Category: Equality

The Super Rich Have a Super Nice Pledge

Thirty-eight US billionaires have pledged to give at least half of their total wealth to charity during their life or after their death. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates (who have previously donated very large sums of money) have made an impression on other extremely wealth individuals in the USA with their new organization The Giving Pledge.

The campaign was started in June to convince US billionaires to give away at least half of their fortunes either during their lifetimes or after their deaths.

“We’ve really just started but already we’ve had a terrific response,” Mr Buffett said in a statement.

He added: “The Giving Pledge is about asking wealthy families to have important conversations about their wealth and how it will be used.”

Those who pledge their money to “philanthropic causes and charitable organisations” must publicly state their intention through a letter of explanation.

Read more at the BBC.

Expanding Education

Liz Coleman is the president of Bennington, a college in the USA, and she has some wise things to say about education. She suggests that the more classical take on a liberal-arts education has fallen short of creating the proper citizens for the 21st century and her solution is to broaden the school’s concept of education itself.

Google Picks Up the Tab for Inequality

The New York Times is reporting that Google is going to start compensating its gay/lesbian employees in same-sex partnerships, for the tax charged on their partner’s employer health benefits; a tax which heterosexual married couples are exempt from. It’s a little thing, but it’s nice to see a corporation do something to right an injustice that has nothing to do with their bottom line.

So Google is essentially going to cover those costs, putting same-sex couples on an even footing with heterosexual employees whose spouses and families receive health benefits.

The company began to look at the disparity after a gay employee pointed it out, said Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for people operations (also known as human resources). Google, by the way, says its benefits team seriously considers any suggestions on how to expand its coverage. “We said, ‘You’re right, that doesn’t seem fair,’ so we looked into it,” Mr. Bock said.

Read the whole article at the New York Times

Winning Over Winnipeg Workers

Here’s an inspiring piece of one entrepreneur in Winnipeg who saw a labour shortage and a surplus of people and put the two together. He, with the help of the government, created a program to train unemployed and young Canadian First Nation people to be able to work at his company. That might not sound extraordinary, but apparently this went against convention and shocked a lot of others in the field.

During a labour crunch four years ago, Mr. Saulnier felt the familiar pressure to hire workers from abroad. Some tycoons in the industrial construction business even took him aside and told him he could only win bids on massive infrastructure jobs if he had a large and secure labour pool. And the only way to assure that – at least as conventional thinking goes – was to launch an overseas recruitment program.

But Mr. Saulnier isn’t exactly conventional. He saw an untapped source of labour much closer to home.

“I grew up in a small Northern Ontario town where I was surrounded by first nations communities, where there were very good men and women who are just wishing for a job,” he explained in an interview. “Against the advice of business advisers and industry colleagues, we decided to seek them out.”

Keep reading at the Globe and Mail.

Thanks to Greg!

The Robin Hood Tax

In the UK there’s a movement to tax the banks on their transactions at a very tiny amount and using the increased revenue to help the poor and the environment.

You can watch the video below and check out the Robin Hood tax site.

Here’s how it works:

The Robin Hood Tax is a tiny tax on banks, hedge funds and other finance institutions that would raise billions to tackle poverty and climate change, at home and abroad.

It can start as low as 0.005 per cent – and average 0.05 per cent . But when levied on the billions of pounds sloshing round the global finance system every day through transactions such as foreign exchange, derivatives trading and share deals, it can raise hundreds of billions of pounds every year.

And while international agreement is best, it can start right now, right here in the UK.

That can help stop cuts in crucial public services in the UK, and aid the fight against global poverty and climate change.

Thanks to Greg for sending this in!