All but two of the charges against Ibrahim were dropped last year after brands including Zara and H&M boycotted an industry conference in Dhaka, in protest at the treatment of workers and crackdown on unions. With competition growing from garment sectors in Vietnam and Ethiopia, threats by western buyers hold more sway than ever.
I was at that conference. As was the H&M rep. I met him.
Incidentally the Guardian has an interesting article about how the Finnish experiment with a Universal Basic Income has come to a crashing halt after two years.
Only they do not explain just what went wrong. And it seems they are kind of hiding that article on their site. This one leads to the Guardian but isn’t:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/04/finland_pulls_the_plug_on_guaranteed_basic_income_experiment.html
SMFS
Yes, i’m hoping Tim will be able to get his teeth into that when the info starts to flow.
I suspect that the negative effect on individual people is far greater than most adherents will admit to.
I’m waiting for an explanation of why they stopped it. That’s going to be the interesting thing here. Was it working? No? If not, why not?
“The participants, aged 25–58, are all unemployed, ”
WUT? The whole point – really the entire point – is that it really is universal. Absolutely everyone gets it, working or not. Thus, working really pays and not working does not pay. you get to see an actual difference in living conditions.
If you:
– only give it to unemployed people with no strings attached
– make it comparable to the strings-definitely-attached unemplyoemtn benefit
– stop the payment when you get a job (even if the money already paid is not recovered)
you are simply making an epic howler of utterly perverse incentives.
This is simples, no?
They aren’t going to release results until 2019 apparently
The Pedant-General said:
“The participants, aged 25–58, are all unemployed, ”
It was a trial; the idea was to pay unemployed people, but not stop the payments if they got a job, and presumably see whether they were more likely to get a job than average.
That’s a vaguely sensible way to do a trial; see if it works to reduce unemployment, and either way you haven’t really lost anything.
Of course the other half of the trial would be to see how many people with jobs gave them up once they had a guaranteed income, but it makes sense to leave that part until later because if that half doesn’t work you could cause real damage.
“Should they find a job during the two-year trial, they still get to keep the money.”
Hmmm… I read that differently. Rather unclear if what they meant was “the payments will continue”.