The toxic effects of job insecurity

From lower productivity rates to family dysfunction and from poor customer service to depression and lack of motivation. What lies behind David Cameron's calls for "less red tape".

David Cameron's recent plans to make it easier to sack staff in the first two years of their employment have sparked an intense debate over the nature of Britain's labour market.

After the "fluffy years", it was only a matter of time before the crook-eyed default Tory approach to the world of paid employment would resurface.

The problem for Cameron and the bosses' organisations, however, is that - unlike the Thatcher years - there's very little left in terms of workers' protection for the government to wade in with the axe.

Extreme job insecurity in the UK is already a growing reality.

According to the OECD, Britain is in the top three along with the US and Canada (and well under the OECD average) in the strictness of employment protection index (1985-2008), which measures "the procedures and costs involved in dismissing individuals or groups of workers and the procedures involved in hiring workers on fixed-term or temporary work agency contracts".

Given the companies' free access to casual staff on "zero hours contract", or the free use of "temps" (which, by law, can be hired repeatedly on fixed-term contracts for up to four years before any tie comes into place), the lax regulation on probationary period for regular staff, as well as some of the lowest levels of statutory redundancy pay in the Western world, the notion that Britain's employment regulations may be at the core of the current dole rates is simply comedy material.

If we carry on this way, soon the only crusade left for the British Chamber of Commerce and the Tories to embark upon under the guise of "cutting red tape" will be against the right for workers to empty their bladder or take a crap at work.

However, what the last few days also highlighted is the almost total abdication on the part of the left and Labour in the fight against the galloping job insecurity and its noxious effects.

This line from the normally commendable Stumbling and Mumbling blog bothered me to the extreme. While sceptical of David Cameron's proposals, author Chris Dillow also wrote:

"There’s good evidence that [employment protection] reduces workers’ effort and increases absenteeism. This suggests that - at the margin - Cameron’s proposals might increase labour productivity".

Now, the reason why the above quote bothered me so much is that it shows how toxic and widespread certain myths are that even well-informed and well-read people can buy into them without questioning.

In brief, the Daily Mailesque-fable that a permanent job or certain guarantees at work will automatically turn you into a slacker. They ain't gonna sack me, so why bother, basically.

And how can you dispute that if even the usually meticulous and pro-left Chris Dillow can cite "good evidence" on the matter?

Except that said "good evidence" points to three pieces of research from Portugal and Italy which are solely and exclusively focused on specific (and already obsolete) legislation passed in those two countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Those laws were extremely protective - overly protective in fact - in a way not remotely comparable to anything Britain ever experienced, not even at its unionised peak.

It's like saying "there's good evidence that January is not a cold month and in fact look at this link to prove it". Except that it points to average January temperatures from the Canary Islands and Dubai.

The fact is, instead, that there's literally a mammoth body of research out there warning of the toxic long-term effects of job insecurity (click here for a summary).

Over the years detailed studies took place around the world, from the US and Canada to Australia, Sweden, Korea, Germany and more. The findings leave room to no doubt: there is a clear correlation between excessive levels of job insecurity and a variety of negative outcomes.

The initial advantages of "increased flexibility and lower costs" for the employers are undisputed. But little is ever said about the long-term effects that "casualisation may have on important aspects of national economic performance such as skill formation" and, most importantly, the ticking time-bomb that is widespread casualisation as weighed against "long-term financial planning".

But the strongest and most consistent evidence is the one seen across firms, industries, and countries linking job insecurity with "negative employee attitudes, behavio[u]rs, and health" and with the fact - as noted by several researchers - that "job insecurity is more stressful than job loss itself".

Amongst the negative effects, a "powerful negative influence on motivation", "reduced effort" and "poor safety compliance by employees". Low levels of job satisfaction are also associated with negative employee attitudes, lower customer performance and effectiveness with customers as well as with -in turn- a detrimental effect on group morale.

And that's without taking into account what "the longer term negative effects on workers' depression levels", or "the systemic [relation] between job insecurity and marital and family dysfunction" or, even, the proven effects that "parents' job insecurity has on children's school performance as measured by grades" .

The fact that "job insecurity reduces job satisfaction is attributable to the uncertainty of not knowing how to predict or control job threats".

And that's because, while insecurity in the short-term may spur a worker to perform better if the goal is a latter stage of more protection and various perks, an ongoing perception of "precariousness" will start having an adverse effect, as the worker will feel increasingly uncertain that their persistence can be sufficient enough for them to retain their job.

For a worker with little to lose, the lack of ties will offer no incentives to stop them from slacking off or "looking elsewhere" altogether.

Tory proposals on sacking people are both useless and criminal

Mass sackings: welcome to The Great Conservative Economic Strategy.

Another fine display of 21st century British politics took place yesterday when David Cameron dropped the bombshell on the millions of unwitting voters that it should be made much easier to sack workers in this country ("Firms get power to sack the slackers", Telegraph).

Now, of course, the Tories don't have a mandate for that. They never mentioned any of their "employment reforms" at any stage of the election campaign. They didn't because they knew that voters would punish them for that. And in fact, at this point, if you're an ordinary worker and you still think voting Tories will do you or the country any good, then you may as well chop your own bollocks off. The outcome will not be dissimilar.

It's astonishing that, in the face of the biggest crisis in sixty years, The Great Conservative Economic Strategy amounts to the sacking of half a million public workers, even easier sacking procedures for everybody else and -of course- higher costs of living.

The Tories' proposal is based on the contempt they have for ordinary workers. If you are an employee, you are - by default - a burden, an irritant, a disposable pain in the arse. Whatever the issue, financial or otherwise, you're the first one who should bear the brunt. No matter how much this may undermine morale or loyalty to the company. No matter how insecure it makes you feel. You're not a person. You're just a cheap pawn.

David Cameron's proposed new "Employment Charter" starts from a fallacy the size of the Millennium Dome: the ridiculously simplistic illusion that if you decrease protection at work, employment levels will rise automatically.

This is so all over the place that it's difficult to know where to start. But let's just say that the post-1997 implementation of the minimum wage and new maternity rules in Britain were followed by the lowest dole rates in thirty years. Look, instead, at the swirl of anti-Union laws and other measures brought in by Thatcher. It did nothing to even slow down the sustained high unemployment rates that kept looming large over the 1980s and 1990s.

Or consider Italy and Spain, where the last ten years saw most extreme forms of casualisation and disposable employment steamrolled in. Their unemployment levels are still looking extremely sorry, in fact worse even than before.

The second fallacy is that the Conservatives are making it sound as if the current British labour market was stifling and inflexible, while it is already one of the most boss-friendly in the EU as it's cheaper and easier to get rid of staff in Britain than it is in most of its counterparts.

Currently, bosses already enjoy the possibility of hiring as many agency or casual workers as they please. These come with no tie whatsoever. They are literally disposable.

If, however, the same boss saw fit to recruit "properly", there is a probationary period of up to 6 months in which he/she can sack said employee on a whim - literally - no notice, no motive, no compensation. Nowt.

