21st Century Exploitation

If you go down to your local jobseekers centre*, you will be in for a shock. Through the drab mass of unemployed, the downcast faces, the flickering screens, looking for any soul crushing job, there you will find an outrage.

There are jobs being offered with a wage of just £3 per hour.

“Woah, hold on Michael; minimum wage laws clearly stipulate that the lowest an employee can work for is £6.08, there’s no way anyone could get away with paying less. You filthy liar, you old guard agitator”. Well, quite right, my internal-voice friend (or is that neighbour?), the minimum wage is £6.08 outside of London which is still below the national living wage of £7.20 (excluding London).

So, how do they get away with it? Under the guise of “apprenticeship”. Get to a computer at a job centre, scroll down to “C”, and you will find “Cleaning Apprentice”. Huh. Didn’t realise one needed an apprenticeship to be a cleaner. How very unusual; surely cleaning is one of the few professions that require very little if any training, no offence to any cleaners. Apprenticeships are more for technical roles like carpentry, electrician, plumber, even chef and so forth. But cleaners? There must be a reason behind calling it an “apprenticeship” rather than “job”.

That is because this is a cheap trick to pay a paltry £3 per hour. That is right; £3 per hour. If you work for nine hours, from eight in the morning until five in the evening, you will make just £27 a day. That is the equivalent of £135 a week, so more than living on benefits (£95 a week), but still not enough. Companies are able to pay such an exploitative amount by disguising the job behind the guise of “apprenticeship” when in reality it is nothing short of slave labour.

Would you take a job for £3 an hour? I should be asking that to whoever advertised the job, of course. But, bluntly, I doubt anyone reading this would. But some people are driven to desperation; they will take this job because they need it. The companies know their desperation and lack of awareness of a minimum wage or workers rights, and they exploit it.

Things get worse; though pay is the clearest disgrace, apprenticeships do not enjoy the same legal protection as employees. Apprentices can be fired easier, do not have union rights, may not go on strike and can be replaced easier.

Let's be frank; it is a job they are advertising - they perform the same duties and work the same hours, the only difference is the wage. Apprentices are have a minimum wage slightly lower than £3, so companies can hire cleaners, call them apprentices, be in the governments good books for hiring apprentices, while keeping the wage roll down. It's disgraceful.

Do you remember the days when it was possible to be paid less than £1 an hour? I don’t, even though it was just before 1998. The idea of a state with no minimum wage is totally alien to me. We should be working towards building a society where exploitation and poverty are totally alien concepts to those born today, and the minimum wage is one step towards that society.

The minimum wage is necessary because employers were shirking their social responsibility and allowing their workers to live in poverty while bosses were earning millions. If men were angels, government would not be necessary (Jefferson), but men are not angels, and government regulation to force responsibility are needed. Even with the historic introduction of the minimum wage in 1998, economic inequality did not go down.

The current minimum wage is barely enough to live by and that is twice the amount than this “apprenticeship”. The living wage campaign is enjoying popularity in Labour, but there is a caveat with it. First, the national living wage covers everywhere outside of London as the same but the reality is that the North East is far cheaper to live in than rural Kent. But the bigger problem is that by forcing organisations to adopt the living wage, their wage bills will go up. And as so many organisations are geared towards making a profit, the first thing they will look at to cut is the wage bill; the living wage may lead to unnecessary redundancy. Underemployment is a scandal, but is far preferable to unemployment – except when it amounts to a mere £3 an hour.

How does the UK compare to other civilized countries with a minimum wage? Well, it is difficult to compare as the price of living varies so much; many Eastern European countries are considerably cheaper than the UK – you can buy a large Czech farm for the price of a small urban flat in Britain. The real comparison comes against Western European countries. The hourly rate in Euros in the UK is about 6.70; in the Netherlands it is 8.07, Belgium 8.31, Ireland 8.65, France 9.19, Luxembourg 9.71 and Denmark 14.27 but Austria (5.77), Germany (roughly 6.53), Italy, Sweden and Norway fall below the UK.

