In Defence of a Tory Minister

Yesterday, the media was full of outrage at the comments of Tory Minister, Rachel Maclean, for saying that, in response to sharply rising inflation, workers should work more hours or get a better job. Like most, on hearing the comment, I thought it was just your typical out of touch Tory, blaming workers individually, as with another who had apparently said they needed to learn to cook. However, later, I heard the full comment from Maclean, and what she actually said was nothing like the media headlines.

Maclean did not say that the immediate answer was for workers, individually to work more hours, or to move to a better paid job. In fact, what she said did not relate to action that workers, individually, or collectively, should take as a solution at all. What she talked about was action that the government needed to take, in order to provide a long-term solution, so that it became possible for workers who were working part-time, and so on, to be able to work longer hours. Given that we have still 1 million workers working on zero-hours contracts, such an ambition is not at all a bad one for a government to set itself.

Similarly, given that large number of workers on zero hours contracts, many working only a few hours a week, and given the large number of other workers in unskilled, low paid, and insecure jobs, it is not at all a bad ambition for a government to set itself that it should create conditions in which workers are able to move out of those precarious, low paid, demoralising jobs, and into better paid ones. As a long-term solution to falling living standards, at least within the bounds of capitalism, that is precisely the way forward, as against simply tying workers further into conditions of degrading dependency, relying upon state welfare payments to boost their incomes.  Whether the Tories policies, in general, and its idiotic Brexit policy, in particular, does that is another matter.

That the media made such a meal of these false headlines is not surprising. Its typical of the way it operates. Firstly, many of these journalists and newsreaders are very highly paid, but the journalism tends to be very lazy. Secondly, it is a media that relies upon sensationalism. I have noted before its necessity to describe everything in superlatives, as “the best”, “the biggest”, “the most”, and so on, even though its clear that these labels are invariably exaggerations. I had to laugh, yesterday, when I was watching an old Dave Gorman episode, in which he dealt with exactly that phenomena. But, there is another factor at play, here.

As I have described recently, the fact is that we have completely different conditions, now, than those that have applied for most of the last 40 years, other than for a few years after 2000, and prior to 2008. As I wrote the other day, in the US, there are now 2 vacancies for every unemployed worker, and the latest data now shows that, in Britain too, there are more job vacancies than there are unemployed workers seeking to fill them. So, as in the 1950's, and 60's, we have conditions, already, where it becomes possible, at least for some workers, in the right places, and with the right skills, to decide, yes, to simply move to another better paid job. That has already been happening in the US, where the “quit rate” has been rising for some time, as workers realise they can just move to better jobs.

And, this relative shortage of labour is manifesting in incomes too. The latest employment data from the ONS, shows wages rising by 4.2% in the three months to March, and of course, the media again focussed on the fact that this was lower than inflation, meaning that real wages were falling, according to the media by 1.2%. The 4.2% figure was again, higher than the predictions, but also does not tell the real story. Add in bonuses, and other such payments, and wages rose by 7%, in that period, which was actually ahead of inflation to that point, meaning that real wages were rising.

The inclusion of bonuses and other such additional payments is important, precisely because the shortage of labour is first manifest in the need of companies to recruit and retain workers, and that is first done by all sorts of such bonuses to attract workers, or to deter them from leaving, rather than actual rises in hourly wage rates. Only as the shortage of labour intensifies, and workers begin to sense their increased strength and bargaining position in the economy, and as annual wage bargaining rounds get underway, does it manifest itself in much higher hourly wages, reduced hours, better holidays and so on.

So, the last thing the bourgeois media want, at the moment, is for workers to understand that conditions have changed in their favour. They want workers to continue to believe that they are stuck in their current jobs, and have to accept their current low wages and poor conditions, limited hours and so on. That is why they had to interpret Macleans words in the way they did. And, similarly, it suits a timid trades union bureaucracy to perpetuate the idea of a weak bargaining position of workers that only allows them to organise rallies to try to mobilise “public opinion” in support of higher minimum wages, rather than actively organising, and demanding strikes for better wages, and a General Strike, for a decent minimum, monthly wage of £2,000.