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Striking workers are providing the opposition that Britain desperately needs

Andy Beckett in The Guardian

In Britain, more than in most democratic countries, going on strike is a risk. Your employer, the government, most of the media, much of the public and often the opposition parties are likely to be against you – or, at best, unsupportive. Your loss of income is unlikely to be made up by strike pay. Your behaviour on the picket line will be subject to what Tony Blair described approvingly in 1997 as “the most restrictive” trade union laws “in the western world”.

In very public ways, you will be breaking the rules of the modern economy: refusing to work, inconveniencing consumers, acting collectively rather than individually, and making demands for more money openly – rather than in private, as more powerful people do. If you are on the left, you are likely to be told again and again that your strike is politically counterproductive.

Such are the written and unwritten laws that have constricted British strikes for approaching half a century, ever since the walkouts of the 1978-79 winter of discontent inadvertently did so much to bring Margaret Thatcher to power and to provoke the counter-revolution against workers that still continues today. Many voters have long got used to the idea that strikes are a minority pursuit associated with a bygone age to which the country must not return. Boris Johnson’s government, with its especially strong intolerance of dissent, aims to demonise and marginalise strikes even further.

Yet this summer, more and more Britons are striking or considering striking regardless. From railway workers to barristers, firefighters to doctors, Post Office workers to teachers, nurses to civil servants, council workers to British Telecom engineers, an unusually large potential strike wave is building. Its social breadth, the range of occupations affected and the atmosphere on some picket lines all suggest that something politically significant may be happening.

At the first barristers’ protest, outside the Old Bailey in London this week, an already excited crowd of advocates in courtroom wigs and gowns burst into prolonged applause when they were joined by a few activists in shorts and jeans from the RMT. It’s not every day that you see such camaraderie between self-employed professionals who rely heavily on trains and striking transport workers carrying a banner that calls for “the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.

The cost of living crisis, and the refusal of the government and other employers to raise wages accordingly, is the immediate reason for this summer’s “wave of resistance”, as Mick Lynch of the RMT union calls it. Yet the causes go deeper: more than a decade of stagnant or falling wages; the long Conservative squeeze on the public sector; and the whole transformation of the British economy since the 1970s, which has effectively taken money from workers and given it to employers, shareholders and the wealthy.


Public dissatisfaction with this model has been growing for years. In the latest British Social Attitudes survey, 64% agree that “‘ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth” – up from 57% in 2019, and far greater than the support for any party. As Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn tapped into this discontent. But the end of his tenure, and Keir Starmer’s apparent lack of interest in its redistributive ideas, has created a vacuum where a movement with a radical economic agenda ought to be.

It’s possible that the strike wave could become one such movement. While support for the strikes has been stronger than expected - the pollster Savanta ComRes found that even 38% of Tory voters considered the highly disruptive rail strikes “justified”; among younger people this attitude was particularly prevalent. In the same survey, 72% of under-35s backed the strikers. Since few of them have ever been on strike themselves – less than a quarter of trade unionists are under 35 – then the likely explanation is not shared experience but shared disenchantment. Young people, like many of the strikers, have been particularly badly served by the status quo.

Many young people supported Corbyn for the same reason. And there are other similarities between the two movements. Former Corbyn advisers such as James Schneider, Corbyn himself, and the parliamentary Labour left all support the strikers. Green activists, once an important part of Corbyn’s coalition, have joined RMT picket lines. Like Labour’s 2017 election manifesto, Lynch uses clear, populist language – “every worker in Britain” should get a much better pay deal, he told Question Time – and its effectiveness has taken the media by surprise. Support for the RMT strike rose after his TV appearances.

Could the strikers succeed, not just in getting fairer pay deals but in beginning to change how the economy works? It’s an immense task, which Labour under Corbyn sometimes talked about compellingly but never came close to carrying out. And as the strikes widen and lengthen, public opinion may turn against them. Walking to work because of a train strike will seem less of a novelty and more of an imposition if that dispute drags on into the autumn. One of the obvious but often forgotten lessons of the winter of discontent is that voters often hate strikes in cold weather.

Excited union talk about building new mass movements has proved over-optimistic in the past, for example during David Cameron’s government. The proportion of British employees who are union members has stabilised in recent years, after decades of decline, but by historic standards it is still low: less than one in four. And the fact that Starmer is not prepared to support the strikers removes one of the main means by which their campaigns could be amplified.

Yet for almost a decade now, British politics has not followed the expected paths. It may be that an economy built on poor wages was politically and socially sustainable only while inflation stayed low. That relatively stable and docile era may be over. Recently, the leftwing website Left Foot Forward listed some of the pay rises already won this summer by the increasingly assertive trade union Unite: “300 workers at Gatwick get 21 per cent”, “300 HGV drivers win 20 per cent”. In post-Thatcher Britain, such transfers of wealth to the workers – not just matching but far exceeding the rate of inflation – aren’t supposed to happen. But they are.

Unlike in the 1980s, when the iron lady beat Britain’s last big wave of strikes, unemployment is low and the supply of labour is short. If strikers don’t like a pay offer, sometimes they can threaten to go and work for someone who pays more. You could call it an example of something the Tories talk less about these days: market forces.

Why executives should always listen to unreasonable activists

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in The FT

When Christabel Pankhurst argued the case for women’s suffrage to members of the London Stock Exchange in 1909, the Financial Times reported that her address excited “a few remonstrative ‘Oh, ohs!’ [but] was punctuated throughout by genuine applause, as well as a good deal of merriment at her humorous sallies”. 

After three years of failing to convert such applause into voting rights, however, the movement led by Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline adopted less amusing tactics, and the business pages’ view of it darkened. Arson attacks on post boxes in the City of London in 1912 left the FT fulminating about the need for “drastic measures . . . to protect the community as a whole from the mischievous intentions of a small and insubordinate section”. 

Why dredge this history up now? Because today’s business leaders are being confronted by a new generation of agitators whose aims they consider unrealistic, whose methods they consider unreasonable but whose message will probably prove worth heeding in the long run.  

This year’s annual meeting season has seen protests over executive pay at companies from AstraZeneca to GE. Nuns have harangued Amazon over its facial recognition technology and taken on Boeing over its lobbying. Diversity advocates have castigated boards for moving too slowly to achieve racial and — a century after the suffragettes — gender equality.  

