How welfare supports the 'gig economy'

Last Friday, I was sent to a jobs fair by my work coach. The fair was at another job centre a short bus ride away. There, the claimants waited patiently, and some impatiently, to speak with seated representatives of various companies and public bodies. I found long queues for the local council — offering admin jobs and other opportunities — and nonexistent queues for tutoring and personal training (I went for the former).

Apart from admin roles, tutoring and personal training, the fair had desks for construction work, retail, catering, even health and social care. Names of brands caught my eye: Westfield, Nando’s and Tesco. It got me wondering. How much of this is about what the employers want? Take a guess. Here we are, the reserve army of labour, queuing to sell our time and our skills to would-be employers. Is this really what the unemployed need?

Of course, there was a catch: if I failed to attend the jobs fair, I would face the possibility of my benefits being slashed to £10 a week for up to 90 days. This is what’s called a ‘sanction’. Once at the fair, you queue to talk to the reps, sign up in the hope of an interview and they sign you off for having applied for a job. It’s unclear how much of this is about paper-shuffling. A cynic would suspect quite a lot.

However, this is not a worry in itself. I suppose some people may find a job this way, and I might even be starting out in some temporary arrangement. But it is an example of something else. The work coaches are eager to get claimants to sign up for agency work, which will provide temporary employment and sometimes ‘self-employed’ or ‘free-lance’ contracts. I’ve worked these before. It can leave you at the beck and call of a company.

If you’re on Universal Credit and working you can keep 35p for every pound you make. That’s £35 for every £100 (in theory). I’ve yet to find out if this system works (in practice), but it sounds like it could serve as a transition back to full-time work. It’s meant to ‘wean’ the claimant off of the public teat. So you re-enter the labour market and never return. This may help reduce the official figures of unemployed too.

There is an industry in waiting for the jobless. The ‘gig economy’ — so-called for its offer of work on ‘self-employed’ contracts, such as Deliveroo andUber— is eager to gobble up cheap labour. These types of flexible contracts leave workers with their rights undermined, including the minimum wage, sick pay and holidays. It shows just how fragile these protections have become. And maybe this is why unemployment is officially falling.

At the time of writing, unemployment stands at 4.8% and, at least on paper, the UK has reached an employment level of 73%. This is the highest since records began in the early 1970s. Naturally, Tories like Toby Young love to play this up as an achievement for the right. Yet the lowest unemployment rate on record was at 3.4% in 1973. Those were the days when governments aimed for ‘full employment’.

Although employment is officially high, real wages have fallen by more than 10% in less than a decade. The TUC found that the wages have continued to stagnate, leading to a fall of 10.4% from 2007 to 2015. The UK is now alongside Greece in terms of shit pay for a hard day’s work. Even Poland has seen real wages increase by more than Britain. Meanwhile the super-rich continue to pig-out, with their salaries hitting £5.5 million.

It looks like the job centres are pushing claimants into short-term, low paid jobs — only for them to be kept on a lower rate of benefits. The government gets to say unemployment is falling, while the reasons for people falling out of work are worse than ever. As we’ve established, Universal Credit isn’t much of a cushion to land on, especially with the ‘sanctions’ regime of benefits. No wonder most people would rather be rinsed by the ‘gig economy’.

This article was originally published at Notes from the Underclass.

It's very expensive being poor!

I was meant to get my first payment of Universal Credit today. I checked my account online with some anticipation (though not much) only to find nothing there. I’ll be calling Scotland soon, listen to canned Vivaldi once again. Eventually I’ll get a dour voice telling me something. But even if I got the money, it wouldn’t be the answer.

Some have no idea what it’s like. Try paying your rent without a job. Try covering your travel costs. Try paying your Council Tax too. Try eating healthily. Try saving up for anything without disposable income. Try paying your bills. Try all of this on just £57 a week. That plus housing benefit, if you get it in time. Try it. Go on.

All of these things are hard enough when you’re working a minimum wage job. You will be lucky if you’re getting by with £100 leftover in your bank account. If you’re a recent graduate, you might be lucky enough to still have an overdraft without the charges. Feel free to dip in and go for a swim. You can sink in for days, before resurfacing at the end of the month.

That’s if you have a pay day, a monthly wage, an annual salary, with the taxes taken out by your employer. An existence as an intern or free-lancer can be highly stressful. In any case, life on what used to be called ‘the dole’ is much less simple. You can find yourself trapped financially. It’s supposed to make you “get off your arse, get on a bike and get a job”. It is true, after all the system is so shit it does give you an incentive to work.