After that, the boss will still have up to 12 months in which he/she can still fire him without any possible fear of being done for unfair dismissal or forking out a penny in statutory redundancy pay.

At this point, you will already concede that if a manager hasn't clocked who the slacker is without successfully rectifying the situation, it is he or she who should be sacked and not the worker.

And it's not over yet. While unfair dismissal claims can be brought after a year, you have to work a total of 24 months in order to be entitled to the lowest possible allowance of statutory redundancy, which - please note - is by far the cheapest in Western Europe.

However, egged on by the British Chamber of Commerce, David Cameron thinks that all of the above amounts to "too much red tape" and that the period that allows staff to submit unfair dismissal claims should be increased from one to two years.

But the icing on the cake is the Coalition's proposal to levy a charge on workers who decide to still fight their corner. This may be vintage Tory philosophy, but in this case it just borders on the criminal - as it crucially links access to justice not to whether you're in the right or not, but to whether you can afford it.

And, needless to say, it also ignores the fee that plaintiffs already pay their lawyer, or their union in the form of fees, if it is they who provide legal counsel.

Incidentally, unions rarely decide to pursue claims that they themselves think will lack weight. The amount of pre-screening that is done prior to deciding whether to gamble on a worker's claim is immense. And that's without even including the conciliation and arbitration stage.

And even so, official figures say that, in the first quarter of last year, just 11% of cases taken to an industrial tribunal were successful - and a puny 5% for constructive dismissal. Amazingly, this is the system that bosses complain is "weighed against them" and is "affecting employment levels".

The Conservatives are mistaking increased turnovers with higher employment rates. Their new proposals will do absolutely nothing to get people back to work.

All they will achieve is a system where it's easier to sack unfairly and without scrutiny and a workplace where it will be even more difficult, often impossible, for an honest worker to fight bullying and victimisation or to seek protection against unscrupulous employers.

The most annoying Xmas song ever...

...Plus festive wishes...

In the next few days, the Very British practice of having to endure Christmas "hits" wherever you are (since early November at least) will finally come to an end. Until next year, of course.

And so a very Happy Xmas to all - in particular emergency staff, barmaids and barmen, 24/7 shop assistants, care workers and all those who didn't have a chance to book time off over the time of the year when you're most expected to be jolly, merry, twee and festive.

In the meantime, here's my own very personal Bottom Five:

1- Do They Know It's Christmas?, Band Aid
Imagine twenty or so egomaniacs each recording their own annoying Crimbo tune packaged as "save the starving", and then proceeding to condense the end products all into one and shove it down the nation's throats for generations to come. 'Painful' doesn't even begin to cover it.

2- Fairytale of New York, The Pogues Feat. Kirsty MacColl
As a former barman, receptionist and shop assistant, I feel for the millions of staff who have to endure this non-stop from November 1st onwards.

3- Merry Christmas Everyone, Shakin' Stevens
As a former barman, receptionist and shop assistant, I feel for the millions of staff who have to endure this non-stop from November 1st onwards.

4- Santa Claus is Coming Into Town, Michael Bolton
As a former barman, receptionist and shop assistant, I feel for the millions of staff who have to endure this non-stop from November 1st onwards.

5- Merry Xmas Everybody, Slade
As a former barman, receptionist and shop assistant, I feel for the millions of staff who have to endure this non-stop from November 1st onwards. Especially the bit at the end when Noddy Holder screams IT'S CHRISTMAS!!!! into the microphone. Grating.

Cliches of 2010 #3

"There are jobs out there if you really want one"

You really think so? Go on then. You give it a go.

But at least have the decency to do so and stand on your own two feet instead of relying on mummy and daddy's handouts, free-rent and free grub as you tell them about application form no.35 being rejected.

You find that most people who come up with the blind belief that "if you really *but really* want to work, you can find a job at McDonalds or Tesco" are generally those who've never had the pleasure of trying.

Or if they have - and luck was on their side - they assume that the same fate would automatically await everybody else. "It happened to MEEE? Then it must be a universal law".

Except that these people forget two crucial factors.

1) Simple figures. According to the latest from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), "[t]he number of vacancies for the three months to October 2010 was 453,000, down 27,000 over the quarter". And guess what? There are 1.47m registered "jobseekers", meaning that for every vacancy there are three people applying.

For the record, "the number of employees and self-employed people who were working part-time because they could not find a full-time job increased by 67,000 on the quarter, to reach a record high of 1.15 million". Which is great, but you can only do that if you've got other ways of supplementing your income.

2) As for the "you-can-get-something-at-McDonalds-or-Tesco-then" remark, it is already a fact that there are tons of people in jobs for which they're overqualified.

More than that, in fact. Many are so desperate that they are working for free [see the Rights for interns campaign] hoping to grab hold of a bone if it lands their way.

The only people who think a graduate can simply stroll into a Starbucks and land a job on the spot are obviously those who've never tried. Because if they did, they'd know that rejection is the order of the day. There are hundreds of thousands of graduates who are routinely turned down for low-skilled jobs, the assumption being that they "will not stick with it", that they're "overqualified" or "not humble enough" to put up with "less ambitious" tasks.

PREVIOUS CLICHES:
#2 "The Royal Family brings in tourism revenue".
#1 "Iain Duncan Smith is a kind and honourable man".

Letter to Sunny Hundal

On the suprising support lent by Liberal Conspiracy to Ed Balls' attack on immigration.

Dear Sunny,

Ed Balls' piece in the Observer two days ago seems to have caused a bit of a stir.

In a nutshell, his point was: we were wrong to allow so many Eastern Europeans into Britain; we should revise the free movement of labour and keep it one way only (1m Brits can live and work in Europe, but not the reverse); his government, Labour, was wrong in a) both not placing restrictions on new EU states and b) not implementing the agency workers directive.

James Macintyre and Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman dismissed Balls' "tough rhetorical stance" on the grounds that "[e]vidence -- from the BNP's trouncing, the fact that the Tories had the same 'cap' policy and lost in 2005, and the fact that even Mrs Duffy's seat was retained by Labour -- suggests this is a bit of an easy myth".

Others have noted how unfeasible it all looks that Balls is suddenly laying into entire chunks of 13 years in power while he seemed to be happily going along with it all until May 7 (he recently claimed he wasn't really pro-Iraq war too - and don't give me that "collective responsibility" stuff because Balls wasn't even in the cabinet in 2003 - he was free to speak).

I'm sure you will agree that it's baffling when an aspiring Labour leader get his words praised by Balanced Migration and even Stormfront (links not provided), whereas even the Conservatives ("on immigration Ed Balls is to the right of Enoch Powell"), the Spectator ('Balls: we have to be more bigoted') and the Daily Mail ("shameless hypocrisy") found his words ranging from opportunistic to altogether wrong.

But what I found most disheartening was the argument you put forward on your blog Liberal Conspiracy, an important voice in the left-of-centre "blogosphere" (god I hate that word, blogosphere).

For some reason, you appear to be giving Ed Balls a fantastically easy ride ('Why I'm defending Ed Balls over immigration').