No subject has attracted more militancy of late, however, than companies’ contributions to climate change. And no clash has defined this shareholder spring more clearly than the revolt at ExxonMobil, in which Engine No 1, an activist investor with a minute stake and an aversion to fossil fuels, fought its way on to the $250bn oil major’s board.  

“This is like the shot heard around the world,” says Robert Eccles, a Saïd Business School professor. Other companies and investors are realising that “if this little hedge fund can do this to ExxonMobil then, oh, things are different”.  

Shareholders’ views of Big Oil were already shifting faster than Exxon had changed its business model, Eccles notes, but like Pankhurst’s troublemakers: “You needed the spark: they blew up the mailbox.”  

Before Engine No 1, there was the civil disobedience of Extinction Rebellion, which has dumped fake coal outside Lloyd’s of London and blockaded News Corp printing sites in the past year. Environmental campaigners had targeted the offices of JPMorgan Chase in New York and BlackRock in Paris. And Greta Thunberg had shown up at the World Economic Forum last year and rubbished Davos-goers’ tree-planting incrementalism.  

Such zealous tactics seem guaranteed to generate more irritation than applause. As Eccles puts it, “here are people who . . . don’t hold any of the cards. Unless you’re breaking the rules or using the rules really aggressively, as Engine No 1 did, you can’t get attention.” 

That makes them easy to dismiss. People on both extremes of the fossil fuels debate “are a little nuts”, Warren Buffett told Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting last month.  

Maybe, but from street style to fashions on Wall Street, new ideas tend to start on the fringes. The examples of the Pankhursts and successive campaigners for causes ranging from civil rights to gay rights suggest that the most powerful ideas become mainstream in the end.  

That rarely happens overnight: it took until 1928 for British women to gain electoral equality with men. But today’s irritants can serve as harbingers of tomorrow’s consensus.  

That should make them valuable to any company wanting to understand the risks and opportunities in the years ahead. Every CEO knows that society’s expectations of business are constantly changing, but few have worked out that their harshest critics might help them position themselves for those shifts. 

Society’s expectations still matter most to boards when expressed through their shareholders’ votes, and the continued growth of socially conscious investing suggests that the agendas of provocateurs and portfolio managers are converging.  

This week, for example, a UBS survey of rich investors found 90 per cent of them claimed that the pandemic had made them more determined to align their investments with their values.  

That report again underscored how younger capitalists are driving this process: almost 80 per cent of investors under 50 said Covid-19 had made them want to make a bigger difference in the world, compared with just half of the over-50s. It is worth executives asking themselves which of those demographics they are spending more time with.  

Exxon’s unreasonable activists showed it that the world had changed and it had not. The question for other companies is whether they can learn such lessons less painfully.  

Does this mean that boards should bend to every crank who berates them at an annual meeting? No, but companies should avoid dismissing every critic as a crank, and study the agitators for early warning signs of what may become groundswells.  

Executives love to talk about innovation and “first-mover advantage”. If they are serious, they should spend more time thinking about where today’s fringes suggest tomorrow’s mainstream will be. Sometimes a small and insubordinate section points the way for the community as a whole. 

We say we value key workers, but their low pay is systematic, not accidental

If those who care for us are to be first, not last, we have to look at the conditions that drive wage stagnation and insecurity writes Zoe Williams in The Guardian  

 

Military personnel help administer Covid-19 tests for NHS workers at Edgbaston cricket ground in Birmingham. Photograph: Jacob King/PA


This weekend brought the news that two workers at London’s Pentonville prison, Bovil Peter and Patrick Beckford, had died with symptoms of Covid-19. “Symptoms” is nowadays a euphemism for “they weren’t tested”, and a grim reminder of the hundreds of thousands of key workers we are asking the world of, but whose selflessness is not being reciprocated.

These are tragedies laced with guilt for all of us: plainly, the most dangerous place to be during this epidemic is in a densely populated care environment, whether a hospital, school or prison. People work in them because they have a passion, but also because there is no alternative, and they do so on all our behalves.

Prison officers have always been the unsung heroes of public duty: never quite macho enough for the people who glorify the armed forces; always a bit too authoritarian for those who valorise nurses. They are some of the most inventive and diligent people working anywhere in the business of caring for others, but they have generally done so without much credit. 

This crisis is forcing an urgent re-evaluation of that, along with all those other jobs that were previously classed as low-value yet now turn out to be the most important in the country. Words are not enough, and nor is clapping; you can praise care workers to the skies, but if you’re paying them the minimum amount in 15-minute segments, without security of hours or of employment, without sick or holiday pay, then the praise is hollow.

You can wax sentimental about the holy vocation of nursing, but you cannot then bring second-year students on to the frontline to fight coronavirus and still expect them to pay their tuition fees. You cannot claim, as the health secretary, Matt Hancock, told Andrew Marr on Sunday, that this isn’t the right time to talk about pay rises; it is the best and only time to talk about pay rises, when we have finally realised, with a jolt, just how much we rely on people who put their jobs ahead of their own safety.

Yet this is about more than money: Keir Starmer accepted the Labour leadership on Saturday with the rousing Old Testament statement about all key workers, cleaners, paramedics, carers, porters: “For too long they’ve been taken for granted and poorly paid. They were last and now they should be first.” But what would it actually mean to put these jobs first? Money is some of the answer, but we also have to look at the conditions and assumptions that drive wage stagnation and the steady erosion of security.

There is nothing radical in the observation that jobs are often described as low-skill, when actually they are just poorly paid. More radical, yet still accurate, is the assertion that they are characterised as “low-skill” deliberately. Caring is a job of tremendous skill, hard as well as soft. And while there is a huge amount of bolt-on expertise that employers require, from administering medicines to dealing with dementia, this is not reflected in any career progression. It is not unusual for a carer in her 40s to be on the same hourly rate, adjusted for inflation, that she was on at 18.

This has been systematic, not accidental. Without progression, the wage bill can remain reliably static, which is the only way the financial architecture of the sector makes sense.

There is often better progression in public sector work, but the combination of the austerity-years pay freeze and a new normal (extending even to the police) of people at the start of their career being expected to work voluntarily, which itself erodes starting salaries, has had a striking effect on these jobs.