Nevertheless, if you live on benefits — you can barely travel and eat properly. The propensity to depression is natural. You’ll soon find yourself waist-deep in despair, and sinking fast. Once you’re there, you’ll find it hard to motivate yourself to apply for jobs. Fortunately, the job centre may sanctionyou for this, so you have fear to motivate you and, I’m sure, you will apply to the best of your abilities under such intolerable conditions.

Wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. That’s why we’ve had a huge explosion of private debt — the only way to raise demand without high wages — as people relied more and more on credit cards, mortgages and loans, to stay afloat. The credit crunch and the subsequent financial crisis did not end this trend, but rather entrenched it further. We can thank ourpolitical leaders for a low-wage, low-growth economy with huge amounts of debt and unaffordable, lousy housing.

Since the credit crunch in 2007 the UK has seen wages continue to fall, in real times, putting us next to Greece. Real earnings have fallen by over 10% between 2007 and 2015 in Britain. According to the OECD, the average wage rate has risen by 6.7% in Europe — but not in Great Britain — as we find in France (11%), Germany (14%) and Poland (23%). This is what the Conservatives mean when they say they are “making work pay”.

Meanwhile the UK’s top bosses have taken home a 10% raise — on an average salary of £5.5 million a year. Wages for the average worker rose by just 2% in 2015. That’s after years of falling wages. The highest paid CEO isSir Martin Sorrell at WPP, taking home over £70 million quid last year. It may sound good for aspirational types, who stupidly imagine they could earn that much one day. The brutal truth is the poor works so these people don’t have to.

Profits are what you make when you don’t work. Except, if you’re in a dole queue — that’s scrounging! If you can digest this thought, ask yourself: How did that taste? Was it disgusting? It should be.

This article was originally written for Notes from the Underclass.

On benefits.

There are few people I rank lower than the middle-class, overpaid, expensively educated, journalists who spend their working lives demonising people living on benefits. These people work to turn the poor against each other and to support benefit cuts. So the working-class is expected to turn a blind-eye to bald parasites like Iain Duncan Smith, a man who lied about his qualifications, who claims expenses for a £39 breakfast, and then cuts benefits to disabled people.

I was lucky to only spend a few months on benefits. What can you expect from benefits? If you're my age you're entitled to £56 a week (the most you can get is £70) plus housing benefit. You're not entitled to anything if you're on an unpaid internship and you'll have to apply for 14 jobs a week to prove you're "serious" about getting a job. Meanwhile the job centres have been given quotas to 'sanction' three people a week - cutting them off from any subsistence for weeks and sometimes months.

Once you do get a job you'll be cut off and just scrape by on whatever you've managed to save (out of the £56 a week?). Don't worry, the job centre will give you travel money, but nothing else, because you've got a wage packet coming at the end of the month. It's clear that this is not a system of free handouts to pamper hordes of 'scroungers'. As a socialist, I invite the working-class to face the people fucking them and reach for the nearest blunt object.

The Boss Needs You, You Don't Need Him!

"You mean like North Korea?"

As I've written about Bill Gates before (back when he was blubbering about 'creative capitalism') I couldn't help but find this clip quite interesting. He seems to be saying inequality has brought us great advances, while also suggesting that the situation hasn't worsened in terms of growing inequality. He scorns distributional efforts, but says he's for certain tax increases (though he claims to be in the dark about Scandinavian tax precedents). He shows his true colours in his obnoxious denial of Microsoft's record of avoiding tax (which you can read about here). We know he's for health-care reform in the US and he's against a raise in the minimum wage. Meanwhile he makes it clear that his preferred method is charitable gestures. On this matter some have been inclined to question his interest in genetically-engineered seeds to be distributed in the developing world.

A Comrade Lost.

I'm sad to hear of Bob Crow's death. He was one of the last strong leaders of the labour movement left in this country. Crow fought valiantly for his members and the service we all rely on in London. We need more people like him and not less. He was never held back by the right-wing media smear campaign because he understood what it means to stand up for the interests of working-class people. Solidarity is not about altruism, it is about the rational pursuit of class interests. Sacrifices may be made collectively, and individually, in order to further a common end. In that sense Crow was an old-fashioned leftist in his affection and understanding of the common people and what is at stake in the age of austerity.

