Reblogged from Michael Meacher MP:
HMRC, those sleuths ruthlessly tracking down tax avoiders, seem to turn the
same blind eye to employers paying their workers below the national minimum
wage. Some 300,000 workers have been found paid less than £6.31 an hour, yet
only 2 firms have been prosecuted! This is despite the fact that over 10,750
companies have been investigated by HMRC on suspicion that they were breaking
the law on low pay and that nearly £16m was collected in arrears payments and
fines were imposed of more than £2m. Yet only 0.02% of these forms were taken
to court. Probably about the same proportion as the number of tax avoiders who
end up in court. Moreover, despite ministers regularly claiming that they were
now naming and shaming firms that refused to pay their workers even as little as
£235 a week, just one firm has been thus named and shamed.
Contrast that with the government’s treatment of the jobless, who are now
paid job-seeker’s allowance of just £71.70 a week (even thought they contributed
insurance contributions all their working lives to earn it), almost the lowest
unemployment benefit anywhere in the EU, but immediately forfeited even for the
most trivial misdemeanour in trying to get another job. They are deprived of
the scarcely even subsistence level benefit they’ve earned for 4 weeks and if a similar
trivial failing occurs for a second time, they lose all benefit for 3 months, so
they have no option but to beg in the streets, scrounge on family or friends, or
steal. It’s not as though jobs are there for the taking anyway, though the
person responsible for that – one George Osborne – isn’t even charged and gets
off free on £3,000 a week.
So under this government employers breaking the law face a 1 in 5,000 chance
of being prosecuted, whereas a jobless person who is 5 minutes late for a job
interview, or is in hospital and cannot attend for interview (and gave prior
notice that this was the case), or who never received the letter telling him/her
about the appointment because he/she had mover address (and again clearly told
the DWP office this), is punished with the most draconian penalty – deprived of
the means of independent survival. And whereas the employer has the right to
be heard in court, the jobless person gets summary punishment with no right of
appeal at all.
It’s not as though the government is unaware of the employers under-paying
their workers. HMRC hands out almost 70 notices of under-payment every month,
yet almost none are prosecuted. And it’s not as though these employers have
just made a minor slip in their operations: it’s known that these employers who
cheat their workers of even their minimal rights tend also to be those who break
the law on trading standards or breach environmental regulations. Ed Miliband
has called for increasing the fine on these employers 10-fold, and Cameron
lamely and inadequately tried to counter this by putting up the fine just
4-fold. Far better, give the job of tracking down defaulting employers to
local Councils and give them a sizeable cut in the fine for all those they
prosecute and convict.