Ironically, Theresa May was right when she famously said that a nurse might use a food bank for “complicated reasons”. Of course there’s a very simple reason – that nurse is not being paid enough. But the feedback loop between the private and public sectors – low pay, insecurity and poor conditions legitimised in one sector and migrating to another – is actually quite complicated.

And there’s an overarching fallacy, that a job many people could do must be inherently low in value. By these lights, huge numbers of people – cleaners, drivers, shop assistants – are without prospects, being so replaceable. The times are testing this assumption to destruction – when you’re looking for the people whose courage we need in order for civilisation to survive, you don’t have to look much further than the postal worker or the hospital porter.
In the immediate term, putting key workers first means personal protective equipment; it means collective and determined effort to strip as much risk as possible out of essential jobs that simply wouldn’t get done if everyone looked out for themselves. But there will be an era after coronavirus; and one thing to carry into it will be a determination never again to think, talk about or treat people as though logic demands they should be screwed down to their lowest possible price.

It is a mystery why bankers earn so much

John Gapper in The FT

In the libel suit he brought in 1878 against John Ruskin, the Victorian painter James McNeill Whistler was asked under cross-examination how he justified charging 200 guineas for a painting of a London firework display that took him two days to finish. “I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime,” Whistler declared. 

Investment bankers explain their bonuses in the same manner, although the rewards for mergers and acquisitions advisers are rather greater than for most painters. Goldman Sachs will be paid $58m by 21st Century Fox for its advice on Fox’s planned $71bn asset sale to Walt Disney (and the bank stands to gain another $47m for financing the remainder of Fox). 

They are remarkable paydays — today’s dealmaking boom is the most rewarding time in history to be a global M&A banker. It is especially lucrative for those in the top league of advisers who run many auctions. An individual with the ability to shepherd nervous boards of directors past the pitfalls and a reputation for squeezing the best prices can name his or her fee. 

But what exactly do they do for the money? When asked this question, they turn sheepish and talk vaguely about the art of persuasion rather than the science of valuation. The secret to a bulging “success fee” is less to obtain the best possible deal than to make the chief executive and the board believe they got it. That is not the same thing, particularly in the long term. 

The M&A adviser’s job has three qualities that put its practitioners in a powerful bargaining position over their own pay. First, the stakes are very high. One former banker compares it to a surgeon explaining his or her charges as a patient is being wheeled into the operating theatre. The latter needs to have the best possible professional and is in no position to quibble. 

Going through an M&A auction can feel like being operated upon for directors who have not experienced it before. Shareholders and the media lurk, ready to condemn any slip-up (the latter risk is why public relations consultants get paid so much as well). There is plenty of subterfuge and bargaining over details, any of which could unexpectedly prove fatal to the outcome. 

Second, advisers are paid with other people’s money. That is especially true when a company is being sold — the overall price including the fees is going to be picked up by the acquirer, so what difference does a few million make? Even when the client is an acquirer, boards of directors whose personal reputations are at stake are not digging into their own pockets to pay. 

Through one end of the telescope, the fees even look small. The average fee for selling a company worth between $10bn and $25bn is about 0.3 per cent, and can cover years of unpaid work. Bankers claim they are cheap compared with property brokers, who may charge several percentage points for selling a house. As ever, the best way to make money is to be around a lot of it. 

Third, M&A advice is a black box. There is plenty of technical skill in structuring a transaction such as using acquisitions to change tax domiciles. That is bundled with access to the bank’s contacts with potential bidders in various countries and presented as a whole by one adviser to the board. The senior banker’s tone of voice conveys a mixture of financial advice, human judgment and comfort. 

The last is the most valuable. In theory, M&A advice could be unbundled into different tasks, and more of the technical work done by machines, but boardrooms only have space for a few people. They are crowded enough by companies’ baffling habit of hiring several banks to advise on big deals and paying them $20m each, which one adviser calls “ludicrous”. 

The fee rises exponentially for an adviser in the room where a deal happens. This accounts for the prosperity of advisory boutiques such as Centerview Partners and Evercore, founded by corporate financiers who built their reputations at banks including UBS and Lehman Brothers. The power of a global advisory elite is exemplified by tiny and highly rewarded banking “kiosks” such as Robey Warshaw. 

Global investment banks sniff at the ability of a few experienced individuals to charge similar fees to them, without bearing the same costs. “The boutiques are full of guys cashing in at the end of their careers and they get a bit of a free ride,” says one adviser at a big bank. In the M&A business, relationships have enduring value. 

But hiring the best cosmetic surgeon in the world does not make cosmetic surgery a good idea. Deals can be brilliantly executed at the time without adding to a company’s long-term value and many are unwound — often with the help of the same advisers — when a chief executive leaves. “Companies pay far too much to advisers. It’s really not worth it,” says Peter Zink Secher, co-author of The M&A Formula. 

The success fees of advisers should be more closely tied to whether the deal succeeds long after it has closed and they have moved on to the next one. Whistler won his libel suit against Ruskin for having accused him of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”, but was only awarded damages of a farthing. Even artists can push their luck.

What the great degree rip-off means for graduates: low pay and high debt

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

 

‘Ministers needed to sell universities to teenagers and their families – and in the process they have mis-sold them.’ Illustration: Bill Bragg



A few years back, I got my knuckles rapped by a government minister. In public. It was 2010: David Cameron had just come to power, and he was about to thrust university students into a new regime of higher tuition fees and debt.

Against that backdrop, I’d written a column criticising the way in which both Labour and Conservative governments marketed degrees as being some kind of social-mobility jetpack, zooming their wearers to more money and high-powered jobs. It was no such guarantee, I said, citing among other things Whitehall’s own plunging estimates of how much more graduates earn over a lifetime. Graduates, I said, would “probably end up doing similar work to their school-leaver parents – only with a debilitatingly large debt around their necks”.

For David Willetts, then universities minister, this was sheer and unpalatable sauce. In a speech to the annual conference of Universities UK, representing the top management of higher education, he named me – then tried to shame me. I was “wrong”, he claimed. Previous governments had indeed claimed that a graduate could expect to pull in £400,000 more over their lifetime than someone who hadn’t been to university. And, yes, his officials had knocked that estimate down to £100,000. But the difference, you see, was nothing to do with the increase in graduates – but “an improved methodology”. So I was “not comparing like with like”. Two Brains, one slap!

