Thankfully, we can continue to sleep easy; as we turn over in our beds and snuggle down, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that these are isolated acts performed by shady foreign types on their own people. We can demonise these communities to our heart's content and abdicate any responsibility for their care. And even better, we can bolster our self-image as fine upstanding British citizens who are above this sort of thing.
And yet, and yet...
While we have been so blissfully asleep, a whole UK slave society has sprung up in our midst and we haven't even noticed (too easily distracted into demonising Johnny Foreigner). Not only that, we seem to think that this slave society is a good thing. Thousands of people are being forced to work for nothing and kept in check by threats to remove the meagre survival rations they have been given by their gangmasters. And their government-sponsored gangmasters have been incredibly successful at placing their labour not with seedy back street sweatshops or isolated farms, but with leading high street stores and supermarkets.
The current economic crisis is now clearly so bad that our own government has seen fit to replace the capitalist mode of production (free exchange between capital and labour) with the so-called oriental mode of production (based on slave labour and despotic power). The goverment's work programme (let's call this criminal enterprise by its real name) is a tacit admission that the free market capitalism so beloved by the Tories has failed. The government is now actively interfering in the labour market by supplying willing takers with free labour. It has taken away the one remaining vestige of dignity left to thousands of people on the edge: their right to sell their labour (the only thing they have left to sell) for a fair price. These people are not even commodities any more, they are simply slaves, kept alive on implausibly low benefits to keep them just above starvation levels so they can continue to do the one and only thing they are good for: to work and work and work until they drop, to be replaced by the next wave of unwilling un-volunteers from the reserve army of labour (aka the unemployed).
And the great selling point of this post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic economic wonderland is this: their numbers just keep on rising! Just as the Thatcher governments of the eighties were determined to root out trade unionism by eradicating the hubs of trade union activity (mining and the manufacturing industry), this current blue tory/yellow tory government is determined to decimate the last remaining bastion of trade union activity in this country: the public sector. Trade unionists and their fellow workers who have fought for centuries to improve the working rights and conditions of every man, woman and child in this country are to be laid low by taking away their most basic working right: the righ to work for a fair wage.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel: our government has been rumbled. What started as a small but very effective campaigning effort quickly led to a groundswell of opinion against what was happening. As usual, nothing was likely to threaten the different workfare programmes whilst its critics were attacking it from a political standpoint. But only when the slave-owners themselves (Tesco, Sainsbury's et al) finally woke up to the threat this controversy could pose to their brands and reputations, fearing a consumer backlash, things started to unravel quickly. You know that the game is up when the Employment Minister, Chris Grayling, starts to bleat on about the Socialist Workers Party having hacked his email acount, rather than argue on the issues.
But beware: workfare is not dead. I suspect it is merely going through a rebranding exercise (to detoxify its current image) and sooner or later it will be relaunched as a softer, more fragrant version. We must remain vigilant and make sure we don't have the (softer, sweeter) wool pulled over our eyes again.
To finish for today (I will come back to this again), I would like to quote the following three paragraphs by Deborah Orr in the Guardian 25 February 2012, which encapsulate a lot of the thinking I have tried to put into this post:
"For the [political] right,(...) hapless, inefficient intervention by the state [in labour markets] is anathema. When the private sector is left to make its own arrangements, neo-liberals never tire of pointing out, it functions bettter, to the advantage of all. The left? Well, the left is always keen to cheerlead for state intervention, no matter how perverse the outcome might be.
"The fact that the opposite is happening during the rowdy debate over 'workfare' is testament to just how dysfunctional the whole issue has become. In the case of the work programme, it is the right, counter-intuitively, which is lining up to argue in favour of state involvement in the employment market. The left is rather less enthusiastic, to say the least. Suddenly, the Conservative party is not remotely interested in letting the market decide. In fact, it is clutching its pearls at the shocking suggestion that market decisions mean anything at all.
"The market decided long, long ago, for example, that work as a shop assistant is not deserving of a very high salary. A low salary tends to indicate low-status work (unfortunately). The Conservative party appears to believe that even a modest wage is more than an honest day's toil in the aisles of a supermarket is necessarily worth. People, the coalition appears to think, ought to be very happy to do this work at no cost to the organisation making a profit from the labour, in the hope that at some point in the future the experience gained from this work placement can be parlayed into a job."
So much for the dignity of labour.
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