Yet when only two weeks ago another leadership hopeful, Andy Burnham, spelt out concepts not dissimilar to those now backed by Ed Balls' ("Our priorities were not [the white working classes'] priorities: [...] we were in denial about the effects of immigration - on wages, housing and anti-social behaviour - in places where life is hardest", said Burnham), you dismissed it all with sarcasm and exclamation marks:

"Mr Burnham will be radically different from everyone else by having a one-issue campaign. Immigration! The issue no-one talks about. The issue that Phil Woolas did not constantly bang on about. Talking about immigration will bring back voters and help Burnham take back the country!".

It reminds me of Arsene Wenger when he complains that Man Utd players' tackles were out of order, but he's fine when his own do exactly the same.

Andy Burnham bad, Ed Balls good. And why is that?

"Because", you explained, "I think we have to accept we lost the debate on immigration and do something about it. We failed in pushing a coherent and positive narrative during all those years and now have a situation where the public is very right-wing on the issue. [...] We can't afford to ignore people's perceptions whether we like them or not".

You get that? You lose a political argument, so you may as well start agreeing with the "winning" side.

Just think if that applied to every aspect of politics. Like, the British public have consistently supported the death penalty over many years as the best way to combat crime. Does it mean we should concede defeat and look sympathetic with "public perceptions", or shall we still reject calls for the introduction of death row because we believe they're wrong?

Or...Those old enough to remember will note how, throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, Tories and assorted supporters of Section 28 would routinely dismiss the pro-LGBT argument by saying that public opinion was simply hostile to same-sex relationships. It was true. Opinion polls at the time did not leave ground to interpretation. But we didn't give up the fight because we were a minority.

For, call me thick, but there is a simple, unanswered question here: are Ed Balls' words to be backed for reasons of PR - that is to say, so that the left doesn't look like it's ignoring "people's perceptions" - or because they make for good, honest, coherent policy? Is Balls right because his (newly adopted) principles are right, or simply out of political expediency? Do we believe in them, or do we just go along because we're tired of fighting an uphill struggle with a tabloid-led rhetoric that has started to seep through society?

There is a fallacy the size of the Gulf of Mexico in your line of reasoning, Sunny. You later commented:

"The changed reality is that we lost the debate on immigration because of the lack of political courage on behalf of politicians and because the left didn’t have a narrative on this either. We avoided the issue and now it’s become an albatross".

So, on one side you criticise the "lack of political courage" (presumably to point out that what the left needed to do was to tackle the problems for which people blame immigrants rather than the immigrants). On the other, the moment the issue becomes "an albatross", we should just somersault the other way and go along with a bit of Eastern European-bashing because it chimes, apparently, with "people's perceptions".

You wrote that "[J]ust screaming racist everytime a politician talks about it is not getting us anywhere and frankly I’m getting sick of that too".

But no-one said Balls was being "racist". Why are you saying that? I don't think anyone, for a second, believes he was being "racist". Opportunistic, maybe. Unprincipled, possibly. A hypocrite, surely. But racist? That's a red herring, my friend.What next? Are you going to say that "immigration is a taboo subject" too?

Those, like me, who are shocked by Balls' road-to-damascus conversion do so not on the basis of "racism", but because we think it's unfeasible, it's wrong, it's ill-conceived.

If Balls really wanted to "reconnect" with traditional Labour voters he could, for example, go further than just pay lip-service to "the agency workers directive" that, lest we forget, only six months ago he himself contributed to rejecting.

He could endorse Jon Cruddas' analysis of how endemic casualisation has led to a race to the bottom in the workplace. He could look at the central issue of affordable housing.

He could choose to go the Ed Miliband way, making the living wage "central to his campaign" or calling for the introduction of "wage ratios" between top and bottom salaries in the work place.

Because, fundamentally, these are the battles that nobody is fighting. There are plenty of parties, groups and newspapers setting migrant workers against British workers as they advocate that there are "too many immigrants" taking our jobs and depressing wages.

But very few arguing loud and clear that, if only working people were paid properly and were handed back appropriate protection in their work contracts, the issue of immigration would probably eventually self-regulate.

Until the root of the problem is addressed - the fact that in this country it is possible to pay people a non-living wage, sack them on a whim and hand them an existence cut out of job insecurity - tuning in to the dog whistle politics of "too much immigration" will just remain that: dog whistle politics.

Welcome back, good old Tories

From "cuddly" government to Iain Duncan Smith: here's the Coalition in all its glory.

After the election binge and the disappointments that came with it, this blog had made a vow to stay away from politics for as long as possible.

We learnt that objecting to proposals and bills is the wrong thing to do. Apparently you have to keep quiet and wait until they've been tried and tested. Even if it's tens of millions of pounds axed from children services and transport. Even if that may cause mayhem - it's in the national interest, so that's alright.

We learnt that fighting for a manifesto on May 5 and then doing the exact opposite on May 7, a-la Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, is perfectly fine. It's your problem if it doesn't add up. It's in the national interest, so we should get on with it.

We learnt that, no matter what, Britain will enjoy fixed parliaments and that, in three years' time or maybe longer, we'll have a referendum on AV which the Tories will campaign against, so everything else is alright.

And in any case, with a coalition government so fluffy and cuddly that 90% of the media are currently offering their love, what could possibly be said against them. They're working in the "national interest", after all, so we decided to stop whining for a while.

Two weeks on and after the declarations of love and national interest, however, this caring government needs to be pulled up over something.

Today the limelight is on über Tory Iain Duncan Smith and his plans over at Work and Pensions, which come straight from the darkest days of Thatcherism.

In a speech that sounds like the a tabloid's wet dream, IDS laid out his no-bullshit action plan consisting, amongst other things, of: the unemployed being forced to do community work in exchange for benefits; immediate requirement to sign up for training schemes; benefits suspended to those who refuse job offers; a "significant number" of those on incapacity benefits moved into work asap.

Let's ignore the fact that -especially post recession- millions are on the dole through no fault of their own. Let's turn a blind eye on the fact that when you can't find a job it's absolutely disheartening and the last thing you need is national campaigns that make you feel even more worthless and in need of self-flagellation. Let's ignore all that.

The thing is, IDS forgets three enormous things.

1) There's a massive recession out there. Unemployment is at its highest in twenty years. There are less jobs available around. The "aggressive cuts" (to quote David Laws) will mean even less jobs available in the very near future. So, very simply, how are millions of alleged lazy layabouts going to find a job?

2) IDS repeated that at present the rewards for choosing to work were "very minimal" or even "none at all". His party however, have consistently ferociously campaigned against the minimum wage.

I will swallow humble pie if I'm proven wrong, but they're extremely unlikely to rise the minimum wage in the foreseeable future. So how's that going to be rewarding?

3) Also, the famous "tax incentives" outlined in the Queen's Speech fall well short of the original promise to raise the tax threshold to £10,000. So how are dead-end McJobs that will still be paid a pittance supposed to suddenly turn from demoralising to "rewarding"?

Welcome back, good old Tories.

Reverse offshoring: Ford leads the way

We are so used to companies closing shop and moving abroad to increase profits. How the Obama administration got two birds with one stone.