Willetts has since left parliament and gone to a far, far better place: the Resolution Foundation, an inequality thinktank that does much better work than the coalition government ever managed. But looking back, I shouldn’t have been surprised by either the reproof or the forum in which it was made. To sprinkle even a little doubt over the instrumental value of a degree is to take on both the well-paid managers of our universities, and Whitehall orthodoxy.

Higher education is “a phenomenal investment”, Conservative ministers tell us – even with tuition fees at nine grand a year. Repayments are only the equivalent of one “posh coffee” a day, according to the then universities minister Greg Clark (who is now communities secretary). “I think people recognise that that is a phenomenal investment,” he said. “It’s not just a good investment for the student, but actually it’s a good investment for the taxpayer.” I’ve seen ads on daytime TV for loans that do a softer sell than that.

And the marketing is still wrong. Take a look at research published last week by a team of economists from Cambridge, Harvard and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. They found that at 23 universities men typically earned less even 10 years after graduating than their counterparts who’d never been. The disparities are so yawningly wide that it makes a nonsense of talking about the “graduate premium”.

A student of economics at the LSE may walk into a City job and very soon be earning six figures. Their life and career will be utterly different from someone doing business studies, say, at a post-1992 university close to home in the north-east, and then chooses to work in the same area. Yet both are deluged with the official and industrial marketing that a mortar board and gown is worth an extra £100,000 over a lifetime.

Both New Labour and the dwindling band of Cameronian Conservatives have peddled the line that higher education breaks down class barriers. Again, untrue: last week’s research shows that students from the richest families did better than everyone else in the graduate job market – and earned far more than even those who’d done the same course at the same university at the same time.

Ministers needed to sell universities to teenagers and their families – and in the process they have mis-sold them. In this new world of tuition fees and debt, children and their parents have been assured that degrees earn big salaries. At the same time, voters have been told that higher education brings social mobility. Both claims have been made far too broadly – and the losers are those now coming out of university with 50 grand owing to the student loan company, a socking great overdraft and the discovery that internships and coffee shops are the only prospects.

I and others have argued down the years that there is no point in creating more graduates unless you have more graduate-level jobs. Such a position strikes me as being so obvious as to be crass, but it has been ignored by successive governments.

The result can be seen in research published last August by the Oxford economists Ken Mayhew and Craig Holmes. They found that the UK now has proportionately more graduates than any other rich country bar Iceland – yet uses their brains much less than most other countries: the “underutilisation” of graduates – at work but not using their skills – is higher in the UK than anywhere in the EU bar Romania, Greece, Croatia, Latvia and Slovenia.

So what are our graduates doing? Jobs that previously didn’t need a degree. Over one in 10 childminders (11.5%, according to the 2014 Labour Force Survey) are graduates. One in six call-centre staff have degrees, as do about one in four of all air cabin crew and theme-park attendants. In a labour market flooded with graduates, picky employers are now able to take the CVs boasting a university education. And so any young person who didn’t go to university now stands to be treated as a second-class employee.

And universities – with the connivance of their vice-chancellors and marketing departments – have allowed themselves to be sold to the public largely as CV-finishing schools. It is a gross act of vandalism to have committed on a higher education system that the rest of the world once admired. And it has displaced all the other values that accrue both to the individual and to society from education. Critical thinking, public knowledge? You won’t get much change for those from a government that plans to gag academics from using their publicly funded research to question public policy and hold politicians to account.

As for Willetts, he owes me an apology. But nothing like as big as the one he and his colleagues owe to tens of thousands of university graduates, stuck in low-paying jobs that don’t use their expensively acquired skills and certainly don’t pay off their vast debts.

Teachers increasingly boosting predicted A-level grades to help pupils win top university places

Richard Garner in The Independent

Increasing numbers of teachers are boosting their pupils’ predicted A-level grades to help them secure offers of places at Britain’s top universities – which in turn are accepting more students who miss their targets, largely to increase their income.

Figures from Ucas, the university admissions body, show that 63 per cent of all candidates are now predicted to get at least an A and two B grades at A level – up 9 percentage points from four years ago.

Yet the data shows that only a fifth of those predicted to score ABB actually achieve those grades – a 40 per cent drop from just six years ago.

READ MORE
Students increasingly admitted to university without three A-levels

The ploy by teachers has been successful because growing numbers of universities are offering “discounts” on their conditional offers to prospective students when A-level results are released.

This is because the Government decision to lift the cap on the number of places universities can offer has increased competition among the institutions when it comes to signing up students.

However, many teachers still reckon they need to bump up their students’ potential A-level grades to ensure they are noticed and are given a provisional offer by universities. More than half of pupils accepted on predicted A-level results – 52 per cent – missed their conditional offer grades by one grade or two, another substantial rise on four years ago. Senior academics say controversy over the issue could reignite calls to move to a system whereby pupils apply for their university places after they receive their A-level results.

Many teachers believe they need to bump up their students’ potential A-level grades to ensure they receive offers by universities (iStock)

The change was called for by a government inquiry headed by former Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz a decade ago but disappeared from the table when universities and schools could not agree to the changes necessary to the education calendar to implement it.

The new figures and the trend they highlight were disclosed by Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of Ucas, at a conference at Wellington College on the future of higher education.


University admissions in numbers

63% of all candidates predicted to get at least an A and two B grades at A-levels
One in five actually achieve those grades
495,940 university applicants in England
52% of candidates accepted on predicted grades miss them by one grade or two
44% of students being admitted with three B grade passes or lower, compared with 20 per cent in 2011

Ms Curnock Cook said that, in discussions with teachers, she had asked: “Surely you wouldn’t be over-predicting your students’ grades last summer?” She told the conference: “I have teachers coming back to me saying: ‘Actually, yes we would.’

“The offers are being discounted at confirmation time,” said Ms Curnock Cook, referring to A-level results day. “It’s been [caused by] the lifting of the number controls that has increased competition [amongst universities].”

“You have to hope you can unlock some latent talent [in those taken in with lower grades],” said one university source. “If you don’t take them in, they could be snapped up by a rival and their reputation increases.”

As well as lower-ranking institutions, high-tariff universities – those most selective in their intake – are also lowering their entry requirements, with 44 per cent of students being admitted with three B-grade passes or lower, compared with just 20 per cent in 2011.

Professor Michael Arthur, provost of University College London, said his university had dropped a grade in 9 per cent of admissions.

