Frances O'Grady - incoming TUC general secretary - has suggested in a Guardian interview today that high unemployment is a deliberate ploy being used by the government to suppress wage claims and destroy employment rights. As she puts it:
There was certainly a strong view in the 1980s, not just among trade unions, but also among a number of intellectuals and commentators, that unemployment was being used as a deliberate measure to keep pay down, and to keep people scared. As long as the number one worry for people, keeping them up at nights, is whether they're going to have a job in the morning, then they are less likely to resist unfair changes, or unfair treatment, or cuts in real pay at work. So there's a fair bit of evidence to suggest it can be a deliberate policy. And I think we do legitimately have to ask why the government isn't taking action to create decent employment for young people, when the evidence is that if you don't do that, you really are going to pay a very high price.
The Treasury is not having it. They responded, also in the Guardian:
To suggest [youth unemployment] is a deliberate policy is utterly ridiculous, a ridiculous accusation that is, quite frankly, utterly laughable.
The government is determined to tackle youth unemployment; the Youth Contract will provide nearly half a million new opportunities for 18 to 24-year-olds and is backed by almost £1bn of funding. We support the creation of jobs be they full time or part-time.
Now, of course I'm biased: I work for the TUC, and am proud to do so, but on this issue all the evidence stacks one way, and that is on Frances O'Grady's favour. The "opportunities" the government refers to are little moe than shallow work creation schemes that have limited quality, no enduring value and no real job prospects. And that is inevitable: this government has persistently refused to stimulate demand to create private sector employment whilst simultaneously cutting government investment and jobs in a vain attempt to cut debt, which as the FT notes this morning is unlikely to work during this parliament.
Why has it pursued this policy? The only possible explanation is that it wants a more neo-liberal market and that is one where there is less regulation, much more limited employment protection and more supply side freedom to sack workers - and limit their pay. All of this is policy evidenced in what the government is doing. In that case either O'Grady is right and unemployment is the aim or alternatively the government is simply indifferent to unemployment being the consequence of its policy. In either case there can be no doubt it has not one iota of concern for those unemployed - because it and the Tory party at large think them feckless and deserving of whatever comes their way. This is the manifestation of their belief that wealth, high pay and status are sure indicators of moral worth, and so unemployment is the result of immorality and as such deserved. That's callous, illogical, unethical and also very obviously simply unfounded and untrue, but that's never stopped a neoliberal believing in anything: you have to suspend your disbelief to be one so absurd are the assumptions that underpin neoliberal economics and thinking.
So I suggest, based on the evidence, that Frances O'Grady is right. But more than that, tellingly she has hit a nerve, and that's the good news.
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utterly ridiculous, a ridiculous accusation that is, quite frankly, utterly laughable
This person doth protest too much, methinks. Ridiculous, ridiculous, and (for those of an etymological turn of mind) utterly ridiculous.
Did you see this excellent letter in the FT yesterday: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/804e4166-f5d3-11e1-bf76-00144feabdc0.html#ax?
Excellent letter
Spot on
It is pure Edmund Burke, ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’ (1795):
“But in the case of the farmer and the labourer, their interests are always the same, and it is absolutely impossible that their free contracts can be onerous to either party. It is the interest of the farmer, that his work should be done with effect and celerity: and that cannot be, unless the labourer is well fed, and otherwise found with such necessaries of animal life, according to it’s habitudes, as may keep the body in full force, and the mind gay and cheerful. For of all the instruments of his trade, the labour of man (what the ancient writers have called the instrumentum vocale) is that on which he is most to rely for the re-payment of his capital. The other two, the semivocale in the ancient classification, that is, the working stock of cattle, and the instrumentum mutum,such as carts, ploughs, spades, and so forth, though not all inconsiderable in themselves, are very much inferiour in utility or in expence; and without a given portion of the first, are nothing at all. For in all things whatever, the mind is the most valuable and the most important; and in this scale the whole of agriculture is in a natural and just order; the beast is as an informing principle to the plough and cart; the labourer is as reason to the beast; and the farmer is as a thinking and presiding principle to the labourer. An attempt to break this chain of subordination in any part is equally absurd; but the absurdity is the most mischievous in practical operation, where it is the most easy, that is, where it is the most subject to an erroneous judgment.”
This is why Burke and Adam Smith did not strike up a friendship, despite a couple of letters between the two. Burke blamed economists for the French Revolution, and this is his response.
Well said
Or maybe quoted
Either way, a valuable insight
And Burke got economists right
Comments in Real World Economics blog (http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/revolt-of-the-rich-2-graphs/#comment-22607):
“Just before the French Revolution 1789, there was a revolt of the rich and the privileged to stop the state from taxing them. That sparked the uprising that fed into the overthrow of the Old Regime. So watch out, you rich and privileged, if you don’t understand that elites can only remain in power if they look out after the general welfare, then there will be hell to pay.”
“Louis XVI was the good guy who has been written out of history as a baddie. He was also unlucky with the volcano in Iceland blowing up in 1783. Had he succeeded would have set an entirely different model for constitutional monarchy.” (Louis was advised by the ‘physiocrats’ to introduce land value taxation.)
So, yes, indirectly, it was the fault of the economists (physiocrats).
“it has not one iota of concern for those unemployed – because it and the Tory party at large think them feckless and deserving of whatever comes their way.” I think we’re punished because they fear us. How many poor people would walk all over rich people on any kind of level playing field? Would we ever have heard of Clegg Cameron or Osborne were it not for their unearned and unmerited inheritances? Doubtful at best, isn’t it? Possibly they feel this too and at some atavistic unknowable level are plagued with guilt. Either way, they’re none of them fit for office.
