Don't shrug off low pay

[Briar]

Yes, I know Toynbee is a naughty lady who advocated voting for Bliar (I didn't) but her campaign for the low paid, if illogical beside her support for Bliar, is still worthwhile.


Don't shrug off low pay

The government is too scared to admit that it is partly responsible for Gate Gourmet-style injustices

Polly Toynbee


The spectacle of the Gate Gourmet picket line will linger on in public memory. The sight of low-paid, middle-aged Asian women in unaccustomed revolt will stay indelibly linked to BA, which so cavalierly contracted out its reputation along with its lowest-paid workers. Desperate to recover its mistake, BA has offered Gate Gourmet an extra £10m to help resolve the dispute.

But that £10m has a certain delicious resonance. David Bonderman, the US financial tycoon who founded and runs Gate Gourmet's parent company, spent exactly that same sum on his birthday party recently. He hired Bellagio, LA's most extravagant casino, and entertained his guests by hiring the Rolling Stones and Robin Williams. He is estimated to be worth about £15bn. His Gate Gourmet employees, however, were on £12,000 until they were sacked to hire cheaper agency workers, mainly from Somalia and Eastern Europe. "That's the way the world is," wrote one airline analyst this week, with a metaphorical shrug. "That's globalisation", as if gross inequity were immutable destiny - which it is not.

...

However, migration is only one factor in Britain's growing inequality. This week's survey of social mobility by the Office for National Statistics found that people are moving marginally up and down, but those in the top and bottom fifths remain pretty securely fixed. Comparing mobility in Tory years 1991-1997 with Labour years 1997-2003, it concludes depressingly that "there were no large differences between the two different time periods". This is despite there being fewer poor children and pensioners since 2000. Labour has redistributed far more through tax credits for low earners - yet market forces rushing in the opposite direction stay unchecked.

...

The definitive answer is in epidemiologist Dr Richard Wilkinson's book, The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier. Examining worldwide statistics, the most violent and sick countries are also the most unequal. However rich a country is, it will be unhealthier, unhappier, more crime-ridden and homicide-prone in direct proportion to its inequality. So Greeks live longer than Americans. People in Harlem die before those in Bangladesh, not due to violence or drugs, but heart disease. Is that bad diet? No, diet has far less effect than the stress and depression of living at the bottom of the social ladder, lacking respect. Low-status monkeys in a group develop heart disease that high-status monkeys escape. (Their health improves if moved to groups they can dominate.) It is the pecking order that matters: poor children know their lowly place from their first day at school. Money is status and low pay tells people how little they are worth.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1556685,00.html

[non sociopath skin]

1. Blair can't have it both ways. If he pontificates about ...

... the British Economic Miracle and holds it up as a shining example to Europe, then he'll have to take some of the flak for the misery it causes the low-paid.

BTW Polly's "naughtiness" was shared by a not inconsiderable amount of us here who advocated voting for Blair with clothes-pegs on our noses in order to avoid further slippage to the right. A cursory glance at the crap winging its way through the air during the present "I'm-More-Righter-Than-You" contest at Tory Central Office gives some indication of what a Howard government would have looked and smelt like.

The Skin

[Briar]

4. I know, Skin

and there is no way I would vote for the Tories.

But I can't vote for Tories in sheep's clothing either. I could not make my hand make that cross on the ballot form: it would wither before it would even grasp the pencil to do so. It's not rational, but it's from my heart.

Blair's New Labour is worse than Howard and co because it destroyed the Labour Party; it destroyed the only hope the low paid, and all of us, had.

[non sociopath skin]

5. I greatly dislike New Labour and all its works ...

... and I'm speaking as someone who was an elected representative of Labour before the Blairite debacle happened and who stood down because I could not go among my constituents and defend Blairism.

But when I listen to the blatant jingoism, racism, anti-unionism, xenophobia and homophobia peddled by the Tories and by their supporters on sites like "Sterling Times," sorry, I simply cannot agree that New Labour is "worse than Howard."

And, I guess, neither can Polly Toynbee.

The Skin

[Kicked in the Taco]

6. I reluctantly voted Labour for much the same reasons

Plus I really don't trust the Lib Dems, least of all on issues such as low pay.

[Briar]

7. I certainly don't trust them either

What a sorry state of affairs!

[Kicked in the Taco]

8. Isn't it just?

At the moment I really feel like our elections are just choices between 3 vaguely different smelling sacks of crap. This year was the first election since '87 (when I was 6) that I didn't actively campaign for Labour, but i voted for them hoping Brown would take over quickly and lead a government that would be clearly preferable to the Tory alternative. But now Blair doesn't look like he's going anywhere fast, this government is becoming more despicable by the day, and I'm starting to wish i'd just stayed at home on election day.

[LeftishBrit]

2. Finally people are saying it!!!

There is a tendency nowadays for people to treat economic trends as some sort of force of nature which one can do nothing about: "That's the economic situation; we have to accommodate to it!" Economic situations depend to quite a degree on political decisions. I'm glad people are now saying it; though it's a pity it had to reach this point for some people.

[Kicked in the Taco]

3. A lot of good points in there.

I wish we could finally put to bed this fantasy of post-Thatcherite social mobility. It honestly seems like some people believe that every miner that lost their job in the '80s ended up as editor of a lifestyle magazine by the late '90s.

She's also bang on about this ugly but pervasive myth that decreasing pay and conditions are just somehow inevitable- and how it's really not surprising that it should seem such given that the mainstream supposed political 'left' just don't seem interested in seriously countering the point.

When the Labour Party isn't standing up for the low paid, you really have to wodner what its purpose is. The Minimum Wage was a great step forward and in my view still the Blair government's most important legislative act, but its both inadequate of itself and, as Toynbee says, still languishing at an insultingly low level.

And as for Bonderman- he's just further proof that the shit always rises to the top of the toilet bowl of the "free market". Gate Gourmet are complete bastards, yes- but the real problem is the kind of sick society in which such companies can operate.