MonsterMonster

There was a time, not long ago, that this type of sensitive contract would have been awarded to China. To top it off they'd buy them out when they realised China doesn't make a good supplier to the UK government.

I think the question is "Is the Belarus government Putin's puppet bitch?"

"I have zero evidence for this..."

Says it all really.

The Japanese branch of the Taliban.

There seems to be a race to the bottom when it comes to pay across all industries. These are wages from almost 30 years ago for a middle level IT person. In 1994 a typical high end IT manager for a national corporation was around £70k+.

Edit: I just remembered that in 1996 the company I worked for paid £1k per day for an external contractor to provide Unix and IP networking consultancy services to one staff member. That went on for five days per week for about a month at least. That staff member was on about £40k.

Here's a reminder of what the water companies have been doing to get into this mess.

Wages have been driven down to such low levels. Pay more then they'll have a better chance of filling those vacancies. There was a time that one parent could support a household, now it requires two and then it barely covers the bills.

The very companies that do not want to pay a fair and decent wage yet happily throw money at the directors will wonder why they've gone bust when their customers no longer have surplus income to buy their goods. Pubs are a good example.

I got the name wrong instead of The New York Bagel Co.

Whether they are any good by comparison to a top end Bagel product I don't honestly know. But out of those available generally at UK supermarkets they are the nicest.

Here in the UK the perception of the value of own-label products is mixed where some are cheap but rubbish quality (Waitrose Essential Bagels) and others that are as good quality as the big brands (Tesco Bagel v ~~American Bagel Co.~~. The New York Bakery Co.) but way cheaper.

However, there does seem to be something happening where good value own-label products are disappearing through more shelf space being given to big brands and displacing own-label equivalents.

I use sensitive toothpaste and I usually buy the stuff several tubes at once. The big brand is Sensodyne which is good but at £5.75/75ml (Tesco) is expensive. The Tesco brand which was as good was way cheaper at around £1 making it far better value for money.

But here's the issue, the big brands can't compete with the quality and value of own-label products on pricing. Across three of the largest supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl, Tesco) the own-label sensitive toothpaste has disappeared with more shelf space being allocated to Sensodyne. All recently at the same time.

The clue might be France.

Closing corporate tax loop holes will help a fair bit. I doubt much has changed since this article in 2012.

Agreed.

Expensive products are far from any guarantee of good quality. Cookers are a good example. The expensive ones invariably have identical components to the cheaper models such as the energy regulators or thermocouples.