All the armies who use rape as a weapon of war utterly deny it, and use terms like ridiculous and laughable.
Norman Lamont said unemployment was a price well worth paying to make Britain Great again – though he pretended it was to control inflation – it was a peculiar definition of Great he was thinking of; “me and my chums are getting richer” the evidence of policy and its results point to.
Lamont’s was a virtual admission that mass unemployment was a deliberate policy even if he gave a different motivation for it, and it doesn’t take much cynicism to see a deep unpleasantness in his person or party; “the nasty party”.
The focus of the right-wing of the Tory party on deregulation of all sorts, not just in throwing out employment rights, pretending that it will bring unemployment down, is an obvious sign that they are using unemployment as a means to an end.
Another pretence is that top-rate tax payers are all “wealth creators”. BBC News Group Director Helen Boaden gets £354,000, she and other Executive Directors get £2.6 million between them, are these the wealth creators that Osbourne favoured in lowering the top-rate income tax?
The Bilderberg Agenda
“Making work pay”, IDS and Grayling’s favourite mantra, also supports the argument.
Demonise the vulnerable with populist rabble-rousing that ignores available statistics – otherwise described as lying, reduce their benefits, force them into low paying work that just about exceeds the miserable benefits they’re left with after the cuts, and now sanctions. Unless paranoia has gripped me – and why wouldn’t it with these two clowns in charge – it seems perfectly reasonable to read the benefit cuts and the very dodgy Work Capability Assessment regime as just another way of forcing people into inadequately paid work and too much fear to resist the erosion of employment rights.
Lot’s of people are comparing the situation to 1930s Germany. That might sound extreme but then I expect that’s what the average German felt when the horrors kicked off.
I watched last night’s ‘Newsnight’ 5 September 2012 feature on child poverty in UK, asking why there is so much child poverty, especially amongst WORKING families. Many of the children being interviewed in the accompanying short documentary had at least one parent WORKING often taking 2 or 3 jobs, leaving them little time with their children, yet still struggling hugely. One of the studio guests was single mum Tracy Nugent from Glasgow, heavily in debt, sharing bedroom with son, person from real world living in poverty who is in WORK. Guest Justin Forsyth, CEO of Save the Children said that 60% of children living in poverty have one WORKING parent. Yet the cosy consensus between Paxman and guests, Graham Stuart from the education select committee, and Christian Guy from IDS’s Centre for Social Justice is that, and get this – WORK WILL LIFT PEOPLE OUT OF POVERTY. Do guests ever listen to what the gist of the topic is or what others say on Newsnight? Seeminlgy many people, including Justin Forsyth of Save the Children, think that a move to Universal Credit will help ease actual child poverty (not just measured poverty which is something else) and all the ills of others trapped in poverty. The government claim nobody will be worse off under UC than on our current benefits system; that’s because current benefits are being capped and cut to such as an extent that by time UC is introduced they will, indeed, be no worse off than they would have been under the just expired benefits system. Coupled with the move to a low wage, underemployed workforce, that means taking most of lowest paid jobs will, of course, leave most people better off than on new benefits regime because restrictions and caps of benefits leave them at £useless and useless pence. It most probably won’t put an end to people not having enough money to live on. After all most people living in poverty in ‘developing’ countries are in some form of work as were those in the Victorian era and the early part of the 20th century (which is when some say the true Victorian era lasted until, philosophically and morally). Exponents of UC say that the system will adjust for fluctuations in income; yet with the income bar set so low for so many people it will make little overall difference as even the highest combination of benefits and income will be less than people should be getting to manage well financially. Better to be in poverty and be underemployed in part time and temporary work, with little chance of the situation changing? Better to be in poverty and be working 3 jobs, for something like 60 hours a week or more, for a low income you can barely manage on, with no chance of getting out of the low pay trap? Or better to be in poverty and benefits and have no chance of getting work at all? What a choice we’re setting up. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01mmx7q/Newsnight_05_09_2012/
David
What we’re facing is, in effect, modern slavery.
Except it’s worse: under slavery the owner usually accepted some responsibility for the slave
The government is accepting no responsibility at all
We are facing social catastrophe
Richard
Slaves have to live separately from masters of course; hence cuts to housing benefit and council tax benefit, proposed sale of local authority properties in wealthy areas…
Plato
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.”
(oh all right, I admit it; it’s from brainyquote.com)
I was really impressed
Either way!
It’s not an aspect which the left want to address, but it should be recognised that the EU’s ‘free movement of labour’ and immigration policy generally is not for the benefit of labour.
In 50s/60s UK were we really so short of unskilled labour that we had to import some? A better response would be to allow wages to rise to reflect excess demand. But that wouldn’t have suited the owners of capital, would it?
Workers are consumers; with a reasonably sized, educated population, there is a natural balance between demand and supply of labour.
PS I’m not against immigration, of course, but the controls should be strictly aligned to maintenance of wage levels, not what employers demand.
[…] via Is unemployment deliberate? You bet it is » Tax Research UK. […]
Sham work opportunities for the young and sham tax arrangements for the rich. Both endorsed by a sham government.
“The government is determined to tackle youth unemployment; the Youth Contract will provide nearly half a million new opportunities for 18 to 24-year-olds and is backed by almost £1bn of funding. We support the creation of jobs be they full time or part-time.”
That “almost a billion” will go a really long way for half a million 18-24 years olds wont it?