Yet attacks on the minimum wage are surprisingly common. My old mate Milton Friedman even called it the “most anti-black law ever”, clearly ignoring the Jim Crow laws but whatever. Ayn Rand would claim the minimum wage laws, or any law whatsoever, was a case of a coercive and intrusive government, yet “freedom does not mean freedom from the landlord or from the employer”, so an employer is free to set whatever they want and it serves the receiver right for being weak. Neumark and Wascher claim that the minimum wage is not good for society, perhaps ignoring the better work rate of employees receiving better pay. Still, they somehow conclude that the minimum wage is harmful to poverty-stricken families, because giving money to the poor and paying enough to afford clothing and food clearly does not help those in poverty (that was sarcasm, by the way).

When a company pays its executives and bosses millions, there’s something not quite right about the argument that the minimum wage will damage their company’s finances. There’s something illogical, immoral and outrageous; like the rich live by one set of rules and the rest by another set, which is precisely the kind of thinking of an eccentric Russian émigré extremist (Ayn Rand, in case it wasn’t obvious).

Despite this recent discovery, our dear PM insists that business is “the most powerful force” for social progress. The fact is business is inherently self-interested because under a neo-liberal capitalist system business must be inherently self-interested; that is how the system works. And therefore it is up to the government and unions to protect the interests and rights of the workers through safety laws, wage laws and “intrusive” legislation.

Unless this deception is revealed and fought against, all the progress in employment policy from the last fifteen years will be undone. We simply cannot go back to the days before the minimum wage, we cannot go back to the Victorian days of twelve hour shifts for half a loaf of crusty bread a day (or as Friedman and his advocates call it, the “Golden Age”). This is exactly what Labour was set up to fight against; so let’s get out the soap box, open the book of rhetoric and start agitating against exploitation that is still alive and kicking in the 21^st Century.

*I say local; this “job” was advertised in the Durham jobseekers centre, though it may well be seen elsewhere.

Fire of Socialism

“The age of great industrial triumphs was an age of appalling social deprivation...unspeakable urban squalor, compounded by drink abuse, bad housing, low wages, long hours and sham education” (T.C. Smout). Ah, a contemporary political comment, one of thousands to sprawl the internet. Except, no, this is a comment on the ‘Great Transformation’, a period in Victorian Britain where the free markets ruled; where miners injured through accident caused by the lack of safety were not compensated and where complaining about such conditions would result in redundancy; a world where poverty was just accepted. This abject poverty was the social cost of unbridled economic growth, of capitalism, and of deregulation. It is in this background of exploitation and inequality that the Labour party was created; its mission was the recognition of the plight of the workers and the impossible living conditions forced on the majority by a minority.

Many of the same problems that existed in the 19^th Century exist today; a report recently published shows 115 million Europeans are in poverty (23.4% of EU population). What of Britain, an ‘advanced’ and ‘post-industrial’ country? A beacon for others; 13.5million (22%) in poverty compared to 13.7% in 1979, 32% of children in poverty, our level of inequality matches that of the 1930s, the poorest tenth are to lose 8% of their income while the richest tenth lose 3.2%, cuts to services would cost the poorest tenth 30% of their income to replace basic services while the richest tenth would lose just 2% to the same cuts, from 1998 to 2008 the poorest tenth lost £7 of income while the wealthiest tenth gained £365 in income – and that was a ‘boom’, the richest tenth own 31% of income while the poorest three tenths make just 10% (the poorest tenth just 1%). Welcome to the civilized world! (And that's not even the half of it).

Great men stood up against this – men like Keir Hardie, Ben Tillet, Arthur Henderson and others; they had vision, they had purpose and they had fire. This fire is what the modern Labour party misses and needs to regain. There is still exploitation and injustice in Britain, never mind the wider world. And who should speak up against this? Who should represent the views of the downtrodden? Us, Labour. We are not an ideology directed by a book, nor a leaning one way or another, nor are we a label; we are a crusade that fights for the fair treatment of workers, just wages proportional to work, the right to work. It was fighters like these who made the Labour party, not just middle class thinkers.