In the grand scheme of things, 170 jobs is not an enormous amount. The significance, however, is priceless. After two decades of business operations or entire companies relocating overseas to maximise profits and further reduce costs, a world-famous company decided to do the opposite.

Following an agreement with the United Auto Workers union, and with the help of a federal grant, Ford Motor Co. decided to invest $135 million in Michigan to design, engineer and produce components for its next generation of hybrids and fully electric vehicles.

The parts are currently built in Japan and assembled in Mexico. The move will mean 170 new jobs in the Michigan area.

Some observers noted that this could mean that the offshoring tide may be turning, after years and years of companies racing to the bottom for the lowest possible salary around the world.

But this is also good news because "Ford plans to sell five electric or hybrid vehicles in the U.S. by 2012 and Europe by 2013". A sign that President Obama's stimulus programme to boost development of plug-in electric vehicles is now a reality.

A Tory government will mean the end of the minimum wage

If the Conservatives were still in power and the NMW had never been introduced, a typical low-paid worker would now earn £1-60 instead of £5-80 an hour.

Miles of newspaper colums and multiple television hours have been so far dedicated to anything from Sarah Brown's toes to Nick Clegg's great-great-aunt. There have been debates about tax, cuts, immigration and education, the NHS and Trident.

One crucial subject, however, has been notable by its absence. The Conservatives know that they would shoot themselves in the foot if they spoke out on it (Chris Grayling may have taught them a lesson) and Labour are too much in disarray to clock it. We're talking about the minimum wage.

In an interview with the Observer in 2005, David Cameron implied that his and his party's long-term extreme opposition to the minimum wage had been wrong. "It turned out much better than many people expected, including the CBI", he said.

But those few words are hardly reassuring against a sea of Conservative hostility that started in the 1990s and continues to this day.

Introduced in April 1999 and hailed as one of New Labour's best policies, the minimum wage was designed to rescue workers from slave-like wages - as little as 35p an hour. I remember vividly hopping from agency to agency in 1997 being offered a selection of jobs that would pay up to £2 an hour, meaning guaranteed poverty and hardly an incentive to punctuality, motivation and professionalism.

Ideologically, the Conservatives see nothing wrong with rock-bottom wages. They would moan about "a lifetime on benefit" but they would also fight tooth and nail to preserve the scandal of companies profiteering on borderline slave labour.

Glaze-eyed, they would recite from their ideological hymnsheet that the-market-regulates-itself (I suppose like bankers regulate their own bonuses), that it's-a-consensual-agreement (of course- a desperate casual worker has the same negotiating power than a multinational company), and that you can always find a job that pays better if £1 an hour doesn't suit you (but then they'll moan that migrants "have stolen all our jobs").

In 1999, like true Prophets of Doom, the Conservatives repeated that a NMW would stop foreign investors from setting shop in Britain, meaning higher unemployment and the collapse of businesses. One of their MPs said: "The minimum wage would condemn hundreds of thousands to the dole queue".

Of course that never happened. More jobs were created after the minimum wage was brought in. Over one million people, the majority of which women, benefitted instantly from a pay rise and were able to see a little improvement in their living standards. Still shitty wages, but clearly better than before.

Yet the Tories' Parliamentary record is there for all to see. They were hysterical when the minimum wage was implemented. They frothed at the mouth each time it was raised to catch up with the inflation.

The inflation-rate calculators say that, if the Conservatives were still in power and the NMW had never been introduced, a typical low-paid worker would now earn £1-60 instead of £5-80 an hour.

But there's more. The Conservatives may have done it on the quiet because it's electorally suicidal, but they campaigned to water it down as recent as 2009. Christopher Chope MP introduced a Parliamentary Bill calling for a "minimum wage opt out". He remarked that it should be "a basic human right" for people to be paid less than the minimum wage.

Senior Tory sources disclosed last year that a Tory government would allow the minimum wage to melt away. "We need to find ways of helping British business to remain competitive. The minimum wage won't be scrapped but it will be allowed to wither on the vine".

In October 2009, this was confirmed by an article in the Telegraph which called on David Cameron "to do more than slow the growth of the minimum wage – he needs to commit to putting it into reverse", repeating the old mantra that "[i]n the depths of a recession, it acts as a real barrier in getting people back to work".

Ominously, at the final Leaders' Debate on Thursday, David Cameron repeatedly stated that a Conservative government would cut down on "business regulation".

You've seen how ferociously the Conservatives are opposing a 1% National Insurance rise on employers.

Can you really picture the same people raising the minimum wage each time the inflation goes up? If, like me, you've experienced the depression of being paid as little as £2 an hour, remember that on May 6.

"Earning £5 a year and you say you're poor? Stop talking shite..."

Back to the future with the old Blairite rhetoric that we're-all-middle-class-now.

A blogger called John B has just come up with this gem of a sentence:

"Thanks to the combination of capitalism and socialism that has prevailed in the UK over the last 100 years, everyone has enough to eat. Anyone who says otherwise on the Internet is talking shit".

Now, John B is a clever chap. He's a good debater and, aside from gratuitously borrowing from Shakesperian sonnets ("talking shit", "worthless prick", "half a brain", "mental capacity", etc), he's generally quite articulate. He also, no doubt, makes a number of good points.

I'm with him that capitalism should be regulated and not abolished. He's bang on the money when he has a pop at the "arty types [...] 'pretending not to be middle-class'". Definitely.

However, aside from the extremely unfortunate remark at the top, John B also treads into unadulterated manure when he comes up with this other sweeping statement:

"75% of the country [are] basically middle-class".

You read that. 75% of the country are middle class. SEVENTY FIVE PER CENT. Which is the type of distorted social commentary you normally see coming out of the gob of well-pampered City bankers, and not articulate leftist bloggers.

I don't know if people cling on to such remarks so desperately as a way of exorcising subconscious wealth-related guilt, like "I'm doing alright therefore, surely, everyone else is", just because we all have "enough to eat", we can all access the internet, and you no longer spot Oliver Twist being chased by Mr Brownlow down the high street.

John B reminds me of my old mate Dave circa-2000, at the peak of Blairism, when most people in Britain seemed so uncritically in awe of formulas such as "things-can-only-get-better", "we-are-all-freelancers" and "we're-all-middle-class-now".

We all have enough to eat, therefore sod over-complicated dilemmas about the nature of poverty in 2010, galloping inequality, the quality of what people eat, or the obscene gaps in life expectancy existing in such a developed country (i.e. in some Glasgow areas, males have an official life expectancy of 54. It's 83.7 for their counterparts in Kensington and Chelsea).

Nah. Stop moaning. Can't you see we're-all-middle-class-now? I am, so you must be too! Less and less people go to work dressed in blue overalls. Less and less people work in steelmaking or car manufacturing. Therefore, we're-all-middle-class-now, nevermind a skilled factory worker may earn more than a call centre chap clad in a shirt and tie and that almost 10% of the population work in the super-low-paid hotel and catering sector.

Forgive my generalisations, but John B reminds me of those people who look at illegal DVD sellers and conclude that, because they're all fiddling with a fancy mobile phone, surely they can't be doing so bad financially. I bet they-have-access-to-clean-water and they're middle-class-now as well.

