wages – Barnsley Community Support Centre

Tag: wages

24
Oct
2014

”People’s protest” gives 91-year-old veteran hope we can fight for fairer wages for all

This article by Harry Leslie Smith originally appeared in the Mirror.

More than 90,000 people marched this weekend to tell the Government: “Britain needs a pay rise”.

Everyone from young children to pensioners, public sector workers to celebrities took to the streets of London to protest at the TUC-organised demonstration.

Among the inspiring speakers was war veteran Harry Leslie Smith who spoke up movingly for the NHS at the Labour Party Conference.

Here the 91-year-old explains why the fight for a pay rise is one the country can’t afford to lose…

I am writing this as I prepare to leave the capital to return to the north. Outside of my hotel window I see London, like the rest of our country, can’t even rest on the 7th day.

Not one corner of our island is quiet because, after four long years of Cameron’s coalition government, we must work every waking hour to stretch pennies into pounds to meet the rising cost of living.

Austerity has ground the British economy into one that profits the elite at the expense of everyone else who toils on zero-hour contracts or tries to live off of stagnant wages.

For many, these are grim and pessimistic days that are made more dismal by the exorbitant cost of higher education, housing, fuel and food.

Life hasn’t been this difficult since the days of my youth in the 1930s and so, despite the fact that I am in my golden years, I can feel empathy and much concern for the future of today’s young.

But I am not too discouraged by the horrendous cost austerity has exacted on Britain.

I find that there is much reason to hope that soon our country will return to its standard of fair play for all.

I take heart in demonstrations like the TUC’s “Britain needs a pay rise” that was held in Hyde Park on Saturday.

Despite the fact that I am in my 90s and have been retired from the working world for close to 30 years I walked with thousands of others because I know what it is like to be paid an unfair wage.

But I was encouraged by what I heard and saw throughout the day.

People who turned up weren’t radicals, agitators or malcontents but ordinary folk from all walks of life and professions who wanted to raise their collective voice to fight the injustice.

The young, middle aged and soon-to-be retired were all equally represented and they all believed they were not only marching for themselves but for every worker who is struggling to live from pay cheque to pay cheque.

As I broke bread with these strangers – who all shared one noble ambition to receive just compensation for their labours – I was struck by their optimism and resilience.

All knew this battle for fair wages begins and ends with the workers who must mobilise either through their unions or through collective action.

It must be done as one young man said to me, like the great civil rights movements of days gone by, through peaceful protests against corporations who dole out profits to their shareholders but refuse to invest their wealth back into Britain by paying proper taxes and wages.

Protesters are rightfully confident their actions on Saturday and in the ensuing months will bring change for the better to British workers’ wages.

For me I don’t doubt their perseverance and optimism will prevail and soon we will see changes for the better to the lives of British workers.

22
Aug
2014

Food spending falls for first time as stores compete and real wages drop

categories: Britain Needs a Pay Rise, Britiain Needs A Payrise

The article by Angela Monaghan originally appeared in the Guardian.

Britain’s food bill drops for first time as supermarkets wage price wars and consumers fail to feel effects of economic recovery.

Spending in food stores fell for the first time on record in July amid intense competition between Britain’s biggest supermarkets – while consumers have yet to feel the benefit of recovery in their pockets.

Britons spent £11.7bn on food during the month, a 1.3% drop compared with July last year. It was the first annual fall in the value of food sales since the Office for National Statistics started collecting the data in 1989. The volume of food sales was also down last month, by 1.5% on an annualised basis.

The ONS put the fall in the value of food sales down to “prolonged discounting and price wars”. Britain’s leading supermarkets have all slashed prices on basic items to fight off competition from Aldi and Lidl, the German discount food chains that have become increasingly popular among cash-strapped UK shoppers.

At the same time, a prolonged fall in real wages has encouraged consumers to shop around more for bargains, opting for cheaper alternative products such as own-brand labels, and buying fewer premium-brand goods. Consumers are also focusing on wasting less food, buying little but more often.

Neil Saunders, managing director at retail consultancy Conlumino, said the unprecedented fall in July was significant. “It is an indication of the issues occurring in the food and grocery market at the moment. We have too many players chasing not enough sales.

“[The drop] is significant because it underlines the real pressure within that segment of the market, and it underlines an economic shift in the way the industry works. That’s obviously very painful for some of the players in that market.”

Prices in UK food stores were 0.2% higher than a year ago – the lowest food-price growth rate since December 2004. Prices of goods sold across the retail sector were 0.9% lower than a year ago, the strongest rate of deflation since 2009.

Britain’s economic recovery looks increasingly established, with growth outpacing that of its G7 peers and an increase in gross domestic product of 0.8% in the first and second quarters of this year. Nevertheless, household budgets remain under pressure as workers’ real pay has fallen for the majority of the past six years.

Consumers are also braced for higher borrowing costs, as the Bank of England moves closer to increasing interest rates for the first time since March 2009.

Saunders said prospects for Britain’s retail sector overall remained mixed. “It is a very competitive sector at the moment and, although there is a genuine economic recovery, it is not filtering through to consumers as much as retailers would like. People are still very cautious about spending. It is not a bad picture for retail, but it is mixed.”

