French Government Falls As Social-Democracy Falters Amid New Global Debt Crisis - Part 4 of 9

In France, currently, the conservative social-democratic government of Macron is seeking to cut welfare benefits, and to increase the age of retirement for workers. The French conservative social-democrats, and other bourgeois political pundits, have, of course, used, as part of their justification for this, the example of Britain, where over the last 20 years, successive governments have got away with cutting the size of the welfare state, and raising the age of retirement and so on. Where the likes of Owen looked to best practice in terms of raising productivity by enhancing the conditions of workers, in the last 30 years the opposite has been the case. When the UK government sought to undermine the final salary pensions of state workers, for example, it used the disgraceful fact that non-state workers had already been deprived of theirs during the Thatcher years. Compare that, even to the welfarist notions of Winston Churchill at the start of the 20th century.

The, then, Liberal Winston Churchill was able to introduce the first Minimum Wage in 1909, saying,

“It is a national evil that any class of Her Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions… where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad and the bad by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes up the trade as a second string… where these conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.”

(Trade Boards Act 1909)

An important point to note, here, is that, when Blair's government did introduce a Minimum Wage, not only did the Tories oppose it, despite it being set at a pitifully low level, but, because it was established and has continued as an hourly minimum rate, not a weekly, let alone monthly minimum amount, not only was it meaningless, but it actively encouraged employers to use zero hours contracts and other forms of precarity.  It, thereby, created the very conditions in which, full-time, permanent labour was undercut "by the worker who only takes up the trade as a second string".  Today, that second string is one that supplements various other kinds of precarious existence. 

One of the central planks of their argument is that workers are living longer, and so, the proportion of the population that is receiving pensions, and that also requires more healthcare and so on, is rising. As I have set out long ago, and as Robert Owen describes, here, that argument is completely bogus.

In 2000, UK life expectancy was 78, and in 2025 is 82. For workers, particularly those in the more hazardous and arduous jobs, who also tend to live in the worst conditions and locations, it is much lower than that (up to 19 years lower). In percentage terms that is a rise of around 5%. But, taking Owen's point above, productivity in Britain, rises by around 2%, every year! So, in just 3 years out of that 25 year period, each worker in Britain, would have raised their output, on average, by more than enough to cover the increased number of pensioners and their consumption of social output. In fact, to emphasise the point, taking the period since 1950, when the welfare state was established on a larger scale, the average life expectancy was, in 1950, nearly 69. It was after that that life expectancy rose most notably, itself, in part due to the welfare state, better healthcare, living conditions and diets. Yet, far from raising the retirement age during the following decades, they were reduced, as well as pensions improved, and for those still working, they had shorter working days, and more holidays.

By 1990, the average life expectancy had risen from 69, to 76, a rise of 10%. Even using the false measure of productivity employed by bourgeois economics, the point is clear. Bourgeois economics measures productivity on the basis of GDP per hour worked. That is a false measure for many reasons. Firstly, GDP measures only the new value created, and not the total value of output. Secondly, what we are concerned with is not the value of the output, but its physical quantity. Pensioners, after all, do not eat, or wear the value of output, but the physical use-values themselves. As Marx demonstrated, as actual productivity – the number of use-values produced per labour hour – rises, the unit value of those use-values declines. But, even using the false bourgeois method of calculating productivity, it has risen far more than the proportional rise in life expectancy. Between 2000 and 2008, it rose by around 15%.

As I have set out before, if you want a more accurate measure of just how much productivity has risen, mostly as a result of the microchip revolution of the 1980's, it is signified by the fact that 25% of all the goods and services produced by mankind in its entire history on the planet, were produced in just the first ten years of this century!!! Yet, according to the likes of Macron, the fact that workers are living a couple more years longer than they used to, has so upset things that they must now work longer, have shorter holidays, longer working-days and so on. Come back Robert Owen!

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