Or, the old school of thought that it's surely outrageous to claim you're a bit poor if you can afford a Playstation for your son. You've gotta be middle-class-if-you-buy-that-too.

I mean, look at that glass collector on the minimum wage. How dare he say is on "low pay"? You're not telling me he hasn't got a mobile phone, an email account, and chances are he also "twitters" as well and he's even aware of inequality-related issues! He can't be doing so bad, can he, John?

Yet look at the figures. Did you know that over 7 million workers in the UK earn less than £10,000 a year? And that's the actual workers, people earning a living and paying tax.

If you consider that the median (correction: mean) income is £22,800 per year, more than 20 million people of salaried workers in Britain are below that.

Add a good chunk of the estimated eight million who are economically inactive (and don't forget the 2.5m currently on the dole), and the notion that SEVENTY FIVE PER CENT of the country "are basically middle class" is already collapsing like a castle built from arse paper.

And yet John B maintains that if you're "having the unqualified right to reside in a developed country, then you’re not poor, even if your income’s a fiver a year".

Of course.

So next time you toy with the idea that your minimum wage should be raised a touch. Or that it's unfair that people earning £6,745 should give 20 per cent of that away on income tax. Or that living on jobseeker's allowance is a bloody nightmare. Or that "[W]e are getting wealth inequalities in London now as far as we know that have not been seen since the days of a slave-owning elite", like someone said recently. Next time any of the above crosses your mind, just shut the fuck up, you "worthless prick".

Because John B said so. Just recite with him:

"Even if your income is a fiver a year, you live in a developed country therefore you're not poor".

Amen.

Causes of inequality according to the right*

From surreal and absurd to shallow and hypocritical. How the Tories and the right-wing press reacted to the inequality report.

The National Equality Panel has published a comprehensive report on inequality in Britain, more confirmation that thirteen years of peripheral adjustments and papering over cracks did little to stop the growing gap between a super rich minority and a poorer majority.

The roll call of findings is depressing. In short, the richest 10% of the population are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10% of society; the gap is wider now than 40 years ago; the gender pay gap is significant and persisting; the UK is the seventh worst country for income inequality out of 30 industrialised countries; Britain has the highest poverty rate in Western Europe and social mobility has declined sharply.

That Labour failed there's no doubt. Thirteen years in government -and with humongous majorities, lest we forget- is an awful long time. They were hardly going to turn into the Robin Hoods of Westminster, but they certainly had the chance to make a more structural impact.

What's more interesting, however, is the clueless reaction from the right. They're barking at Labour's failures yet:

1) They've consistently sniped at any proposal directed at addressing poverty: just think of their fits of rage when the minimum wage was introduced and their fury each time it was raised; or their firm opposition to basic agency workers' rights; or the daily bombardment against social benefits for the unemployed;

2) Only two weeks ago Tory supremo Ken Clarke denied that class divisions exist at all in Britain. He said that society is "classless" and "meritocratic", indeed "transformed" from decades ago - an enviable grasp of the real world for the cigar chomping MP.

And so, according to the Telegraph, "today's equality gap is not a problem that results from the rich getting richer". No. "That is generally a good thing for society", the Tory paper says (without explaining why, of course). "The problem is that the poorer are not getting richer, too". And how do they do that, given that any notion that the low-paid should be paid a little better is invariably seen as a cross between Stalin and the Cloverfield monster?

Rest assured, here's the solution. Look at this:

"the core of the problem [...] lies in education and welfare policy [...] the growth of welfare dependency has crushed aspiration within the family. If you pay people to stay poor, you will never run out of poor people...".

So basically if you're amongst the 1.3m people who lost their job through no fault of their own during the recession, you should forget about help, otherwise you will stay poor. Knock it on the head altogether and bob's your uncle, we're all rich. Just take a look around, the country's bursting with well-paid jobs for the "aspiring" masses, isn't it?

Then there's Max Hastings in the Daily Mail. To him, the root of the problem is even simpler: "It's not the middle classes but social engineering zealots like Ms Harman who are to blame for Britain's inequality gap", he writes. His article takes the scattergun approach: a combination of PC gone mad (based on this non-story from his own paper), the end of grammar schools and lack of good old discipline.

Bring back the cane and get those chavvy kids to sit properly and, sure enough, millions of well-paid jobs will materialise and no-one will work for £4 an hour. Ever again.

Because, Hastings informs us, "[i]t is no longer a class divide which disadvantages Britain's poor. Nobody is denied a job or promotion because they don't speak proper or hold a knife and fork right". And stupid us thinking that that was the problem all along.

Then there's Theresa May, Conservative MP and Shadow Minister for women and equalities. She said:

"Labour has had a one-dimensional approach, looking at the symptoms, not the causes. For example, one in six children are growing up in a workless household. We need policies that can make equality a reality."

But Ms May is wrong on two fronts.
First, sod one in six children, under the glorious Tory days of the 1980s and 1990s unemployment was consistently higher than it ever was under Labour- regularly topping 3m. In fact, the last fifteen years have seen, by far, the lowest unemployment figures since the 1970s, a trend that only ended with the crisis kicking in in 2008.

Secondly - and more importantly - low unemployment is hardly tantamount to equality. Like I've just said, dole queues were at their smallest in the years 1997-2007, yet the levels of inequality galloped anyway.

And this is because you stand better chances of winning the lottery than hearing a British MP questioning the "quality" of employment.

Tories and Labour alike had better get this into their head and quick. It matters little if unemployment stands at 5.5% or 6% if so many people in employment are paid a pittance, casualisation continues unabated and so does the erosion of basic rights in the workplace. The minimum wage was a step in the right direction, but obviously not enough.

Look at this ordinary example. A 40-hour working week paid £5-60 an hour. It pays £890 a month. You detract national insurance, council tax, rent and bills to pay and how on earth are you and your family going to escape a circle of depression? You'd have thought that the new Cameron-era would be good at empathy!

Which leads to the only factor that can make a difference. Higher wages. Which, in turn, can either come out of your boss's own goodwill, or from redistribution - read taxing higher incomes.

In Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark the top rate of income tax ranges between 52 and 58 per cent. All of them officially boast the lowest levels of poverty and inequality in the democratic world.

* This blog entry was first published in January 2010 but, in the run-up to the General Election, it's a relevant snapshot of the Tory mindset.

The minimum wage does NOT affect unemployment

Debunking the ongoing proto-Tory myth.

The debate that followed this article on apprenticeships and youth unemployment was hijacked by the Anti-Minimum Wage Crew.

Reprising an argument he'd already put forward here and here, Tim Worstall argued that countries like Denmark and Sweden have lower unemployment rates, including amongst the young, because "[N]either have a national minimum wage".

Worstall is spot-on when he argues that: "[O]ne of the vile things about the UK's current taxation system is that it reaches so far down the income scale [and that] it's possible to be working part-time on the minimum wage and be paying income tax". But the problem there is the tax system, not the minimum wage.