Many universities have seen huge rises in the numbers of students they are enrolling. Professor Arthur said the number of students at his university had soared from 24,000 six years ago to 37,500. Part of the increase was down to mergers with other bodies such as the Institute of Education – but at least half was due to a rise in student numbers.

READ MORE
Record number of GCSE and A-level exams sent to be regraded

However, the number of university applicants from England decreased on the previous year by 0.2 percentage points to 495,940, the new figures show. The number of 18-year-olds applying also fell by 2.2 per cent.

Overall the number of university applicants for this autumn has held steady – with 593,720 applicants (up 0.2 percentage points on last year) by the time of the January deadline. But the increase was down to a significant rise in applications from the EU – up 6 percentage points to 45,220.

The figures show that more disadvantaged pupils applied than ever before – up 5 percentage points in England, 2 in Scotland and 8 in Wales.

Ms Curnock Cook urged students to be “bold” in their Ucas applications and take advantage of the fact that leading universities were lowering their admissions criteria. Speakers at the conference said parental pressure was partly to blame for teachers upping predictions for their pupils. 

The UCAS clearing house call centre in Cheltenham (Getty Images)

Another teacher said that performance-related pay, which means teachers’ salary increases depend on the results of their pupils – was leading them to predict higher grades.

“Performance-related pay and performance-related management play a part,” they said. “It is why you have to be a little bit aspirational.”

However, it was acknowledged this could be a double-edged sword – as failure to achieve the grades could result in teachers being penalised for failing to meet their targets.

Ms Curnock Cook also predicted that the number of students taking the A-level route to university would continue to drop over the next four years,

Last week Ucas showed that the number of students taking the vocational route through Btecs had almost doubled from 14 per cent in 2008 to 26 per cent last year. Predicted outcomes showed the number taking the traditional A-level route was likely to decline by 25,000 by 2020 – while the number with vocational qualifications would go up by 15,000.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: "We trust teachers to act in the best interests of their students by giving fair predicted A level grades that accurately reflect their ability.

"Distorting grades would be unfair on the pupils involved and could result in universities having to artificially inflate their entrance requirements, rendering it pointless in the long run."

‘I can’t sacrifice my family for the NHS’: the junior doctors forced out of jobs they love

Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian

At what point does a dedicated doctor, with a lifelong commitment to the NHS, decide it is time to quit? For Dr Singh, 34, a junior doctor in general medicine, the moment will come when he is no longer able to pay his mortgage and childcare bills, a situation he expects to find himself facing sometime next year.

Dr Singh has worked in hospitals, with regular A&E shifts, for 10 years since qualifying, loves his job and describes himself as “the kind of doctor you’d want to see to your gran”. But, having done an online calculation assessing how the Department of Health’s new junior doctor contract will affect his household income, he believes he and his paediatrician wife face a 25% cut to their joint take-home pay, making life in London unaffordable. He plans to move into the pharmaceutical industry.

New junior doctors' contract changes everything I signed up for

Several of Dr Singh’s friends have already left the medical profession to work as bankers and consultants in the City; others are considering emigrating to work as doctors in Australia or New Zealand. Most of them are dispirited by the proposed contract, but are more fed up with the daily stress of their work, annoyed that the long hours and considerable financial and personal sacrifices they make during their training are not appreciated, and they worry about the impact that dwindling morale could have on the NHS and its patients.

“I am not looking for parity of pay with my friends in the City. But if you can’t afford to pay your mortgage or your child’s nursery bills and you can’t look after your child yourself in the evening or [at] the weekend because the government is proposing you should work those hours on a normal basis, you can’t continue with that kind of life,” he says, asking for his full name not to be published to avoid annoying his employers. “I am a very valuable resource to the NHS. I do work incredibly hard, I really enjoy looking after my patients and I get immense satisfaction from it. I have an absolute commitment to the NHS but I can’t sacrifice my entire family for that. I have to put a roof over my son’s head.”

Junior doctors will be balloted to decide whether to strike over a radical new contract imposed on them by the Department of Health, which redefines their normal working week to include Saturday and removes overtime rates for work between 7pm and 10pm every day except Sunday. The government says the changes will come with a rise in basic salary, higher hourly rates for antisocial hours and will be “cost neutral” – but doctors believe this change could reduce salaries in some areas of medicine by up to 30%. The British Medical Association (BMA) argues that it is “unacceptable that working 9pm on a Saturday is viewed the same as working 9am on a Tuesday”.

It is unusual to hear doctors getting angry and this swell of rage is disconcerting. A social media campaign means their voices have begun to be widely heard over the past week. If the effects of the government’s austerity drive on care workers, for example, have gone largely unnoticed, the seething protest from this powerful group looks set to be harder to ignore.

Most junior doctors are smart enough to know that they will have to work hard to persuade the public that they are a genuinely needy section of society. A perception of doctors as well-paid professionals has stuck and even a semi-attentive observer knows that the harsh 100-hour-week working pattern that used to characterise medical training has been abolished.

What most people outside the medical profession are probably unaware of is that you aren’t just a junior doctor for a fleeting period after qualifying; this makes up a substantial chunk of your career – sometimes a decade, and often stretching late into your 30s. Basic salaries start at around £23,000 and are enhanced by various complicated supplements, including the antisocial hours pay that is set to be cut. Because medical training takes longer than other degrees, most junior doctors have large amounts of student debt and are expected to continue paying for the exams as part of their ongoing training, in addition to putting in large amounts of unpaid study time and paying out monthly professional payments to the General Medical Council (GMC) and the BMA.

Few people chose to go into medicine for the money, but this contract has triggered a surge of resentment about how much harder doctors work for less money than their equally ambitious and well-educated peers in other fields.
  Radiologist Anushka Patchava says she will have to quit the profession if the proposals are implemented. Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Guardian

Anushka Patchava, 29, a radiologist who qualified in 2011 and has at least two more years as a junior doctor before she graduates to being a consultant, plans to switch careers and is midway through a rigorous interviewing process with two management consultancy firms. She is fed up with the hours and the current pay and is despondent at the prospect of getting a substantial cut to her salary. She earns £31,000, which includes a 40% supplement to her basic salary, to compensate for the antisocial hours she works. Once the new contract is imposed, she thinks she will see this reduced to £27,000 or £28,000 and she expects the hours she works will become even more antisocial. She campaigned for David Cameron in May’s general election, but has subsequently rescinded her membership of the Conservative party in protest at the contract.

