More than a third of workers in Britain are struggling in low-quality jobs that risk damaging their health, according to research by the Health Foundation (The Guardian 4 February 2020). In a report exposing the scale of precarious, low-paid or unfulfilling employment across the country, the independent pressure group, Health Foundation said that as many as 36% of workers in Britain – about 10 million people – were in such a position.
Even though there is high employment, most of the employment is low-quality and carries health risks. According to the research, as many as 15% of workers in low-quality jobs associated with poor or unhealthy working conditions such as modern day sweatshops associated with Amazon, say they have poor quality health, compared with 7% in better working environments.
The study found that as many as 51% of people in low-quality work in 2010-11 were stuck in the same position six years later. The wages system really is a prison from which the establishment of socialism is the only escape.
You will not find the Guardian, the Health Foundation and similar organisations criticising capitalism. Instead, they want government reforms of this or that defect of the profit system, bewailing the consequences of capitalism but not addressing the capitalist cause of these problems. They all want the impossible. They want capitalism without the effects of capitalism.
The report also noted that substandard employment extended far beyond zero-hours contracts and the gig economy. The Health Foundation defined low-quality work as a job that has two or more negative aspects, such as poor wellbeing, security, satisfaction, individual autonomy or pay. However, job satisfaction is very rare, lack of individual autonomy is the norm not the exception, the same applies to job security. Housing security is also an increasingly problem. Low pay is so frequent that successive governments have had to legislate a legal minimum. Wellbeing is hardly the prime consideration for employers which may be why, when they have the chance, some workers opt to become self-employed or set up in small businesses.
Adam Tinson, a senior analyst at the Health Foundation, said:
“Low-quality work is where someone feels stressed and unfulfilled, whether that’s due to pay, insecurity, a lack of autonomy or a feeling of dissatisfaction. This can harm people’s health.”
Socialists would say that any form of employment is wage slavery. Capitalism can never “pay enough”. It needs workers hungry enough to be employed. Workers can never be given autonomy because they are employed and therefore told what to do, when and for whom. Even the self-employed have to jump to the tune of those giving them work.
Capitalist governments cannot abolish poverty.
According to a separate study, published in early February 2020 by the Resolution Foundation, sustained employment is no safeguard against in-work poverty for people across the country (The Guardian 4 February 2020).
The Resolution Foundation said that poverty rates fall from 35% to 18% when people move into work, but that there had been a sharp rise in the number of working households in Britain struggling to make ends meet. Capitalism is a system in which the profit imperative dominates and not the meeting of human need.
The report goes to note that among adults in poverty in Britain, almost seven in 10 live in households where at least one person works. This figure has risen from five in 10 two decades ago.
In tandem with this has been the rapid growth in charities and food banks. Over the last 12 months, a wealthy Surrey town’s food banks reported a doubling of the number of food parcels they had given out. Whenever the benefits system is discussed in Parliament, there are MPs – from all parties and all parts of the country – reporting the dire misery and distress of their constituents.
Labour politicians blame the Tory government’s ‘universal credit’ for its harshness as for over a month, when being transferred from other benefits, the unfortunate claimants are left to live on fresh air with many finding themselves evicted and homeless as a result. But the post-war Labour government with its Beveridge reform to replace a pre-war hotchpotch of overlapping schemes, also aimed to simplify the system and reduce the cost. In doing so, it omitted to provide pensions for workers over a certain qualifying age.
Only socialism will abolish poverty
The real definition of poverty is in not owning the means of production in common and under democratic control. The poverty which affects all workers is not having direct access to what they need in order to live secure and healthy lives. Poverty is not producing what society needs but instead, producing commodities for exchange and profit. Workers live in a wages system which is a form of rationing forcing workers to buy commodities sufficient only to maintain themselves as an exploited class. Wages or salary will, at best, provide the minimum social needs for the short term so that the employer is assured that their workers will need to come back each day.
Lindsay Judge, principal analyst at Resolution, said: “Work alone cannot eliminate poverty. Support to sustain employment and progress out of low pay are needed alongside a benefit system that provides adequate support for low-income working families.”
Hidden in this text is a “blame the Tories” narrative, as though poverty is all the fault of subsequent “evil” Tory administrations and life would be much better for the workers under a Labour government. Look at past Labour government records. They were forced by capitalism and the interest of the employers, to attack the living standards of workers.
Previous Labour governments introduced austerity measures, used troops to break strikes, spied on trade unionists, imposed pay restraints and blamed workers for not being productive. They also forced workers to wage war against other workers in two world wars and several lesser conflicts. For the working class, there is no difference between a Labour and a Tory government. Both have to administer capitalism in the interest of the capitalist class.
Ms Judge does not tell the truth of the matter. No matter what employment workers find themselves in, they are exploited. The working class as a whole are exploited by the capitalist class who own and control the means of production and distribution. Workers are forced, out of necessity, into employment for a wage or a salary and dismissed from employment when they are unprofitable to hire.
The issue is not low pay or the type of job a worker has but the concept of ‘employment’ itself which is a form of ownership which enables the employer to reap “surplus value” (as described by Marx) and accumulate wealth. Furthermore, governments are not charities. They do not exist to provide “adequate support for low income working families”. Governments exist to serve the interest of the capitalist class, to keep taxation and expense on “social security” as low as possible.
What should be the issue is to end the wages system and for the working class to abolish capitalism and replace the pernicious profit system with the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by all of society.
It was Marx who put employment in its right context:
“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. ………….
………They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!” (Marx, Value, Price and Profit. ch.3)
