The minimum wage was supposed to be a living wage. According to the former chair of the Low Pay Commission, George Bain, it would encourage feelings of belonging not to the margins, but to the mainstream of society . Introduced in 1998, the minimum wage fulfilled a commitment from as far back as 1991 when Tony Blair, then Labour s employment spokesman, spoke of the Conservative government s peculiarly disgusting approach to the low paid, which left them to fend for themselves.
Yet the Labour government s response to the recent strikes by local government workers has been to balk at the prospect of a summer of discontent and to deride what it sees as the growing militancy of the trade unions. These disputes, now resolved, have set a minimum level of £5 an hour for the lowest paid local authority workers from next April. But, even with the rise, does this really constitute a living wage?
At the Progress Public Service Matters conference in July, the TGWU s National Organiser, Jack Dromey, said the perception amongst his members was that government prefers to rely on the private sector to deliver its public service objectives. He questioned whether it was any wonder that workers on extremely low wages, particularly in high-cost areas such as London and the south-east, felt aggrieved enough to go on strike. Although, at the same seminar, the Chancellor s chief adviser, Ed Balls, stressed that the government simply wished to use whichever sector would deliver the best results, be it public or private, evidence suggests that this message is not getting through. A recent Guardian/ICM poll demonstrated that 59 percent of voters, including 61 percent of Labour supporters, believed the local authority strikes were justified.
People who work backbreaking hours deserve to take home a pay packet that reflects their effort having to claim top-up benefits which they may not even know they are eligible for is almost an admission that what they re doing isn t enough for the mainstream.
In her recent book, Below the Breadline, investigative journalist Fran Abrams set out to discover whether the minimum wage really has ended the scandal of poverty pay as Margaret Beckett, then trade and industry secretary, claimed in 1997. Taking jobs as a cleaner at the Savoy, a factory worker in Yorkshire and a care assistant in Scotland, Abrams demonstrates the reality of life on £4.10 an hour. In fact, it was often less, as the cost of training days , uniforms and bank administrative charges were deducted from her wages by employers who also lost overtime hours along the way. And this was the best-case scenario. Juggling family life, illness and holidays didn t enter into Abrams remit, yet she was still unable to break even.
The principle of the national minimum wage must be to establish a threshold of decency, a line our society should not cross because it values its workforce, their abilities and lives enough to pay them what they need to live on. Yes, we have redistributive benefits, such as the Working Families Tax Credit, but these should be stop-gap measures, not a permanent subsidy to counter unfair wages.
The government is rightly proud of fulfilling its commitment to a just principle but it is now time to consider the practicalities. The Tories would not abolish the minimum wage, but they d happily bow to business demands to keep it as low as political expediency allowed. Therefore, the principle of a fair wage has to be established, under a Labour administration, which incorporates an assessment of the cost of living.
Local authority workers are the very people delivering this government s priorities in the frontline they are the visible arm of the state. The government should be setting the standard for all employers, public and private, and paying a wage which recognises how integral local authority workers are to its agenda. The strikes cannot simply be dismissed as an increase in trade union militancy and a resurgence of the hard left. Rather, they are about working people taking the lead on an issue at the very heart of the Labour movement.