If she gets the management consultancy job, Patchava will quadruple her salary on day one. “It’s horrific, isn’t it?” she says. She doesn’t consider herself to be materialistic and, in normal circumstances, would not want to leave a job she loves, but the level of needless daily stress has become wearisome and she is constantly aware of lack of morale among her colleagues.

“Going into work is a struggle – you have to psych yourself up. You’re so short staffed that you can’t offer patients everything you want to offer them. There aren’t enough doctors to fill the posts that there are available now, even before the contract is brought in,” she says. “We are not supported and morale is low. You work really long hours, taking decisions that impact on people’s lives and, at the same time, you’re worrying whether your pay check is going to be enough to cover your bills.”

The daughter of two NHS surgeons, Patchava has an deep-rooted sense of loyalty to the NHS, but her parents understand the pressure she is under and why she wants to leave. There are no perks; she has to buy expensive food and coffee from the hospital cafe and pays £12 every night shift to park in the hospital car park. She calculates that, once the long hours are factored in, she earns about £10 an hour, so these costs are not negligible. As junior doctors, her parents used to get free food and free accommodation. Four of her closest friends from Cambridge, where she studied medicine, have already left to work in the City. “One of them got a gold medal in medicine, for being top of the year, but they dropped out for exactly these reasons.”

These are not alarmist stories being spread by campaigners. Even the Conservative MP and doctor Sarah Wollaston, who chairs the Health Select Committee, knows about the brain drain – her daughter has left the NHS for Australia. Now she, her husband and eight of their friends work in a hospital where they have yet to meet an Australian junior doctor in the casualty department. “It is staffed almost entirely by British-trained junior doctors,”Wollaston wrote this week.

Patchava worries about what will happen when she wants to have children and has to organise childcare for the irregular hours. Another aspect of the new contract is that parents who take time off to look after their children will no longer see their pay rise automatically while they are on leave. People who take time out of the medical training system to do research will be similarly penalised. Other changes include the removal of a supplement paid to those going into general practice, to match those working in hospitals, which doctors believe could see trainee GPs losing a third of their pay.

“I don’t have a luxury lifestyle, but I don’t think I could support children with that money and those hours,” Patchava says. “The NHS runs on the philosophy of altruism. Everyone comes in an hour early and stays late to make sure the work is done. We love the NHS, but this has been such a kick in the teeth. I’ll have no hesitation about taking a job elsewhere.”

This sense of mismatch between the commitment put in and reward taken out is widespread. “I’m 30 years old, live in a friend’s flat with three other people, don’t own a car and have still got thousands of pounds of debt,” writes one junior doctor in an angry email. “My friends outside of medicine have bought houses, have children and the majority have their weekends and evenings for themselves. On top of my ‘48 hours a week’, I teach and lecture in my free time, attend courses (which we have to fund), study and do everything I can to be a better doctor. I love my job – I couldn’t imagine living with myself if I left. However, the prevalence of locums and holes in the rota, overstretched stressed GPs and A&E staff make the atmosphere toxic. We miss weddings, funerals, birthdays. Relationships are lost, friends estranged, all because we love our job.”

Foiz Ahmed, a junior doctor in emergency plastic surgery (who is grappling with £30,000 debt) argues that the new contracts will strike a pernicious blow to the NHS and patient safety. “This isn’t just about salaries, although of course a 10-30% pay cut is unmanageable for most of us. Let’s ignore the fact that I used to earn more an hour while working for a mobile-phone company as a student ... With the continued denigration of public perception of doctors, there is a sustained attempt to make the NHS fail. A demoralised workforce performs less efficiently, and a less-efficient system can be broken up and sold to private firms.”

The Department of Heath insists these fears are misplaced. “We are not cutting the pay bill for junior doctors and want to see their basic pay go up just as average earnings are maintained. We really value the work and commitment of junior doctors, but their current contract is outdated and unfair.”

Junior doctors are not convinced. The GMC had 3,468 requests for a certificate of current professional status, the paperwork needed to register to work as a doctor outside the UK, in the 10 days since the new contract was announced; usually it processes 20 to 25 requests a day. Partly this was the result of a concerted online campaign to get junior doctors to apply as a way of showing their anger. But some doctors, such as David Watkin, 30, a paediatrician based in Birmingham, truly intend to leave if the contract is imposed. Watkin recently returned from a year working in New Zealand, has stayed in touch with his employers out there and is confident that there will be a job for him.

The day-to-day stress Watkin experiences in Birmingham, which is mainly the result of standing in for unfilled doctors’ shifts, was absent in New Zealand. “But stress is not really the issue,” he says. In New Zealand, he says he felt more looked after, with meals paid for and professional fees covered by the hospital.

Would I be a fool to return to the NHS on the new junior doctor contract?



“Here we feel very under-appreciated by the government and the Department of Health. We have sacrificed a lot – years of training and extra hours studying outside of our work. We have moved around the country every six months to go where our training jobs send us, with no say in where we go, so it’s difficult to settle anywhere and hard to buy a house. We, as a body, are feeling under attack; it feels like any concerns we raise are being misrepresented with hospitals portraying us as just wanting more money.”

At 30, he still has about £9,000 in debt (down from about £30,000). He has done seven years as a junior doctor already and has another four to go before he becomes a consultant. “I worry that this is going to lead to an exodus of doctors, and I worry about the pressure that this will put on those who stay – and on patients. I had a work-experience student with me this week; it feels harder to come out with a positive line about why they should do it.”

  Holly Ni Raghallaigh: ‘I worked very hard and put myself in a lot of debt to get here.’ Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Guardian

Holly Ni Raghallaigh, 29, a trainee urologist, is planning to go to Scotland (which, like Wales, will not impose the new contract). She has been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by the cost of her training, and doesn’t feel able to take a pay cut. With five more years as a junior doctor, she doesn’t think she could afford to continue if her pay is reduced.

