Chavs - The Demonization of the Working Class
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Hairdressing is an example of a booming low-paid service sector job. It's one of the worst-paid jobs in Britain: the median salary for a female stylist is less than £12,000. There are over 170,000 hairdressers in Britain today." Other rapidly expanding low-paid jobs include data input, security guards, receptionists, care assistants and cleaners. These low-paid jobs are the only ones on offer for growing numbers of workers who, in a different time, would have taken up a middle-level job with relatively good pay.
'It wasn't just that manufacturing was wiped out. I mean, in London we used to have a million and a quarter manufacturing jobs, now it's just over 200,000--that's mainly high-end printing,' says former London mayor Ken Livingstone. 'But there's a whole layer of really well-paid jobs in the utilities which, as they were privatized, were all wiped out. And so, for a working-class person, the jobs have been dramatically narrowed.'
One of the things that distinguished the old industrial working class was a strong trade union movement to fight its comer. Back in the late 1970s, over half of all workers were union members. Today unions remain the biggest civil society organizations in the country, but their membership has steeply declined from thirteen million in 1979 to just over seven million today. The decline becomes even starker when you consider that, while over half of public sector workers are union members, the same is true of only 15 per cent in the private sector. The new service sector jobs are more or less a union-free zone.
Thatcher's pummelling of the unions certainly goes a long way toward explaining this weakness. As former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn points out, the laws 'are more restrictive on trade union rights than they were a hundred years ago'. Their presence on the statute books puts Britain in violation ofits obligations as a signatory to International Labour Organization conventions. Not only do they make it difficult for unions to organize in the workplace, the laws also prevent them from fighting on behalf of their members. Unite was taken to court by British Airways in 2010, over a long-running dispute with cabin crew. Despite eight out of ten workers voting for strike action on the back of a 78 per cent turnout, the judge banned the strike. Why? Because the union had failed to give notice by text message that eleven out of 9,282 votes had been spoilt.
Industrial relations specialist Professor Gregor Gall is right to point out that unions were stronger in manufacturing because of 'the time in which unionization occurred. This was an era of greater union and worker rights, far more progressive public policy and law and less powerful employers.' The dog-eat-dog individualism unleashed by Thatcherism also undermined the collective spirit at the heart of trade unionism. And it is more difficult for unions to put down roots in the transient service sector. Factories with hundreds of workers who were there for the long haul were simply easier to organize.
'There are huge challenges; says Jennie Formby, the national officer for Unite's food, drink and hospitality sector:
It is very difficult to organize in hotels and restaurants and pubs because there are thousands of them. How do you actually have a concentrated campaign to cover every site? There's a very high turnover of labour and large numbers of migrant workers without English as their first language, particularly in hotels, so it is harder to deliver a sustainable organizing campaign. Itis much easier for us to organize factory workers, for example in meat and poultry processing factories--where we've been extremely successful over recent years in organizing thousands of predominantly migrant workers-than it is to organize the often almost invisible workforce who work in their thousands in Britain's hotel sector.
She recalls the very successful Unite-led campaign to stop employers counting tips as part of their workers' wages. Among the obstacles that the union was up against were the very real threats many workers faced from their employers if they engaged in any kind of union activity, Or spoke out about the exploitation they were suffering. Some were threat- ened with disciplinary action, including outright dismissal. 'Our members were basically being robbed of their earnings that customers had chosen to give to them to reflect the good service they had received, but companies saw it as a huge threat to their income if the legislation was changed, as they were making millions out of short-changing these hard-working and low-paid restaurant workers,' Formby says. 'How- ever, successful as the tips campaign has been in winning for our members, it was actually more about lobbying government and getting changes in the law than it was about organizing workers.'
Mary Cunningham's supermarket boasts a good union presence. When she took over as union rep there were only fifty-one members, but now it has reached 400. This is a testament to her organizational drive. But as she says herself, this is rare. Since 1996, the percentage of union members in retail has never reached 12 per cent. Not a lot, it would seem-but pretty high by service sector standards. Because of the turnover, Mary says, 'you're recruiting just to stand still. You might recruit thirty people in a matter of months, but by that time people have left-YOU're losing them all the time ... Obviously when you get suc- cesses, it's easier to recruit, so when people can say, "Mary did this, and a worker got their job back" -that's a positive thing, and people say, "Oh, I think I'll join."
Again, Mary does not lack stories of management clamping down on unions. 'At one big company that's been around for years, I had a hundred people wanting to join the union. I had a meeting off the pre· mises with two ladies, and they took a hundred forms back and most of them were filled in, until the company found out about it and said anybody that filled a form in on the premises, or caught with a form, would be disciplined.'
After three decades of persecution, unions are no longer part of workplace culture-and that is particularly true in the service sector. 'A lot of people these days don't even know what a union is about,' says Mary. 'Which is sad, really.'
