Aurelia Butler

Barclays has given 35,000 of its branch and junior support staff in the UK a £1,200 pay rise to help them cope with the escalating cost of living crisis and soaring inflation.The salary increase will come into effect on August 1 and brings forward part of the lender’s annual pay review, normally due to come into force in March. The bank indicated it might also boost salaries of staff in other countries in the coming months.“Barclays will continue to monitor the economic situation globally and consider our approach to pay in each country in the local context,” it said in a statement on Thursday.Barclays and other companies are reacting to consumer prices in the UK rising at the fastest pace in four decades, piling pressure on people struggling to pay their bills.Inflation in the UK reached 9.1 per cent in May and the Bank of England has forecast that the measure will exceed 11 per cent in the autumn. The pound has also fallen against other major currencies such as the dollar.Companies are finding that staff are increasingly making demands for higher pay and threatening industrial action if these are not met.Companies that have raised pay and offered bonuses in recent months include Lloyds Banking Group, easyJet, British Airways, Rolls-Royce and some of the UK’s biggest supermarkets.BAE Systems, Britain’s largest defence contractor, is also offering a bonus to its workers as part of a two-year pay deal agreed with unions on Thursday. Some 28,000 employees will vote on the deal worth 12.75 per cent over two years next month. The deal includes a £1,000 bonus for each year. Unite welcomed the offer from Barclays, saying: “As all employees face significant cost of living increases Unite has campaigned to ensure that this bank recognised the need to act.” However, some other one-off awards have not always been well received by workers.Unions last week criticised a pay offer from Rolls-Royce that included a £2,000 cash lump sum for its 14,000 UK workers to help them through the cost of living crisis.

Unite said the offer — which also included a 4 per cent pay rise — “falls a long way short of the cost of living crisis claim submitted by our members and their expectations”.On Thursday employees at BT voted in favour of strike action for the first time in 35 years, after the Communication Workers Union accused the telecoms group’s management of introducing a low flat-rate pay rise despite soaring levels of inflation.Lloyds said last week it would give 64,000 employees, excluding senior managers and executives, a £1,000 one-off payment to help with their household bills.“As the rising cost of living continues to impact our people and our customers, we’ve been assessing the evolving outlook for inflation and considering how we can support you even further,” the lender said at the time. More

The EU and New Zealand have concluded a free trade agreement, giving a boost to a strained global trading system.The agreement will eliminate all tariffs on EU exports to New Zealand and improve access to the bloc for products from the country’s powerhouse meat and dairy industries, as well as fruit and vegetables.The deal, covering trade and investment, is the first Brussels has struck in three years after resistance in several member states to reductions in trade barriers. EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said the agreement had unprecedented provisions on sustainability and labour rights. The two sides could impose sanctions against each other for any breach of the Paris climate agreement to cut carbon emissions. “This is a new generation of trade deal, with both sides set to make real economic and environmental gains,” he said. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, flew to Brussels to finalise the deal on Thursday with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The pair highlighted the “shared democratic values and interests” of the two parties.Haggling over agricultural products dominated four years of talks and almost sunk them. Wellington has abolished farm subsidies and wants new markets for its competitively priced beef, lamb, butter and milk powder.New Zealand farmers will have to end the use of protected EU names, such as feta and Manchego cheese over the next few years.Asked about the agricultural package, New Zealand trade minister Damien O’Connor said: “No one likes it, so we must have got it about right.” Some 97 per cent of the country’s exports will enter the EU tariff free. Bilateral trade in goods between the two partners was €7.8bn in 2021, with trade in services hitting €3.7bn in 2020. The deal could cut some €140mn a year in duties for EU companies.The EU in recent years has clinched deals with Mercosur, the South American trading bloc, and Mexico. It has also finished talks with Chile. But several governments are insisting on extra conditions protecting forests in the Amazon before ratifying the Mercosur deal.A deal with Canada entered into force provisionally in 2017, and is still awaiting ratification in several countries. Dombrovskis said sustainability concerns had held up the deal with Canada. Fifteen EU member states wrote to him last week demanding he conclude more deals.Dombrovskis said he hoped the New Zealand agreement, which should be signed next year, would be ratified by the European parliament and member states within two years. “In terms of sustainability this is the most ambitious trade agreement ever concluded,” he said. “We hope this will also facilitate the ratification process.”Markus Beyrer, director-general of BusinessEurope, the EU employers’ lobby group, said the deal was a “welcome and much-needed resumption of an ambitious EU trade agenda”. “The geoeconomic context marked by supply chain disruptions demands resilience from the EU by spreading and mitigating risk through market diversification, both for imports and exports,” he said. More