Unfortunately, many will welcome his death as good news, only to moan when tube fares rise and the standard of service declines. Even when the Oyster card is abolished so many will still not understand that if we have no organisations then we have no means to resist at all. Crow was hated precisely because people like him threaten the neoliberal agenda of stripping all public services to the bone to enrich a tiny elite.The Jubilee line was only extended to raise property values and procure enormous profits for speculators in the City. The tax-payer shelled out for that and the banks gobbled up the profits. It is capitalism which asks the poor to work for the benefit of the rich. Rational self-interest doesn't even come into the picture. 

The Evacuation of Meaning.

 

 

You may have heard recently that the Labour Party has rediscovered itself as the revolutionary vanguard ever ready to play dictatress to the proletarians of the UK. Unfortunately the slogan won’t be ‘Peace, Bread, Land’ exactly because Ed Miliband has pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months, to protect the minimum wage, repeal the bedroom tax and to incentivise private companies to develop on the land they own. No promises to reverse course on tuition fees, certainly not on ‘free schools’, the coming sale of Royal Mail and the on-going privatisation of the NHS so ignored by most of the mainstream media. If you read The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Express you will of course know this is the most radical position ever taken in the last thirty years. That is only demonstrative of just how deeply the termites have spread and how well they have dined. Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson have condemned Ed Miliband’s positions for abandoning the New Labour script of triangulated means to compete for the Conservative vote and, naturally, taking the working-class vote for granted. The Blairites are totally on board for the Cameron prescription of fiscal conservatism (for the poor anyway) to restructure the welfare state and public services.

The right-wing commentariat are on the offensive to safeguard the existing order (or should that be disorder?) of bloated energy oligopolies and the particular approach Cameron has taken to pumping up a housing bubble in London. The bedroom tax has appeal because gutting the benefits system will make some in the public feel good that Nicky Welfare isn’t getting away with spending his £60 a week on lager anymore. That’s the only discussion we’re allowed about benefits. No one wants to talk about the fact that Nicky Welfare’s housing benefit doesn’t go on his drinking habits, but it does go straight into the pockets of a landlord. The housing crisis is not up for discussion anymore. The Conservatives and Lib Dems have been hard at work trying to patch up the system as it was when Gordon Brown was in the Treasury. All of them will talk the talk about the need to build more houses to stoke the chronic shortage and lift people out of dilapidated housing. There is no serious commitment to extending public money to building more social housing. Instead the government and the so-called left-wing opposition are signed up to selling off these houses thereby feeding the same processes of debt and property speculation which laid the basis for the last crash.

 

At the same time, the Labour Party has not reclaimed Clause 4 to recommit itself to the nationalisation of industries and assets. Instead Miliband waffles as the NHS is sold off bit by bit and even as the delegates vote unanimously in favour of renationalising the railways the Labour leadership looks for the door. Yet ‘Red’ Ed can’t help himself from affirming a vague commitment to an even more vague democratic socialism. It seems like just five minutes ago Ed Miliband was calling himself a “modern progressive social democrat” and affirmed a commitment to a “responsible capitalism”. It shows how far things have gone, Tony Blair knew what he had to say to get ahead back in 1983 when he described himself as a socialist influenced by Karl Marx. Keep in mind ‘Red’ Ed is the same leader looking to chuck out the troublesome unions, while he has taken the side of Boris Johnson in his support for a “use it or lose it” policy on land ownership. Even Margaret Thatcher maintained a 60p tax for nine years, but Ed is so ‘red’ for supporting the 50p rate. The truth is the spectrum has moved considerably to the Right and now the much lauded centre is hardly a bastion of moderation. At best Labour offers to hold back a bit more than the Conservatives: austerity lite, rather than austerity.

 

Meanwhile the liberal press is in just a bad shape as it agrees with the right-wing analysis for the most part. The liberals love the idea that the socialist movement and its project are long dead. To them Ed Miliband is a nuanced centre-left politician, better than Tony Blair but not as bad as Tony Benn. It’s just another variation on the Third Way paradigm of New Labour and New Democrats. There is virtually no difference in rhetoric as Miliband has been oh so very careful not to distinguish himself from the odious stench of Blairism. Nor has he set out to distance himself from the Brown mound. He doesn’t want to define himself or to be defined and yet he expects to win an election on the same old pablum. The conservative press have already laid down their script, as they had done from day one, Ed Miliband is a leftist and his failures are to be taken as failures of the Left. The liberals more or less have swallowed so much of the premise as to tie themselves to this conclusion. When it came to Syria the Labour leader was distinguished not by his success but by his failure to push through his ‘yes’ motion. It would’ve made his father proud. It might only be reasonable able to hope Miliband can produce more of these fuck ups once in office.

This article was originally written for and posted at the Third Estate on September 27th 2013.