Official figures show that average earnings increased by 0.3% in the past year, the lowest for five years.
Low-wage work is the first step to a "poverty pay trap", a leading union has warned, after new research showed how many people were being "priced out" of the economy.
A survey of more than 2,000 workers earning £6.50 an hour or less showed that a third cannot afford to shop where they work, and half did not know how much they would be paid from week to week. A fifth of young minimum wage workers said they had been forced to turn to food banks in the past year.
"Five million UK workers earn less than a living wage, consigned to an insecure income and increasingly shut out of the economy. Many of these workers are employed in the shops and services that populate our high streets, yet they cannot afford to shop where they work. The crying shame is that low wage work in this country is no longer the first rung on the employment ladder but actually the first step into a poverty pay trap. People with the skills for better-paid work are not escaping into it because there are no decent jobs around. Big business in Britain should hang its head in shame. Our major retailers, restaurant chains and hotels could well afford to raise wages, and with it the living standards of the communities they depend on for their profits.” Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner said
Low-wage work is the first step to a "poverty pay trap", a leading union has warned, after new research showed how many people were being "priced out" of the economy.
A survey of more than 2,000 workers earning £6.50 an hour or less showed that a third cannot afford to shop where they work, and half did not know how much they would be paid from week to week. A fifth of young minimum wage workers said they had been forced to turn to food banks in the past year.
"Five million UK workers earn less than a living wage, consigned to an insecure income and increasingly shut out of the economy. Many of these workers are employed in the shops and services that populate our high streets, yet they cannot afford to shop where they work. The crying shame is that low wage work in this country is no longer the first rung on the employment ladder but actually the first step into a poverty pay trap. People with the skills for better-paid work are not escaping into it because there are no decent jobs around. Big business in Britain should hang its head in shame. Our major retailers, restaurant chains and hotels could well afford to raise wages, and with it the living standards of the communities they depend on for their profits.” Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner said
Who creates the wealth? Just ask yourself this question: if the workers as a class stayed home for the month of August, how much wealth would be produced in the month of August?
ReplyDeleteWho ends up with most of this wealth? The top 10% own more than 80% of the wealth the other 90% produce. Why? Because the wage system is based on workers trading the wealth they produce during their time at labour for the price of their skills on the labour market.
Solution to most of the problems of the world is to abolish the wage system and set up a system based on the labour time one puts into creating the wealth. That would take the establishment of common ownership of the collective product of labour i.e. 100% of the wealth ending up with 100% of the producers.
You expressed it well but why do you think we require would labour time vouchers (if that is what you mean). Our canon is "from each according to ability" , not according to work. We are aware that there are many schemes that incorporate labour time calculation in their allocation of needs, even Marx suggested a form as a *temporary* measure, but with the development of the productive forces capable of creating abundance, this form of rationing is no longer necessary. One additional reason often offered is the psychological one...that people are still imbued with capitalist values of greed and hoarding. This we would suggest is not a problem that can be resolved by maintaining discrimination in distribution of the world's wealth.
ReplyDeleteAs Kropotkin says in Wages System, " we will set to work; the work of demolishing the last vestiges of middle-class rule, with its account-book morality, its philosophy of debit and credit, its institutions of mine and thine."
Hi Alan, just seen this. I not sure about a thread in the Parties Forums?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2698361/The-richest-man-world-says-working-THREE-days-week.html