to 20 per cent, though the latter group gets bigger during the Christmas peak. For Norton, it’s “less divisive” because everyone has a blue badge: “There’s no demarcation or differentiation. You’ll see the odd yellow badge around — they’re visitors and contractors.” I glance down at my badge. It is bright red.

Most employers worry about high staff turnover, but Amazon has been positively encouraging it. For a number of years it has had a policy called “The Offer”: each year after the peak Christmas period, warehouse staff are offered a few thousand pounds to quit (the precise sum varies depending on tenure and other things) on the condition they will never be allowed to work for Amazon again.

Stuart Perry, a regional organiser at the GMB union, has a more cynical view of The Offer in particular. “My view is it’s so they can rotate the staff, limit the opportunity for organising and collective bargaining, and also keep the wages down because if new people are coming in, they’re constantly starting at the bottom,” he says.

local Conservative MP Amanda Milling (the Tories took the seat from Labour in 2010) and was inspired to get more involved in local politics when the redevelopment of the power-station site was announced. She was worried “we’d have a lot more development like Amazon, and people I’d gone to uni with, graduates, were struggling to get jobs”, she says.

The area is far from an economic black spot. Though the high street is struggling, the industrial park near Amazon is humming with small businesses. The proportion of people on jobless benefits in the local authority is below the national average. But average wages are lower and there is a smaller proportion of professional jobs.

Boris Johnson, the UK’s Conservative prime minister, has said the defining mission of his government is to “level up” the country and improve the prospects of places that have “for too long felt left behind”. But while local councils have often tried to lure big employers like Amazon to bring work to their areas, in Rugeley it seems clear that the jobs in that warehouse are simply not going to turn the town around on their own.