A minimum wage which condemns people to poverty is an insult to the millions of people who often do the hardest forms of work. Yet this pittance of just £6.31 an hour – or less for those under 21 – is increasingly seen as some kind of Holy Grail by politicians from all three main parties.
Both Iain Duncan Smith and Liam Byrne talk of gaining a minimum wage job as if this will transform the lives of those in poverty, showering riches, opportunity and joy upon them as they become decent, moral, hard-working wage slaves. In reality most minimum wage work is temporary, has little or no prospects and is supplemented by and often punctuated by benefit payments.
But worse than this, whilst people are marginally better off on minimum wage than on out of work benefits – despite government lies to the contrary – it still isn’t enough to meet the most basic costs of living. In Leeds, the bottom end rent for a private sector three bedroom flat is around £150 a week. A full time job on minimum wage pays just a few pounds over £200 a week. Whilst a family would still receive Housing Benefits and Tax Credits, even this barely provides an income that will provide for food, bills and other essentials after housing costs.
The so called Living Wage, currently being trumpeted by Ed Miliband, is barely any better. In London a full time job (37 hrs per week) on the Living Wage would leave a take home pay of just under £270 a week. A recently announced affordable housing project, based in Stratford and claiming to be for the low paid, is set to charge £323 a week for just a two bedroom flat. The ‘Living Wage’ isn’t even enough to pay an ‘Affordable Rent’. And try telling a bank manager you want a mortgage when you are paid just over £8 an hour.
The minimum wage sets a government approved standard of poverty that grasping employers are only too happy to endorse. As rises in the minimum wage have failed to keep up with inflation, this has meant the lowest paid steadily receiving less and less. Last year George Osborne froze the minimum wage for young people at a disgraceful £4.98 an hour. There have been calls within the Tory Party to cut the minimum wage even further or to exclude certain groups such as disabled people or the young.
Neither government or bosses should set wages, workers should. It is no accident that during the 60s and even 70s, when Trade Unions were at their most militant, working class wages were at an all time high. Lying Tory revisionists would claim the 70s were a desperate time and these unions had to be reigned in and in many cases smashed. The truth is for most workers they’d never had it so good.
In the absence of a strong trade union movement the minimum wage is now the only protection against both gross exploitation and in work poverty – and it fails at both. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight tooth and nail to keep it. In the context of ever increasing benefit conditionality, to lose the minimum wage would be a disaster as claimants could be compelled to take any job, no matter how low the pay. With trade unionism almost dead in most low paid sectors, whatever scant compromises have been won need to be maintained as the benefits system disintegrates.
But if we are forced to fight to keep it then we should do so with no illusions. A government set minimum wage, which has never risen above poverty pay, is a failure of the left, not a success story.
Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid
The Void