John McInally has been leading valiant attempts by the pes union to organize call centre workers. He believes that there are real grounds for optimism, because of one key similarity between call centres and old- style factories: large numbers of workers concentrated in one place. But he has no illusions about the obstacles that are in the way, not least because of how regimented the work is. 'You could have four hundred people in a room, or a couple of rooms, who may see each other every day but never speak to each other,' he says. Just as factory workers were stuck at their looms in Victorian times, call centre workers are stuck at their desks. There is one major difference, though: unlike Victorian workers who could shout to each other over their looms, call centre workers have earphones plugged in all day and so are prevented from communicating. 'People are treated like units of production, unlike factories where there is a more organic interaction between people.'
Some unions that have been prepared to take action to defend their members have grown, like the transport workers' union the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, and a handful of others. But the reality is that unions continue to shrink in number and barely exist in the service sector. What is particularly scandalous is that those who most need unions are the least represented. According to the 2008 Labour Force Survey, less than 15 per cent of workers earning less than £7 an hour are union members. For those on between £15 and £20 an hour, the proportion is well over four in ten.
It is not the unpopularity of trade unionism that is to blame for its crippled state. According to a poll conducted by union group Unions 21, around half of non-unionized workers think that unions have a future, compared to 31 per cent who think they do not. While women were most likely not to join because of the cost, for men the biggest tum-off was a sense that unions did not achieve anything. According to Trades Union Congress organizing officer Carl Roper, unions had not done enough to recruit in the private sector: 'There doesn't seem to be a union approach to how we look at those workers:lI
It is not just that the failure of unions to recruit low-paid and moderately paid service sector workers condemns them to poor wages and conditions. It undermines the collective identity of working-class peop
le. It deprives them of a voice, leaving millions of people virtually invisible and without a means to articulate their concerns and aspirations, which can be easily ignored by politicians and journalists alike. Furthermore, it helps to consolidate the idea that you can only improve your lot through your own individual efforts and that, accordingly, those in poorly paid jobs deserve their lot.
The weakening of trade unions goes a long way to explaining why workers' pay stagnated even during the boom years. The huge sums being made benefited mostly the bosses, because of the lack of an organized force to win a share of the spoils for the millions working some of the longest hours in Europe. Similarly, this lack of pressure from below explains how workers' rights have been chipped away,
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Even before the recession hit, the wages of working-class Britain were going nowhere fast. In 2005, for example, company profits were the highest since records began, but workers suffered a hit to their weekly earnings of nearly half a percent. The income of the bottom half flatlined after 2004; for the bottom third, it actually went into reverse.ll Following the crash in 2008, wage freezes became the norm as workers were left to pick up the tab for a crisis caused by the greed of wealthy bankers. The 9.4 million people in low-income households had nothing to fall back on in hard times. The decline in their income is aU the more shocking because it happened under a Labour government. Compare and contrast with the much-maligned Labour administrations of the 1960s, when the poorest 10 per cent saw their real income go up by 29 per cent, compared to the 16 per cent increase enj oyed by everyone else.
New Labour loyalist and former Cabinet minister Hazel Blears admits that life got harder for working-class people. She argues that the government was trying to 'square a circle', fearing that intervening too much to help struggling workers would make Britain 'uncompetitive' and throw people out of work. 'As ever in politics it's about striking the balance, and sometimes you get that balance right, and sometimes you get it wrong.' But she concedes that, in New Labour's later years,
just getting on day-to-day for a lot of working-class people became increasingly difficult. You're either on short-time, your wages were depressed, things that you had enjoyed-like taking your family out toeat once a week, going to the pictures, going on holiday-began to be very difficult. And the quality of life, I think, in some families just became work and sleep, work and sleep, with no fun at all.
What makes all of this so spectacularly unfair is that workers' wages have stagnated even as their productivity has steadily gone up. In the past, growing productivity has translated into rising wages. But the annual increase in productivity has been twice that of wages in twentyfirst-century Britain. Overall, wages represent a much smaller slice of the economy following the ravages of Thatcherism. Nearly two-thirds of the nation's wealth went on wages back in 1973. Today, it's only a little over half.
It's not just the legacy of Thatcherism that workers have to thank for their stagnating pay packets: globalization has played a role, too. When China, India and the former Soviet bloc entered the global market economy, Western companies suddenly had access to hundreds of millions of new workers. Not only did this make labour plentiful, it also made it cheap because corporations could get away with paying far lower wages in the developing world, not least because of international deregulation pushed by the likes of the World Trade Organization. This has dealt a crippling blow to workers' bargaining power. After all, companies can simply relocate to the third world if their Western workforces refuse to stomach low wages and poor conditions.