“I worked very hard and put myself in a lot of debt to get here,” she says. At one point she had to pay for a urology course ahead of an exam and was so overdrawn that she missed two consecutive monthly payments to the GMC, was temporarily removed from the medical register and subjected to a large fine. She estimates she has spent £5,000 on mandatory surgery courses and exams during surgical training; she is paying back her remaining £10,000 of student loan at a rate of £450 a month. Once her rent in London and her monthly subscriptions to the Royal College of Surgeons (£50), GMC (£40) and BMA (£18) are paid, she has nothing left. It isn’t possible to save towards a deposit on a flat.

“Every single time I found myself in my overdraft or having to borrow petrol money or forego a flight home to Ireland to book a course, or every weekend I spent working as a locum to fund my education – I would do it all over again,” she says. “I adore my job and, honestly, working in the NHS is all I have ever wanted to do. And, for the record, I am grateful to the taxpayer who has put me here.” She says she hopes the tales of difficulties she found “embarrassing and demoralising” make people understand the financial pressures junior doctors face. “I don’t want it to sound like a sob story. I could have managed my finances better, but I had no money.”

Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules

BBC News

Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled.

This time has not previously been considered work by many employers.

It means firms including those employing care workers, gas fitters and sales reps may be in breach of EU working time regulations.

BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman said it could have a "huge effect".

"Thousands of employers could now find themselves in breach of working time regulations," he added.

'Falling below minimum wage'

Chris Tutton, from the solicitors Irwin Mitchell, agreed the ruling would be "very significant" and could have an impact on pay.

"People may now be working an additional 10 hours a week once you take into account their travel time, and that may mean employers are falling below the national minimum wage level when you look at the hourly rate that staff are paid," he said.

The court says its judgment is about protecting the "health and safety" of workers as set out in the European Union's working time directive.

The directive is designed to protect workers from exploitation by employers, and it lays down regulations on matters such as how long employees work, how many breaks they have, and how much holiday they are entitled to.

'Bear the burden'

One of its main goals is to ensure that no employee in the EU is obliged to work more than an average of 48 hours a week.

The ruling came about because of an ongoing legal case in Spain involving a company called Tyco, which installs security systems.

The company shut its regional offices down in 2011, resulting in employees travelling varying distances before arriving at their first appointment.

The court ruling said: "The fact that the workers begin and finish the journeys at their homes stems directly from the decision of their employer to abolish the regional offices and not from the desire of the workers themselves.

"Requiring them to bear the burden of their employer's choice would be contrary to the objective of protecting the safety and health of workers pursued by the directive, which includes the necessity of guaranteeing workers a minimum rest period."

Who came up with the model for excessive pay? No, it wasn't the bankers – it was academics

All the focus has been on bankers' bonuses, yet no one has looked at the economists who argued for rewarding bosses by giving them a bigger financial stake in their companies



Take a big step back. Ignore those sterile debates about how Dave screwed up over Stephen Hester's pay and where this leaves Ed. Instead, ask this: which profession has done most to justify the millions handed over to the boss of RBS, his colleagues and counterparts? Which group has been most influential in making the argument that top people deserve top pay? Not the executives themselves – at least, not directly. Nor the headhunters. Try the economists.




The ground rules for the system by which City bankers, Westminster MPs and ordinary taxpayers live today were set by two US economists just a couple of decades ago. In 1990, Michael Jensen and Kevin Murphy published one of the most famous papers in economics, which first appeared in the Journal of Political Economy and then in the Harvard Business Review. Its argument is well summed up by the latter's title: "CEO Incentives: It's Not How Much You Pay, But How."



The way to get better performance out of bosses, argued the economists, was by giving them a bigger financial stake in their company's performance. You couldn't have asked for a better codification of bonus culture had you stuck a mortar board on Gordon Gekko's head. So popular, so influential was Jensen and Murphy's work that it opened the door to a new corporate culture: one where executives routinely scooped millions in stock options, apparently justified by top research that they were worth it.



The usual criticism of economists is that they missed the crisis: they preferred their models to reality, and those models took no account of the mischief that could be caused by bankers running wild. Of all explanations, this is the most comforting; all academics need to do next time, presumably, is look a little harder – ideally with a grant from the taxpayer.



But economists didn't just fail to spot the financial crisis – they helped create it. They provided the intellectual framework and drew up the policies that helped caused the boom – and the bust. Yet rather than a full-blown investigation, their active involvement in this crisis and their motivations have barely got a look-in. As Philip Mirowski, one of the world's leading historians of economic thought, puts it: "The bankers have got off the hook, and gone back to business as usual – and so too have the economists." It's the same discipline that spoke all that nonsense about markets always being efficient that is now deciding how to reform the economy.



A few weeks ago, I described the current economic system as a bankocracy run by the banks, for the banks. Mainstream economists play the role of a secularised priesthood, explaining to the laity just how and why the markets' will must be done. Why are they doing this? Luigi Zingales, an economist at Chicago, calls it "economists' capture". Much of the blame for the financial crisis has fallen on regulators for being captured by the bankers, and seeing the world from their point of view. The same thing, he believes, has happened to academics. When Zingales looked at the 150 most downloaded academic papers on executive pay he found that those arguing that bosses should get more (à la Jensen and Murphy) were 55% more likely to get published in the top journals.



Anyone who saw the film Inside Job will recall the scene in which leading economists are shown puffing financial deregulation, or the outlook for Icelandic capital markets, or whatever – and then revealed to have taken hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, from the very interests they are advocating. But this goes wider than direct payment; many academics also believe those arguments about how markets work best when they are left alone. As the economist Steve Keen puts it: "Most economists are deluded."



Maybe, but it also pays to be deluded. Think about the rewards for toeing the mainstream economic line. Publication in prestigious journals. Early professorships at top universities. The conferences, the consultancies at big banks, the speaking fees. And then: the solicitations of the press, the book contracts. On it goes.



Rob Johnson, director of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, quotes a dictum he was once given by a leading west coast economist. "If you got behind Wall Street," he remembers the professor telling him, "you went to Lake Como every summer. If you left finance alone, you took a nice vacation in California. And if you took on the bankers, you drove a secondhand car."



Were this corruption of analytical philosophy, say, this might not matter so much. But economics shapes our policy and our public debates – and it warps both. Yesterday, I listened to a discussion of Hester's bonus (what else?) on the Today programme. Defending Hester, a journalist quoted some American finding that CEO pay had actually halved since 2001.



