Pope Leo’s language is vivid. Something must be done to alleviate ‘the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class … working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. ‘
Not even Socialist Worker would permit itself such language though there is a further irony that Cameron reveals his attack on working people on the day he hosts a visit by the future leader of the nation where capitalism is now at its most rapacious – China.
120 years ago a Pope saw things differently as he argued that ‘The members of the working classes are citizens by nature and by the same right as the rich; they are real parts, living the life which makes up, through the family, the body of the commonwealth… It would be irrational to neglect one portion of the citizens and favour another, and therefore the public administration must duly and solicitously provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes.’
The Pope’s encyclical was also a thrust against communism or the rising socialist view that that state ownership was the answer to poverty. But at a time when in most European countries, employers saw themselves as upholding Catholic order, the Vatican’s denunciation of employer bullying of workers and the church’s emphasis on ‘that law of justice will be violated which ordains that each man shall have his due’, came as shock.
Now the ConDem government are proposing to take Britain back to a pre-1891 world. British workers are now largely deunionised save in the public sector or small corporatist sectors like BA. Unions are partly to blame with all the major ones fighting each other to recruit and represent the public sector rather than undertake the arduous task of organising the private sector workforce. The new Wikicapitalism of low-pay, long-hours work often undertaken by foreign workers sucked in to do jobs that indigenous workers won’t do is very difficult to organise.
Most employee contracts allow a trial period or stipulate some reasons that permit dismissal. One high street store, for example, fires any worker who makes three mistakes in till entries. Industrial tribunals have no power to reinstate workers and both they and unions accept that a firm cannot keep on employing people if the orders and income are not there.
But to deny workers the right to any representation is to shift power massively and crudely in favour of employers who can now hire and fire at will in the first 12 months of employment – the most difficult for any employees as they make decisions on the basis that their income and job will continue. It opens the way to the bullying employer who wants to victimise someone he doesn’t like and denies justice to a woman who seeks to defend herself against sexual harassment from her boss or colleagues at work.
In other countries there are systems of works councils or, as in France, Tribunaux des Prudhommes (literally Wise Men Tribunals) which adjudicate in workplace grievances and are composed of elected union and employer representatives.
None of these systems is perfect and none solves every workplace dispute. But at least workers have some modicum of rights which Cameron and Clegg now want to remove from their fellow citizens.
Pope Leo also told the political elites of 1891 that ‘Among the many and grave duties of rulers who would do their best for the people, the first and chief is to act with strict justice – with that justice which is called distributive – toward each and every class alike.’
When the current Pope came to Westminster Hall, political leaders queued to be photographed with the pontiff. Perhaps he should be asked back to give Cameron and Clegg a lecture on the Catholic church’s social teaching. Not even Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit sought to remove the core citizens’ right of having an airing of a workplace problem. Cameron is no son of Thatcher. He is of his class with its ‘master and servant’ mentality and its centuries-long hate of workers who dare to answer back.