Which is why Worstall is wrong when he writes that "there really is an unemployment effect" caused by the minimum wage, effectively echoing what the Conservatives (including a younger David Cameron) were saying when the Minimum Wage Act was implemented back in 1999: "it would send unemployment straight back up". It never happened.

The argument is flawed on so many levels that it's even difficult to know where to begin. Especially because the causes of unemployment are so complex, both politically, geographically and historically, that it's actually unfair to point at black and white causes and solutions.

Either way, for a libertarian to cling on to Denmark and Sweden as market models is quite peculiar. Redistribution there may not take place in the flimsy guise of a National Minimum Wage, but their top tax rates would cause a free marketeer a seizure. It's 58% in Denmark and 55% in Sweden.

The whole ratio behind the introduction of a National Minimum Wage in the UK was precisely to enable people to earn something closer to "a living", without affecting the overall tax structure.

Also, Denmark may not have a state-imposed National Minimum Wage, but that's because there is already one that was privately knocked out together by the Danish Trade Unions and the employers' organisation covering 81 to 90 per cent of the national workforce. Incidentally, it is so low that virtually all Danish workers are paid above the minimum rate anyway.

In any case, when most countries compare their economic variables with Scandinavia, they tend to come off worse. I don't believe unemployment in Denmark is lower than in the UK because of the minimum wage any more than I believe lower temperatures can explain Scandinavia's lower corruption levels.

Italy -with a population very similar to Britain- has never had a National Minimum Wage. Yet it's joblessness rates have consistently been higher than the UK since the NMW.

Take a look at this comparative table. At the end of 1997, Italy's rate stood at 12,2% vs 6,8% in the UK.

The rate went down in both countries throughout the Noughties. Italy reached its best moment in 2007-8 at 6.1%, its levels though still higher than the UK, where the joblessness rate remained consistently under 5 per cent between 2003 and 2006.

It's also worth noting that, in 2003, Italy adopted labour laws that are amongst the most "flexible" in Europe. While casualisation sky-rocketed and it became fantastically easy and cheap for employers to hire and fire, this did little to stem the massive downturn when it hit in 2008.

Again, Italy's unemployment went back up. As of March 2010, it stands at 8,6%. Though at their worst since the early Nineties, Britain's rates - currently 7,8% - are still lower than Italy's.

Britain has a mimimum wage, Italy doesn't. Would that be enough to explain the different performances if we were to follow Worstall's logical fallacy?

If that wasn't enough, we could look at other variables. Focusing on Britain alone, we can return to this table. Look at how high unemployment was in the pre-minimum wage days, through both the 1980s and the 1990s.

Or we can look at the United States, instead. Like Robert E. Prasch wrote in his In Defense of the Minimum Wage, "[B]etween 1981 and 1990, government policy allowed inflation to erode the value of the federally mandated minimum wage".

The neo-liberals in the Reagan and Bush Sr administration promised that a total freeze in the minimum wage would induce businesses to hire and provide experience to more unskilled workers. Compare the joblessness figures of 1979 (5,8%) with 1990 (5.6%). Like Prasch notes, "the structural reduction in unemployment simply failed to happen".

If anything (see this), US unemployment peaked in the 1980s and went down consistently throughout the 1990s, when the minimum wage was raised repeatedly for the first time since the 1970s.

Redundancy Island

How a group of laid off workers took over an uninhabited island and began their protest.

When so-called "reality TV" programmes started mushrooming up one after the other, many commented on the fact that the only "real" thing about them was in the name.

And yet, as they quickly saturated television, their artificial, dumb and repetitive formula will probably be judged by history as the Noughties' worst cultural legacy.

Back in 2005, we wrote that a Temping Idol or Casual Employee Academy would have been a good antidote to the binge of televisual fakery that goes by the name of "reality".

Now, a dramatic story is actually underway and it's no fake.

A group of workers barricaded themselves on Asinara, a small island off the northern coast of Sardinia. For decades, and until 1997, the island was used as a maximum security prison, and its only inhabitants were prisoners and warders.

After being collectively laid off four months ago, on February 24, a group of workers from a chemical company called ENI landed at Asinara and set camp at the old prison.

This is when their L'isola dei Cassintegrati, "Redundancy Island", started. Though there are no celebrity and no television crews, the workers are hoping to direct collective focus towards their plight.

Their families help them set up a Facebook group which has already gained over 14,000 supporters. It reads:

"Redundancy Island is a 'real' reality, unfortunately, where no-one is famous but everyone is jobless. Hidden away on an island which is the symbol of what a once Great Sardinia which is now in the throes of a deep crisis, we are dwelling in cells which are no worse than the prison bars that the national government, the regional one and ENI presented us with.

There are no yachts, billionaires or showgirls on this island, just the crude reality of unaccountable politics and a state-controlled company – ENI – pursuing its business goals as they trample on hundreds of families. Not least, a group of brave workers fighting for their rights".

Since redundancy notices were served in November, the workers have had to make do with a single 800 Euro payout.

"It's embarrassing that we have to mimick Celebrity Island to remind people of what's going on in both Italy and Sardinia", said one of the protesters to Italian daily la Repubblica.

Youth unemployment: German lessons

Youth unemployment data across the EU suggest that countries with more developed apprenticeship policies have minimised the worst effects of the downturn.

In Britain, 17.9% of those below the age of 25 are unemployed. True, some countries are faring even worse. The percentage is 21.5 per cent in Ireland while, in Spain, the jobless amount amongst the young has now reached a staggering 42.6 per cent.

Countries like Denmark and Germany, however, show a different picture - with the unemployment rate amongst the under-25s standing at 8.9 and 10.5 respectively.

Of course, there is no obvious reason for this disparity. However, Germany has long been known as a country placing apprenticeships at the core of its education system.

The German system is a model for youth work contracts. It is called 'the dual system'. Once completed compulsory education, either at 16 or 19, a worker can start an apprenticeship at a company which can last between 2 and 3 and 1/2 years. During this period, for two days a week, the apprentice will have to learn the theoretical background at a vocational school known as Berufsschule.

The precise skills and theory taught on German apprenticeships are strictly regulated. The employer is responsible for the entire education programme.

There are aroud 350 trades to choose from: anything from accountant to builder or from medical worker to baker.

About two thirds of young people who finish school decide to begin an apprenticeship every year.

The fact that the contract is really an 'apprenticeship' doesn't mean that the worker has no rights. Unlike other countries such as Italy, contracts designed to help the young are not misused to maximise profits out of unprotected workers. The company is required to pick up the social security costs as well as unemployment insurance and pension entitlements.

What varies is the salary. For instance, an apprentice metal worker in the Baden-Wurtemberg region will earn around 810 Euros a month during his first year, €861 in his second, €937 in the third and €988 in his fourth. His counterpart in Berlin will probably take home €100 less each month.

This can partly explain why there is a lower percentage of university students in Germany when compared to other Western countries, but there is a much lower percentage of people entering the German labour market with no qualifications. This seems to have protected, at least partially, German workers and job seekers from the worst effects of the downturn.

Britain, instead was hit on two fronts.

