What do the privileged few know about lack of opportunity?
Dear Editor,
I write in response to the letter in last week’s publication titled ‘An Aycliffe Graduate’s Despair’. I would like to discuss some of the points made in the article and relate them to a wider context.
‘The writer asserts that ‘the jobcentre have done nothing but hinder my search for work’. Like the writer of last week’s letter, I have been offered the opportunity of training through the jobcentre. On inquiry, I find without exception all of the courses on offer either provide remedial English and Maths skills, or technical skills that would allow one to apply for an entry level job as a labourer in one of the building/construction trades. I have an excellent degree from an outstanding University.
When I inquired about using this as a platform to build my way into a profession I was met with frustration. For example, within as little as a year I could complete either a conversion course in law or train to be a journalist. Both of these options wouldn’t cost the tax payer more than the government is prepared to pay to private training providers for the short remedial courses I mention above.
I made the case that, with a professional job I would pay more tax back into the system across my working lifetime than I had ever had out of it in benefits. However, despite this logic, current legislation does not allow for graduate training.
The writer of last week’s letter also states that ‘the government is inciting hatred towards the unemployed’.
This is a typical deflection tactic used by the government to set the working poor against the unemployed poor. ‘It’s their fault you work for so little’ the government cry, then point the finger at those who draw benefits. Any family can find that their income earner loses their job through no fault of their own. However, I live around people who have claimed benefits for many years who start families and make additions to the number of children they have without any thought of getting off benefits and engaging in useful economic activity.
For me, and I’m sure the writer of last week’s letter, feeling trapped within a culture where no aspiration exists when you’re driven and ambitious only adds to the sense of despair. However, one must understand that lack of opportunity and decent wages perpetuates benefit dependency.
Last week’s letter illustrates the point that the political class think of us as nothing but peasants who can be whitewashed in White-Hall ideology and then left to fight it out amongst ourselves. What can these privileged few know about the frustration one feels at the lack of opportunity?
Nor can the last Labour government be held in any higher esteem. It was Gordon Brown’s administration that specifically commissioned an independent study into poverty in Britan. The returning report concluded that an adult living on less than fifteen thousand pounds a year was living in poverty.
A worker on New Labour’s minimum wage was nearly three thousand pounds a year below the then government’s acknowledged bread line. Moreover, the same administration cynically calculated that it was cheaper to keep a percentage of people on the dole than implement a living wage in line with their report’s findings.
We live at a time when the Con-Dem government tell us that austerity must be implemented to plug the deficit. The deficit can be fully costed without eroding public sector spending. These are just right wing ideologies to shrink the state, policies the Tories would implement in any circumstances. Again, the government try to set us apart by stirring discontent between public and private sector workers.
We shouldn’t be eroding public sector pay, but bringing private sector pay and conditions in line with the public sector. For anybody who thinks that this is just wishful thinking I would refer them to the economy in the immediate post war years when the deficit was greater than it is now; and it was investment in workers that rejuvenated the economy.
I would like to address one final point made in last week’s letter. The writer expresses a fear that he or she is, and will remain ‘a slave to recruitment agencies’. I cannot offer any words of hope. Why? Because this is how the previous Labour government and current Con-Dem government want the labour market to be.Blair and Brown facilitated the free movement of migrant workers into and out of this country. It is a noble principle but it needed to be properly executed and managed. It served the then Labour government as a form of false economy as so many of their other policies did. When it was calculated that it would be cheaper to keep a percentage of our citizens on the dole rather than implement a national ‘living’ wage, there was still the problem, who will people the economy at the bottom of the food chain? Employment agencies flourished and saturated the market to accommodate the influx of migrant workers. It was a win-win situation.
The government got the work done necessary to keep big business well oiled without increasing the wage bill, and migrant workers earned money that translated into greater value when they returned to their economies. Now, most of the economies where free movement is permissible have normalised.
The Con-Dem government try to encourage the ideology of neoliberalism. This means, no longer are we professionals, trades-people or workers, but each and every one of us accesses the ‘free’ market and each other as individuals looking for profit.
Where you might have once been one of a hundred workers employed by a factory, you are now like an actor with an agent who got you the role as one of the cast. What better working culture than one in which we are all individuals looking for opportunity in each other could recruitment agencies ask for? They get a slice of everything you do, but they also put you into direct competition against your colleagues.
In order for that agent to get you that role, they have to state that you, their client, can do it cheaper, faster and for longer, with less time off, and a contract that can see you legally out of the door immediately. If this sounds like left field indulgence, I know of a factory fully staffed by temporary workers and not one of those employees are paid through P.A.Y.E.
They are all self employed workers responsible for paying their own tax. It’s perfectly legal, the beneficiaries are the agency who by not retaining their employees tax, have less of a gross on their books when they determine their own tax payment.
This is what the Con-Dem public school boys think the economy needs. Maybe it’s what a handful of their posh mates need to keep themselves rich and riffing over the bumps of austerity while the rest of us walk the hardy terrain. And where is New Labour in all of this? Two years in and still deciding upon policy, putting together a package of populism that they hope will win them the next general election without any radical change in their party or their relationship with the electorate.
W.S.
(Resident of Newton Aycliffe)
