Boris Johnson will be judged, like other political leaders, on his handling of the current pandemic. Perhaps not immediately, while people are struggling to cope with a wholly alien life-style, but certainly when the pandemic is beaten and we have to count up the cost. There must be no going back.
On the face of it, it looked like a positive move for the government to guaranteed four fifths of the wages of workers temporarily laid off during the crisis. Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced that the government would cover the cost of 80 per cent of the wages of workers, up to a maximum of £2,500 a month, for an initial three months. This is by no means, as the TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady, unfortunately suggested, an example of “real leadership”. Sunak is only responding – and very late in the day – after howls of outrage as the government appeared to be doing nothing for workers and everything for business.
Glaring deficiencies in government ‘support’
In any case, there are glaring deficiencies in Sunak’s so-called ‘support’ for working people. Those who have been asked to apply for Universal Credit will face a nightmare of bureaucracy to get anything. Unemployed and low-paid workers who rely on benefits already know how bad the UC system is. It is one thing – in words – to say that UC is available from the first day, but another altogether to see it done.
Jeremy Corbyn has justifiably complained on Twitter today that “People are waiting for hours on the #UniversalCredit helpline or placed up to 78,000th in an online queue.” This is completely intolerable. Corbyn also points out that “Cuts of nearly 50,000 staff from the DWP since 2010 have created a failing system even before this crisis.”
Even if UC payments eventually get through, the government’s offer to make UC for the self-employed equivalent to Statutory Sick Pay – £94.25 a week – is wholly inadequate. It is equivalent to a miserable £18.85 a day, barely above what would be considered a living wage for an hour’s work. The TUC is right to call on the government to “fix the sick pay system”. The TUC has demanded that it be raised to a level equivalent to a 35 hour-week at the real living wage, in other words, at least £300 a week.
Civil servant jobs axed over the years
Unfortunately, the same kind of swingeing cuts that affected the DWP have also affected HMRC in the last ten years and this department is going to have to implement the 80% wage guarantee for workers laid off. It would be a monstrous scandal if staff-shortages and inefficiencies at HMRC delayed payments. Sunak has already said that the first payments from this scheme will be made “within weeks” and many not until the end of April. That is not good enough, but it unfortunately reflects the staffing difficulties in HMRC.
The biggest gap in the Tories ‘support’ for workers is its failure to support the self-employed. This is a category of work that spans a huge range of industries and services and it includes five million workers. Many of the current self-employed are fake self-employed, in jobs that in the past would have been pay-roll jobs, with taxes paid through PAYE and statutory rights for sick-pay, holiday pay and other things.
In the past ten or fifteen years many unscrupulous and greedy bosses have forced those who would have been regular employees into being ‘self-employed’ as a means of cutting back on their own obligations to pay tax, like employer’s National Insurance and to pay holiday and sick pay. It is for this reason that nowadays a worker starting on a building site, would be asked, before anything else, to ‘set up a company’ so he can be self-employed.
Most precarious jobs
Many of these workers are in the gig economy, working for the likes of Deliveroo and Uber. They are in the most precarious of jobs, often with zero-hours contracts and zero job protection. In a situation where there is a health emergency, they are the most financially vulnerable group of workers. There have been scenes this week of crowded underground trains in London. But it is no good for the Prime Minister to call for workers not to use public transport, while at the same time he is offering nothing to millions of self-employed, including gig workers and building workers, many of whom have to work to live and have to travel on public transport to get to work.
The relief from debt payments, taxes and council rates offered to businesses will be more or less instantaneous. But the system of support on offer for working people is a dog’s dinner. It is a mess created by a government intent on protecting business first and everyone else last.
Workers are rallying around and making huge sacrifices during this emergency, and often at great personal risk. It is notable who the ‘key workers’ – those without whom society cannot function – have been deemed to be, because they include many of the poorest-paid workers. That will need to change.
An immediate 10% pay rise for all NHS staff!
We have to salute all those workers who are standing by the public and staying at their posts for long hours. That goes especially for the workers in the NHS, for too long they have been under-valued, under-paid, understaffed and over-worked. If the grasping management of a big company like Tesco can reward their workers with a pay rise of 10 per cent – albeit conditionally, and “temporarily” – then we should demand the same for all workers in the NHS. A 10 per cent pay rise now is nothing compared to the huge sums being paid to fight the pandemic and it would be the simplest and the easiest message of support to send to NHS staff. Like the hand-outs to business, it could be done at a stroke.
It might be the case that the Labour and trade union leaders are making bold statements and are not being given air time on the TV and in the press. But there is, nevertheless, at the very least an appearance that the leadership of the labour movement are too quite and too undemanding of this millionaire’s government. Let us repeat, we are not “all in this together”. Different class interests have not disappeared as a result of the pandemic. It is the responsibility of the leadership of our movement to shout from the rooftops for the interests of workers, whatever the expense.
Vindication of socialist policies
The crisis is becoming a vindication of what socialists have always argued – that the best means of delivering the everyday needs of the majority of the population – in terms of services, education, transport, housing and health – is by planning. But it is not possible to plan what isn’t controlled and it is not possible to control what isn’t owned. The so-called ‘free-market’ has been utterly discredited by the coronavirus pandemic. It has failed to protect workers’ living standards, failed to produce essential medical equipment, failed to provide hospitals with resources and staff, and it will always fail.
There will be furious discussion and arguments when the pandemic is over. As it was in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the discussion was no longer about how to manage the war, but how to manage the peace. There will have to be a reckoning. The greedy airline bosses, building company bosses and others have been exposed as unfit to manage any industries, let alone key parts of the economy.
Only guarantee for the long-term
It is time to go back to the socialist traditions of the Labour Party and to fight for the nationalisation and democratic planning of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy – something like the top FTSE100 companies that dominate British society. That will be the only guarantee in the long-run that we can protect the livelihoods and futures of the overwhelming majority of the population.
*Guarantee incomes for self-employed people, extending protection applied to employees to the five million self-employed
*Fully paid parental leave for those who need to take time off work to care for children not attending school
*Raise Statutory Sick Pay to at least £300 a week and extend this to Universal Credit levels.
*An immediate 10 per cent increase in pay for all NHS staff
*For socialist policies: the nationalisation, with workers’ control and management, of the top 100 firms that dominate the British economy.
March 25, 2020