Stagnating wages and low-paid service sector jobs played their part in the economic crisis. To maintain their spending power, workers began to borrow. In 1980the ratio between debt and income was 45. By 1997 it had doubled, before reaching an astonishing 157.4 on the eve of the credit crunch in 2007. As people's purchasing power slowed, more and more credit was splashed out on consumer goods. Between 2000 and 2007, consumers spent £55 billion more than their pay packets, courtesy of the plastic in their wallet or hefty bank loans. This huge increase in household debt is just one reason Britain experienced a credit-fuelled boom before the bubble inevitably burst.
'If you're in a situation where your income is not increasing in real terms, and if you actually find yourself in a situation where your income is declining, then one way to meet that gap and "keep up with the [oneses" is to borrow more money to do so,' says debt expert Chris Tapp, director of Credit Action. And that is exactly what millions of people did, borrowing way beyond their means to supplement the gap left by stagnating real wages. Reckless consumerism played its part, too, as credit allowed consumers to splash out on expensive holidays, televisions, iPhones and so on because, as Tapp puts it; 'Society screams at us: "This is what you need, this is what you need to be accepted, this is what you need to be valued." And credit, easy credit, allows you to do that.'
As well as being poorly paid, many of the service sector jobs have a markedly lower status than the manufacturing jobs they replaced. Miners and factory workers had a real pride in the work they were doing. Miners were supplying the country's energy needs; factory workers had the satisfaction of investing skill and energy into making things that people needed. The jobs were well regarded in the local community. Of course, there are many conscientious supermarket and call centre workers who put real effort into their jobs and into providing good customer service. But there is no doubt that there is not the same pride and prestige attached to their jobs.
'Despite the problems of manufacturing industry in the 1970s the workers were very well skilled,' says political historian Ross McKibbin. 'They were very well paid. They were nearly all unionized. And they had very high levels of pride in work. And I think that has declined. In what one might call the industrial working class, the pride in work is less than itused to be, and the effort to have pride in work has declined:
Little wonder that, in one survey, four out of ten middle-income workers felt that their occupation had a lower status than their father's, compared to only 29 per cent who felt that it had a higher status. Those who are now classified by statisticians as 'lower middle class' -like clerical and admin workers and supervisors, for example--are now mostly lower down the income scale than they would have been as members of the skilled working class a generation earlier.
That said, the low status accorded to many non-industrial jobs can be grossly unfair. Part of the problem is that we have developed a distaste for socially useful but poorly paid jobs. This is a spin-off from the new religion of meritocracy, where one's rank in the social hierarchy is supposedly determined on merit. The problem lies in how to define 'merit'. The New Economics Foundation (NEF) think-tank published a report in 2009 comparing the social value of different occupations. Hospital cleaners are generally on the minimum wage. However, NEF calculated that-taking into account the fact they maintain standards of hygiene and contribute to wider health outcomes--they generated over £10 in social value for every £1 they were paid.
Waste recycling workers are another example. They fulfil all sorts of functions, like preventing waste and promoting recycling, as well as re-using goods and keeping down carbon emissions. The NEF model estimated that, for every £1 spent on their wages, another £12 was generated. But when the think-tank applied the same model to City bankers--taking into account the damaging effects of the City'S financial activities--they estimated that for every £1 they were paid, £7 of social value was destroyed. For advertising executives it was even more: £11 destroyed for every £1 popped into their bank account." In modem Britain, you may end up having a low-paid, low-status job even though the contribution you are making to society is enormous.
This decline in occupational status is just one way the death of manu- facturing has undermined the quality of workers' lives and their sense of worth. Another is that the new service sector jobs simply do not foster the same sense of community as industry once did. 'This kind of strong, community-based working-class culture has certainly been
reduced very markedly,' says sociologist John Goldthorpe, something he has noticed from visiting the former pit village where he grew up. 'There used to be the occupational culture of mining, too. Everybody knew about mining. There was talk about mining in the pubs and clubs, there was this kind of shared occupational culture as well as the commu- nity.' The service sector has simply not replicated the sense of belonging and community that manufacturing could foster.
'Society has become increasingly atomized,' is former Labour Cabinet minister Clare Short's verdict. 'In the street I grew played together, they went in and out of the adults' up in, all the kids houses, everyone knew roughly who each other were, what they did, and helped each other ... There were always people in the houses because not so many women worked. It was culturally completely different. And there's been a lot of loss, in my view, in the changes. They're not all for the better, and the sense of community and belonging is massively reduced.'
The balance between work and life has also suffered. Four in ten of us put in hours on a Saturday, for example, more than in any other EU country. Another bleary-eyed I3 per cent work night shifts, again higher than most European countries. As well as working irregular hours, we spend more time holed up in our workplaces than elsewherein Europe. The downward trend in working hours skidded to a halt in the 1980s--and has gone the other way. By 2007, full-time workers were putting in an average of 41.4 hours every week, up from 40.7 hours a year earlier. In the EU, only Romanian and Bulgarian workers put in longer hours.