One one side, the 1980s and 1990s saw a sharp decrease in the number of apprenticeships which was only reversed through increased investment since 1997. The number of learners of all ages starting on the Apprenticeships programme has more than doubled from around 75,000 to around 180,000 today.

On the other side, the Labour government was guilty of placing unrealistic expectations on the University system. You may remember the old Blairite obsession with having 50% of people in Higher Education by 2010. It was never going to be economically sustainable, which is why the Government is now -very shyly- trying to support graduate internship positions.

At the moment, it's not going very well. Out of 725,000 unemployed 18-24 Britons, there are 3,400 graduate internship positions, only 47% of which are paid.

Be nice to shop assistants

You may think you're religious, well-brought up, very liberal, or simply a very nice person. There's only one way to find out.

You may have heard about the allegations of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's bullying of his staff.

Yesterday's Observer referred to "abusive behaviour and volcanic eruptions of foul temper" as it reproduced extracts from journalist Andrew Rawnsley's new book.

Apparently, the culture at No.10 is/was one of rage, fear and paranoia, with many members of staff -even at the lowest level- victims of bullying from Prime Ministerial circles. According to National Bullying Helpline boss Christine Pratt, "three or four people" from Gordon Brown's office had contacted the charity in recent years.

Now. For the sake of balance, we must also remind you that Andrew Rawnsley has a new book to flog and that, as one of the most senior Observer columnists, he may have been given ample backing by his own paper. It's also true that Peter Mandelson has said that Brown is no bully and that he is simply "demanding of people".

However, and here I pick up on an excellent point made by Neil Robertson at The Bleeding Heart Show, whether it counts semantically as "bullying" or not, nobody should routinely shout at staff - at any level, in any organisation. Not even the Prime Minister. It doesn't matter if he's stressed. He should ask the earthlings in his office how they feel.

Neil writes:

"Over the years, I’ve developed a completely arbitrary but generally quite reliable method for measuring a person’s moral worth. Where some people might totter up a person’s good deeds, charitable giving, political beliefs or religion, mine is far more straightforward: Are you nice to shop assistants?".

For years, I had the misfortune (or maybe the fortune) of working as a barman, waiter, receptionist. These are amongst the lowest paid, most repetitive, least rewarding jobs in the country. You're supposed to be efficient, nice, polite, smiley, professional, obedient, aware, meticulous, patient, punctual, on the ball and sympathetic for the minimum wage or little more. You're supposed to give up most week-ends and bank holidays. While excellent for social observation and developing misanthropy, those jobs offer no incentive whatsoever .

Truth is, most people haven't seen what life is like on the other side of the counter, desk or till. It may not be their fault, but they're simply not aware of the difference a smile or an understanding customer can make. Most don't even think you're a disposable piece of shit who's taking stick for something you're not responsible for. It simply doesn't cross their mind.

You can think you're religious, well-brought up, very liberal, or simply a very nice person. But it's on those occasions that, like Neil says, "your moral worth" comes across.

Politics, in those cases, counts jackshit.

This is simply my personal experience, but allow me to say that the nicest, most humane, most understanding manager I've ever worked with was actually an old school arch-Tory, a pub landlord. We used to have lots of political chats and debates during dead afternoons and evenings behind the bar and, politically, we agreed on nothing. But he never ever patronised anyone and would always ask you, not tell you, to do stuff. In my dysfunctional book, he will always remain the most left-wing manager I've ever had, even though his heroes were Margaret Thatcher and William Hague.

On the other side, I remember once I was working as a receptionist at a Museum somewhere. Not a particularly bad job, but you know, hardly glamorous Mick Jagger material. There comes a self-professed "staunch socialist", "friend of the people", "left-wing" fifty-something senior lecturer I had the misfortune of meeting during my time at University of Birmingham (apparently he's no longer there now, he fucked off to another continent).

I greet, but there's no 'hi', 'hello', 'good morning' in response. Nowt. He looks at me, chuckles and then says "god you've made a career for yourself since university" and he starts laughing and off he goes, walking in with his wife and two mates. My fellow receptionist who was with me looked dumbfounded: "who's that prick?" she asks me. "My old lecturer at Uni. He's a socialist", I answer.

Why is Corus' closure not on the front pages?

As a hammer blow is about to be dealt to the North-East, the government's lack of political will is there for everyone to see.

The media have decided they're not really interested in what could turn out to be the biggest casualty of the economic downturn in Britain so far.

After all, it's a complex and depressing story: the Corus steel plant in Teesside is about to shut down, with 1,600 skilled jobs about to be laid to waste along with a staggering further 8-10,000 job losses in the supply chain.

Much more has been said about Gordon Brown appearing on Piers Morgan's Life Stories or David Cameron's daughter breaking his i-Pod. A regional disaster with a guaranteed knock-on effect is about to take place and most people don't even know.

And yet causes for outrage are there aplenty. Teesside has been leading world steel manufacturing since 1917. Stretching from Redcar to Middlesbrough, it features the largest blast furnace in Europe. Privatised by the Thatcher government in 1988, the company was bought by Tata Steel for £6.7 bn in 2007, creating the world's fifth biggest steelmaker.

So how can it be that, with a general election looming and with every economist warning that extensive job losses pose the biggest threat to the economic recovery, we are allowing such a bedrock of our economy to go down - with devastating consequences for a whole region?

Why can't the government go beyond half-baked claims that they're "prepared to help the company and to work with any potential buyer" and simply take the company by the jaffas and ferry it across to better times ?

Some would tell you that the answer lies in a combination of the massive downturn and British steel being no longer competitive. But there are two flaws in this argument.

Firstly, the government has offered financial support to an ailing sector before. In October 2008, it made £500bn available to the banks in loans and guarantees, forking out financial sums that we didn't even know existed. Sure, it was inevitable, many say, as the entire economy was about to come crashing down along with the banks.

And yet an aid package to rescue Corus would be only a tiny fragment of the Great Bail-Out of 2008. More importantly, it would save the government billions in benefits, re-training schemes and the additional social costs of an entire area.

Also, it would help a sector that will always be viable. Steel will always be needed and British companies will have to buy steel anyway, all the time, except that they'll have to import it from abroad, dealing a further blow to an already embarrassing import/export balance - currently lagging at the bottom of the EU table. Steel manufacturing in the North East is also high quality. Its main competition has rarely stemmed from cheaper countries.

And in fact, Corus has received a number of offers, except that nothing has been finalised. According to Unite the Union, this is a "smokescreen" and a "disgraceful charade": "Serious offers have been made to Corus that would allow production to remain at the plant", said Terry Pye of Unite, "but the management has dismissed them all out of hand".

The suspicion that the sale is being thwarted "for competitive reasons" was also mentioned by the Financial Times: "Ray Mallon, Middlesbrough’s elected mayor, claimed a credible consortium interested in buying the plant had received no response from Corus to a request to 'look at the books' and to allow due diligence".

Nor are people convinced by claims that EU state-subsidy laws would rule out serious government intervention: last year, rules on both subsidy and state loan guarantees were extensively relaxed (at least until the end of 2010) and, according to the European Commission, by April 2009 ten countries had already taken advantage of the more lax system, the most popular example being Germany granting Opel €4.5bn in state guarantees.