He said that a strong housing market was boosting some areas of the sector, including homeware and DIY goods.

The ONS data showed the volume of retail sales rose by 0.1% over the month in July, disappointing City expectations of a stronger rise of 0.4%. Growth was held back by sales of fuel and household goods, which both fell in July.

It slowed the annual rate of growth to an eight-month low of 2.6%, and could be a sign that economic growth is moderating, according to John Hawksworth, chief economist at accountancy firm PwC. However, he said it was too soon to be clear whether it was a sign of things to come. “Retail sales data can be erratic, so we should wait for more evidence before concluding that the recovery is running out of steam.”

Once fuel sales were stripped out, the volume of retail sales grew by 0.5% on a monthly basis in July. Samuel Tombs, senior UK economist at Capital Economics, said it was an encouraging sign of resilience among consumers.

“July’s retail sales figures provided reassurance that consumers are still willing to spend more even though an interest-rate hike is looming.” Tombs said a 3.3% fall in fuel sales in July was probably down to a rise in prices during the month and should prove to be temporary.

“Oil prices have fallen sharply in recent weeks, suggesting that pump prices will fall back soon,” he said.

16
Aug
2014

The unemployment figures expose the philosophy behind our economic recovery

categories: Britain Needs a Pay Rise, Britiain Needs A Payrise

This article by Alex Andreou originally appeared in the Guardian here.

Many people are enjoying neither good wages nor job security – the outcome of the UK government’s neoliberal philosophy.

The labour market figures released today show unemployment continuing to fall and the employment rate rising. This is good news, of course. The most striking data, however, has been on wage growth. For the first time since 2009, wages actually fell by 0.2% in the three months to June. Combined with a rising consumer price inflation index of 1.9% over the same period, it confirms a catastrophic pincer squeeze on living standards.

The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, insisted all is not as bad as it seems. “You have to be in work in order to even have a chance of your wages rising,” he said. But that is to focus on the thousands of people entering the job market as somehow offsetting the problem of the many millions who were already working and have seen their wages squeezed for years now, while the cost of basic living continues to rise. It is comparing oranges with apples.

Duncan Smith explained that year-on-year comparisons were skewed because they include many City employees who chose to defer their bonuses in the last financial year to the start of this financial year. He did not explain that the reason so many bonuses were deferred was in anticipation of the reduction of the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p – a particularly shameful episode in this government’s economic policy. This tax change was sold to the public as having a minimal impact because the 50p rate was highly inefficient, but it seems to be having a significant effect on overall figures. Even stripping away bonuses, wage growth was an anaemic 0.6% – still well below inflation and the slowest pace since 2001.

The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) released a report on Monday dubbing the UK “the self-employment capital of western Europe”. This may well be an important piece of the puzzle of strikingly good employment figures accompanied by flat productivity and falling real-terms wages. Two-fifths of all new jobs since 2010 have been self-employment. And self-employed incomes, according to figures from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, have fallen by 14%, compared with a 9% fall for those in regular employment.

Recently, my friend J related to me her tale of self-employment over a drink. Having been made redundant from her job in a media company, she went into her local job centre to sign on. “Do you have any hobbies that involve making something?” she was asked by her adviser. “Well, I quite like to knit,” she responded. That was it. She was going to sell knitwear on eBay for a living. Despite her protestations, she was enrolled on a one-week start-up training course (this meant that she was paid the equivalent of jobseeker’s allowance but from a different fund and never showed up in unemployment statistics). On the first day of the course, she was put in a room with other “entrepreneurs” and shown episodes of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den. She was encouraged to use her savings to buy supplies for her “business”. She became anxious and unhappy. Thankfully, J found a regular job soon after and is now trying to sell the knitting supplies on eBay to recover some of her outlay costs.

This is, of course, only an anecdote – by no means an isolated one – but an anecdote that fits interestingly with the IPPR’s senior economic analyst Spencer Thompson’s view that “some [self-employed] are entrepreneurs, driven by high-growth ambitions, innovation and disruptive business models, but many are sole-traders simply looking to get by”. This is why, according to the IPPR, some in the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee see the dramatic rise in self-employment not as the success story it is being presented as, but as indicative of an underlying weakness in the recovery.

The squeeze is no temporary glitch, either. This morning the Bank halved its forecast for wage growth from 2.5% to 1.25% – below expected inflation – so the pincer movement is likely to continue. These figures represent a brittleness in the economic recovery and a significant political risk for the government. The more their vociferous insistence that things are getting better diverges from the reality of people’s lives, the bigger the chance it will be discounted as a fabrication by the electorate. Such ostrich-ism feeds directly into the perception that they are out of touch.

Duncan Smith’s thesis that people are more interested in security than wage increases may be true. But the government is uncomfortably shoehorning more and more of the workforce into self-employment, part-time work and zero-hours contracts. This combines with a sustained erosion of business regulation, employment rights and unionisation to create a toxic environment in which most people are enjoying neither good wages nor job security. It confirms critics’ assessments that the past four years have been not so much crisis-necessitated austerity as a structural change inspired by a neoliberal philosophy.