The Poverty of Benefits

The Poverty of Benefits
Posted on January 10, 2013 by imarxman

Following their return to parliament after Christmas, Westminster politicians, and the media, have been greatly exercised over the issue of benefits. Specifically, the capping of a plethora of payments at 1%, effectively cutting them when inflation is taken into account.

The argument from the coalition government is that people in work have had to bear wage freezes or below inflation increases at best, so those out of work should not be rewarded for their indolence by receiving generous benefit increases. Pathetically, this has been reduced to strivers versus skivers or some such nonsense.

The Labour opposition responded by pointing out that many working families are dependent on benefit payments such as tax credits. Also, childcare costs are so high that many who can only find work paid at or around minimum wage level would payout more to have their children looked after than they’d receive by working.

What neither side in this facile argument points up, nor does the media, is the basic problem is a combination of widespread poorly paid work which means workers becoming as dependent on benefit payments as their unemployed compatriots.

Capitalism through is agency, the government (and opposition), are attempting to divide the working class against itself, shirkers against workers. At the same time it has to subsidise employers by making up the poverty wages they are increasingly paying.

This is by no means unprecedented. Indeed, it is a feature that has existed since the early days of modern capitalism. In 1795, at The Pelican Inn in the village of Speenhamland, Berkshire, a group of local magistrates met to discuss the problem of rising poverty amongst agricultural workers.

They implemented a sliding scale of wage supplements based on the size of family and the price of bread. An unintended consequence of this was that employers payed even lower wages, knowing they’d be topped-up to subsistence levels by the parish.

The same employers, however, complained about the increasing burden of the poor rate they were having to pay to the parish, especially, so it was claimed, as this pauperisation of workers was morally degenerating, encouraging them to indolence knowing their wage levels would be maintained.

The Poor Law Commissioners’ Report for 1834 described the Speenhamland System as a, “universal system of pauperisation”. Thomas Malthus criticised the system for encouraging large families, the more children the greater the payment.

General vilification of the poor seems to have been orchestrated to allow for the passage of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act abolishing “outdoor relief” in favour of workhouses.

In other words, the poor were not to be rewarded for their idleness, but must seek relief for their distress by effectively imprisoning themselves in the “new Bastilles” as the workhouses became known.

While no politician at the moment is proposing to open modern day workhouses, the principle remains the same. Wages are suppressed and then subsidised or absent altogether due to unemployment requiring benefits.

The whole system is undoubtedly hugely expensive and does lead to a culture of dependency rather than opposition. And this is the point: the arguments between the various capitalist factions in parliament over respective benefit levels disguises what really needs to be done.

Trade unions, the organised working class, should not get drawn into this facile debate by supporting one parliamentary faction, the Labour Party, against the others. It needs to be developing and leading the fight for wages levels that render tax credits and other methods of subsidising wages unnecessary.

The working class has to develop strategies for ensuring the wealth they create is used to rebuild British industry and infrastructure reducing unemployment to a minimum of those who cannot work.

A poor rate is a poor rate even dressed up as tax credits, and it is no credit to the working class if it continues to tolerate its own pauperisation. Nor must the class accept being divided into apparently opposing camps. All are workers who are only shirkers of responsibility if they passively acquiesce in the face of attacks upon them in the name of austerity. http://imarxman.wordpress.com/