It has been estimated that the German government has put aside €115bn to help any company in any industry, the only pre-requisite being that they are "victims" of the crisis and that they were performing well until the downturn kicked in.

It is purely a matter of how high different governments value the role played by manufacturing in society. In Britain, so it seems, it's far from being a priority. Alas, thousands of workers and their families are about to suffer the consequences.

We're all simpletons

Mass public sector redundancies will mean more "freelancers" available, the experts tell us.

In the last few days the British press enjoyed having a pop at Greece and the rest of Europe, quickly forgetting -obviously- the humongous impact of the downturn on the UK. Suddenly it's as though none of it ever happened.

But then look at yesterday's news reports announcing that, with the recession far from over, we're about to witness major redundancies in the public sector. Two weeks ago, Birmingham City Council announced around 1,300 job cuts.

Now, according to a survey carried out by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and business advisers KPMG, many employers are in the process of sticking thousands of redundancy notices through the letter box.

Covering the news, yesterday's Today programme on BBC Radio 4 summoned up a certain expert (I can't remember his name) who reiterated that the redundancies are not going to be a bad thing and that every cloud has a silver lining etc.

Apparently, the pain of having public workers joining the dole queues will be cancelled out by a rise in the number of "freelancers", the good old word that, in the early days of the Blair government, was dangling from the gob of every politician even though it simply means "casual".

When the Radio Four chap pointed out that those "freelancers" won't have any job protection or pension scheme of any kind, the "expert" retorted "Oh but no. It's going to be a business to business relationship" without elaborating - of course. Yes, I know you're smelling something. And that must be the copious amounts of bullshit. Because even a 5-year-old would grasp that a desperate casual or agency worker would sign up for anything, forget pension schemes and guarantees.

This fake one-way optimism, however, is in line with the general assumption that the British public is a collection of simpletons who would swallow up anything.

Like, we've lost count of headlines announcing "the recovery", and it may as well be the case for a few shareholders. Yet we learnt today that the UK rate of inflation rose up to 3.5% (Consumer Prices Index -CPI) or 3.7% (Retail Prices Index -RPI) in January. And this is why pay freezes are being imposed left right and centre, with rises in 2010 expected to range between zero and 2.25 per cent. That is, only for fuckers like me or you, not for executives.

To a lot of people whose rent, utility bills, food shopping and transport are going to eat further into their wages this word - recovery - may end up sounding a little bit hollow.

Causes of inequality according to the right

From surreal and absurd to shallow and hypocritical. How the Tories and the right-wing press reacted to the inequality report.

The National Equality Panel has published a comprehensive report on inequality in Britain, more confirmation that thirteen years of peripheral adjustments and papering over cracks did little to stop the growing gap between a super rich minority and a poorer majority.

The roll call of findings is depressing. In short, the richest 10% of the population are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10% of society; the gap is wider now than 40 years ago; the gender pay gap is significant and persisting; the UK is the seventh worst country for income inequality out of 30 industrialised countries; Britain has the highest poverty rate in Western Europe and social mobility has declined sharply.

That Labour failed there's no doubt. Thirteen years in government -and with humongous majorities, lest we forget- is an awful long time. They were hardly going to turn into the Robin Hoods of Westminster, but they certainly had the chance to make a more structural impact.

What's more interesting, however, is the clueless reaction from the right. They're barking at Labour's failures yet:

1) They've consistently sniped at any proposal directed at addressing poverty: just think of their fits of rage when the minimum wage was introduced and their fury each time it was raised; or their firm opposition to basic agency workers' rights; or the daily bombardment against social benefits for the unemployed;

2) Only two weeks ago Tory supremo Ken Clarke denied that class divisions exist at all in Britain. He said that society is "classless" and "meritocratic", indeed "transformed" from decades ago - an enviable grasp of the real world for the cigar chomping MP.

And so, according to the Telegraph, "today's equality gap is not a problem that results from the rich getting richer". No. "That is generally a good thing for society", the Tory paper says (without explaining why, of course). "The problem is that the poorer are not getting richer, too". And how do they do that, given that any notion that the low-paid should be paid a little better is invariably seen as a cross between Stalin and the Cloverfield monster?

Rest assured, here's the solution. Look at this:

"the core of the problem [...] lies in education and welfare policy [...] the growth of welfare dependency has crushed aspiration within the family. If you pay people to stay poor, you will never run out of poor people...".

So basically if you're amongst the 1.3m people who lost their job through no fault of their own during the recession, you should forget about help, otherwise you will stay poor. Knock it on the head altogether and bob's your uncle, we're all rich. Just take a look around, the country's bursting with well-paid jobs for the "aspiring" masses, isn't it?

Then there's Max Hastings in the Daily Mail. To him, the root of the problem is even simpler: "It's not the middle classes but social engineering zealots like Ms Harman who are to blame for Britain's inequality gap", he writes. His article takes the scattergun approach: a combination of PC gone mad (based on this non-story from his own paper), the end of grammar schools and lack of good old discipline.

Bring back the cane and get those chavvy kids to sit properly and, sure enough, millions of well-paid jobs will materialise and no-one will work for £4 an hour. Ever again.

Because, Hastings informs us, "[i]t is no longer a class divide which disadvantages Britain's poor. Nobody is denied a job or promotion because they don't speak proper or hold a knife and fork right". And stupid us thinking that that was the problem all along.

Then there's Theresa May, Conservative MP and Shadow Minister for women and equalities. She said:

"Labour has had a one-dimensional approach, looking at the symptoms, not the causes. For example, one in six children are growing up in a workless household. We need policies that can make equality a reality."

But Ms May is wrong on two fronts.
First, sod one in six children, under the glorious Tory days of the 1980s and 1990s unemployment was consistently higher than it ever was under Labour- regularly topping 3m. In fact, the last fifteen years have seen, by far, the lowest unemployment figures since the 1970s, a trend that only ended with the crisis kicking in in 2008.

Secondly - and more importantly - low unemployment is hardly tantamount to equality. Like I've just said, dole queues were at their smallest in the years 1997-2007, yet the levels of inequality galloped anyway.

And this is because you stand better chances of winning the lottery than hearing a British MP questioning the "quality" of employment.

Tories and Labour alike had better get this into their head and quick. It matters little if unemployment stands at 5.5% or 6% if so many people in employment are paid a pittance, casualisation continues unabated and so does the erosion of basic rights in the workplace. The minimum wage was a step in the right direction, but obviously not enough.

Look at this ordinary example. A 40-hour working week paid £5-60 an hour. It pays £890 a month. You detract national insurance, council tax, rent and bills to pay and how on earth are you and your family going to escape a circle of depression? You'd have thought that the new Cameron-era would be good at empathy!

Which leads to the only factor that can make a difference. Higher wages. Which, in turn, can either come out of your boss's own goodwill, or from redistribution - read taxing higher incomes.

In Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark the top rate of income tax ranges between 52 and 58 per cent. All of them officially boast the lowest levels of poverty and inequality in the democratic world.