Has the movement been hijacked by ‘gauche-caviar’ or champagne socialists? Possibly, but if we look at Labour in the UK some of our best politicians came from conservative backgrounds families; Attlee, Morrison, Crosland and Blair for instance. Rather, we have lost our idealism and accepted a world system which exploits the poor. We have become part of the establishment we sought to change; maybe we got too comfortable, maybe we got too distant, the point is we need to refocus social democracy back to helping people, back to the basics of socialism; decency.

Idealists say “all men will be brothers”, realists say “all men cannot be brothers”; the latter breeds cynicism and greed, the former gives hope – which would you rather live by?

We have become part of the establishment we sought to change; and when in office we have failed to change it sufficiently or live up to expectations. This is especially true of former Communist countries where social democratic parties have been forced to privatise and accept “shock therapy”, but also of west European social democratic parties. The UK has had three strong Labour governments, yet Britain is still burdened with the House of Lords. Even worse, we accuse “the establishment” of corruption and abuse of power, but as soon as we come in we are embroiled in scandal, we become the elite, we want to keep things the same. The Nordic and east Europe countries have seen social democrats become the conservative party and the “liberal conservative” or free market parties become the modern, progressive party able to keep with the times.

“What we lack in resources we make up for in innovation”; that is what social democrats should be saying in their self-assessment. Unfortunately, it is a quote from Nicholas Sarkozy, but the point still remains; "we are a party of pennies, not pounds" (Attlee - a much better source to quote).

I quote Attlee and in length to show what socialism is about; “Those who count progress only in terms of seats won and growth of numbers miss the real significance of what has happened...the emphasis today is less on destruction and more on construction... It is not enough to denounce capitalism and leave socialism to a few general principles. Modern socialists must be able to show the immediate steps which socialists will take when they achieve power... The vision of the future has now to be translated into political action... Socialism is not an end in itself, but only the means of attaining conditions under which the fullest possible life will be available... A socialist government, while seeking to increase wealth...will not be content with a material success. In planning the new Britain they will think of it, not just as a basis for wealth production, but as the environment in which men and women live happily and freely”

There is the problem; we are counting success in electoral terms (a problem with 're-founding Labour'), we are too busy criticising without offering a different vision, we have lost the vision of the future ideal society, as such no action can be taken. Instead of asking ‘what can be done’ we should be asking ‘what should be done’; we should not let reality get in the way of our ideals. Reality can be changed, ideals in their vaguest forms cannot. Miliband says “you’ve got to change the rules”; no, we on behalf of the people, of those in need, of the exploited must change the rules.

What is socialism about? If we get past the welfare state, nationalisation, “left wing”, revolution, fighting exploitation of workers, fair wages and so on, if we get down to the soul of what socialism means, on why we support these measures, then fundamentally socialism is about helping people. Whereas conservatism is about order and preserving the status quo, and liberalism is about freedom (however that is interpreted), socialism is about benevolence. 

Social democracy tries to create a fairer, freer and safer society for all, where an individual receives free and comprehensive education to make a living earning a fair wage for his toils, where he is cared for when he falls ill at no cost, where he is protected from social delinquents and he may walk the street without the fear of persecution or harm. Fundamentally, socialists and social democrats are idealists. The experience of government and the failure of reform has made us grow sceptical and ground us in realism; we need idealists, we need dreamers, we need people who are realistic but also, dare I say, a little naive. That is what we are fighting for when we are door-knocking and delivering leaflets; we do not fight for Labour but for a new society. The party is simply the means of achieving it.

Social democracy needs to be put back on its feet and refocus; understand what really matters. We have forgotten what we are fighting for and who. In the wake of the mass deregulation and privatisation in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, Sweden and other, I must say this; social democracy will come back, there will be a backlash, it will overturn the power of the markets. Let them have their way for now; but you cannot shoot an idea, and as long as inequality and poverty exists so too will idealists and activists, so too will social democracy. 

There is still fire for social democracy and new ideas, but the thinkers are writers, journalists, bloggers and lecturers, preferring not to get their hands dirty or reputations tarnished in political action. As Marx said; it is not enough to speculate about the world, the goal is to change it.