Sunday, November 03, 2013

A Living Wage is no Life

The number of people who are paid less than a "living wage" has leapt by more than 400,000 in a year to over 5.2 million, amid mounting evidence that the economic recovery is failing to help millions of working families.
Matthew Bolton of Citizens UK, an organisation campaigning for the living wage, said: “Every one of those five million working people has a story of struggle: working two jobs, no time with the children, choosing eating over heating.”

A report for the international tax and auditing firm KPMG also shows that nearly three-quarters of 18-to-21-year-olds now earn below this level – a voluntary rate of pay regarded as the minimum to meet the cost of living in the UK.

According to the report, women are disproportionately stuck on pay below the living wage rate, currently £8.55 in London and £7.45 elsewhere. Some 27% of women are not paid the living wage, compared with 16% of men. Part-time workers are also far more likely to receive low pay than full-time workers, with 43% paid below living-wage rates compared with 12% of full-timers.

 Save the Children’s data show that the number of children living in families with earnings below the living wage has risen from 1.82 million in 2010-11 to 1.96 million in 2011-12. The charity said it was increasingly concerned that 1.7 million households struggling with low incomes would have lower entitlements under the universal credit welfare reforms.
Save the Children's Priya Kothari said: "More children risk being pushed into poverty because work isn't paying enough; two-thirds of children in poverty live in households where one or both parents work. How can that be right?”

David Miliband pledged that a future Labour government would subsidise companies paying the living wage.  The demand for a living wage is an old one, going back to the ILP in the 1920s and beyond. This was proposed first as a remedy to the crisis that many believed was caused by under-consumption, later as a "transitional demand" by which capitalism would be bankrupted. Presumably it is  a wage that would allow a worker to afford decent housing, enough proper food, new clothes, to go on holiday and run a car.  We have nothing against workers struggling for and getting higher wages if they can. We favour this. We hope the campaign to get employers to pay some of their workers more succeeds, even if we don’t like the term “living wage” any more than “fair wage”. There’s nothing fair about the wages system and we’re against people having to work for a wage to live. Socialism is not about redistributing income and wealth from the rich to the poor, but about establishing a society that would not be divided into rich and poor. There will also be unintended consequences of implementing Miliband’s policy such as the subsidies may well encourage companies to lower all wages. The employers’ trump card is going to be “Look, you are not going to be worse off, since your total income from us and the state is going to be more or less the same”. Employers will taking this subsidy into account when fixing or negotiating the wages they pay?

No amount of reform will eliminate the irreconcilable clash of interest between the capitalist and the working class. Like all reforms of capitalism living wage legislation leaves intact the basic mechanism wherein a small handful live of the surplus value produced by the working class.
Marx didn’t think much of such demands as “fixing the minimum wage by law”, which was one of the reform demands of the French Workers Party he had a hand in helping to set up in 1880. He wrote, referring to the proposer of this: “I told him: ‘If the French proletariat is still so childish as to require such bait, it is not worth while drawing up any program whatever.’” (Letter to Sorge, 5 November 1880)

THE WORKER'S MIRAGE

The dangling carrot 'Henry' must pursue,
Still out of reach, but never out of view,
With every step he thinks 'Tis mine at last
But so did Henry's father in the past,
A greater stride he thinks will win the prize,
But still the carrot dangles 'fore his eyes,'
Tantalisingly, promising a chew,
Still out of reach, but never out of view.
There is no need of blinders for this moke,
He only sees the carrot, not the joke,
There never was a heavier burdened mule,
There never was a more obstinate fool,
As age and toil combine to slow his pace,
Yet still the carrot stares him in the face,
Still goads him on, his efforts to renew,
Still out of reach, but never out of view.
The whip or stick could never have obtained,
A greater service, as with muscles strained,
And clenched teeth that strive to make the bite,
He labour on each day, sometimes at night,
Until the eyes grow dim and slow the tread,
And chest supports the balding, drooping head,
The once proud prance becomes a shambling gait,
The tired torso begs to pause and wait.
And so there comes a time when he no more,
May grunt and swear, and sweat from every pore,
But there are not green pastures for this ass,
In which his few remaining years may pass,
The carrot now forever, from his view,
A pittance of a pension is his due,
His life mis-spent, through chasing a mirage,
The dangling carrot known as 'Living Wage'

JAMES BOYLE (3/1/62)

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