Chicago economist Steve Kaplan does indeed argue that "CEO pay in 2006 remained below CEO pay in 2000 and 2001". What's missing there is that 2001 was the height of the US dotcom boom, when bosses were getting crazy money. Kaplan also writes papers about how hard it is to be a chief executive. According to his CV, his consulting clients have included Accenture, Goldman Sachs and a bunch of other Wall Street banks. This is the way such arguments are prosecuted: without full disclosure of either evidence or interests. And in such arguments, it's you that loses.

In the UK 2,800 bankers earn over £1m. The claim that rare skills command a premium does not apply to them

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, 23/11/2011

Here's a game you can play at home. Ask your friends how much they reckon the head of human resources at Cadbury, the chocolate company, pocketed for the last year for which we have figures. In my experience, the guessing will open at around the £100,000 or £150,000 mark. Then, realising that the answer must be stunning or else you wouldn't be asking the question, people go higher, suggesting £300,000 or even £500,000.

Those who place their bet at that very top end tend to smile at the absurdity of it, acknowledging in advance the madness of such a high salary. So far, in two years of playing this game, I have never seen anyone get the right answer. Which is that in 2008 Bob Stack, then head of HR for Cadbury, was rewarded with a package totalling £3.8m, including £2m in exercised share options. The aptly named Stack retired with all that and an £8m pension pot, paying him £700,000 this year and every year.

It's a choice example, even if Cadbury, gobbled up by Kraft, is, like Stack, no longer part of the British corporate scene. No matter how inured you think you are to runaway executive salaries, laid bare by this week's report of the High Pay Commission, that one makes the jaw drop. For Stack was not some master of the universe CEO, heading up a global financial behemoth. He ran the personnel department at a chocolate company. That's not a trivial job. But a basic package of nearly £2m a year? It makes no sense.
Ask people to pinpoint the problem and they might struggle to be specific. They just find it appalling that, as the commission found, today's CEO is often paid 70, 80 or over 100 times the salary of their average worker, when three decades ago the ratio usually stood at 13 to 1. A gap has turned into a vast, ever widening chasm.

Why does this matter exactly? You can't simply whine that it's unfair, insisted the executive recruiter Heather McGregor on the Today programme. "Anyone over the age of seven who complains that things are not fair needs a reality check," she said.

Deborah Hargreaves, the High Pay Commission chair, is ready with grown-up, hard-headed arguments for why runaway pay is bad for business. When those at the top are getting so much more than their subordinates, workers get demoralised, Hargreaves told me; absenteeism increases, and staff refuse to engage with management or support the corporate mission. When the average salary has increased just threefold over the last 30 years, it makes workers sullen and resentful to note that, say, the head of Barclays has seen his pay rise by nearly 5,000% over the same period.

Free-wheeling capitalists should be particularly alarmed, says the commission. Gargantuan executive pay is sapping enterprise: people who might have been risk-taking entrepreneurs have no reason to start their own businesses when they are so comfortably looked after at corporate HQ. And of course such winner-takes-all rewards warp the wider economy. Housing in London is just one example. The bonus boys have driven up prices at the top end, pulling the whole housing market out of reach of would-be first-time buyers at the other end. It's trickle-down economics at its worst: the wealth of the rich doesn't cascade downwards, but its corrosive consequences do.

Defenders of the wealthy brush aside such talk, certain their critics' real beef resides elsewhere, in envy or a retro-communist desire for uniformity. "Move to Cuba" was McGregor's most succinct soundbite.
In one way she's right: concerns over worker demoralisation and reduced entrepreneurial spirit do not lie at the heart of the matter. Our objection to telephone-number salaries goes deeper. What it comes down to is desert – a notion so deeply ingrained that, yes, even a seven-year-old can grasp it: the belief that people should deserve the rewards they get.

That's why the "move to Cuba" remark was so off beam. Most people have long accepted that there will be a differential in pay that, in the hoary example, the brain surgeon will earn more than the dustman. People understand that some skills are rare and therefore command a greater premium. They even accept that this can result in extreme outcomes, with the likes of Wayne Rooney trousering £250,000 a week. But none of that logic applies to the current state of corporate pay.

Rooney is truly a one in a hundred million talent; there might be just two dozen people in the world who could match his skills. But with all due respect to Bob Stack, that is not true of him. Nor can it possibly be true of the 2,800 staff in 27 UK-based banks who, according to the Financial Services Authority, received more than £1m each in 2009. Whatever these people are able to do, it's clearly not rare.

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian 23/11/2011

Ah, comes the reply, but these are the cream of the international crop, among the very best bankers in the world. The commission report blows a hole in that tired argument, revealing there's hardly any cross-border poaching of corporate talent. Not many of our monolingual high earners could work abroad and even fewer would want to. They like it here and do not have to be paid lottery jackpot money to stay.

So rarity and competition can't justify these rates, and nor can any old-fashioned notion of desert: there is no society-wide consensus that says these people do such valuable, critical work they deserve their riches. On the contrary, we lament that the City lures maths and science graduates who might otherwise have become great engineers or scientists, paying them instead to move digits on a screen producing nothing of any discernible value whatsoever.

When reward slips its moorings from merit, this surely poses a danger that goes beyond our economic prospects. What message are we sending the next generation of Britons? Why should they aspire to become a surgeon or a headteacher or a judge, when those once top-paid jobs now earn a tiny fraction of the salary attached to a relatively cushy, low-risk seat in the boardroom or on the trading floor?

Strikingly, the commission found that even the mega-earners do not kid themselves they deserve their pay. They admitted that they had got lucky, that they worked no harder and risked no more than those earning much less. But they did think they were "entitled" to what they got. Hargreaves draws no parallel with the August rioters, except that they "showed that same sense of entitlement, that they could take trainers or a TV, as those bankers who thought they could take a bonus, even if they had brought a bank to its knees".
The commission has plenty of bright ideas for change. Ignore the City bleats that meaningful action has to be international, which sadly is impossible: action has only been impossible up till now because the UK, batting for the City, has blocked any EU attempt to tackle high pay. But the larger change will be cultural. We need to revive the lost notion of merit and desert, to make those bagging huge, undeserved salaries feel a sense of shame or at least loss of reputation at such unwarranted rewards. We have the Fairtrade scheme, so why not a Fair Pay kitemark granted only to products made by companies who pay defensible rates? Such a seal of approval should be given only sparingly – only to those who have really earned it.