“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery. Ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.” – Karl Marx (Continued)
The cost of living crisis and growing poverty we are all experiencing here in Britain could have been avoided if UK workers had received the wage increases seen across other developed countries. Rather than being work shy and lazy as many on the right have suggested, and therefore not deserving of wage rises, corporations and business have greedily pocketed the money for their own short term monetary gain rather than investing in the long-term economic future of the country as a whole.
Remember this statement from George Osborne, one of the champions of Austerity measures?
“The shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits.” (Conservative Party Conference 08/10/2012)
This speech set out the moral justification for Austerity and massive benefits cuts. Forget the financial crash of 2008 caused by greedy bankers and financiers, forget about under investment by British business, it was lazy workers/benefits claimants who were responsible for economic stagnation caused by a lack of work ethic. Austerity (massive public sector cuts, including skills training) were needed, so the argument went, to fix this default position of British workers character.
The right-wing press - Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph - backed this line of argument by repeatedly publishing headlines that contrasted “hard-working families” with “scroungers”. Their articles implied widespread fraud of the benefits system and they portrayed welfare as a lifestyle choice, rather than as a necessity. Simultaneously, Tory politicians such as Osborne, Ian Duncan Smith and David Cameron made comments about “entrenched worklessness”, “welfare dependency” and a “culture of entitlement”.
How true were these claims?
By 2012-2014 over 60% of households receiving benefits had at least one person in work. Tax credits and housing benefit overwhelmingly went to low paid workers, not the unemployed. The unemployed made up only 2–3% of welfare spending. The truth was (and still is) LOW WAGES drove people to claim welfare benefits, not laziness. What is more, the amount of welfare fraud was a mere 0.7% of total welfare spending and not the problem it was made out to be.
What about the claim that people “chose benefits over work”? - very unlikely. The UK has one of the lowest unemployment benefit levels in the OECD. Visual Capitalist’s ranking (using OECD data) shows the UK in the lower tier of OECD countries for unemployment support after one year, far below high generosity systems like Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland, etc. (visualcapiltalism: “Where Unemployment Benefits are the Highest, in OECD Countries”: 17/06/24)
What is more, during Austerity, strict conditionality, sanctions, benefit caps, and the five week wait under Universal Credit before were made all reduced effective income security compared with more insurance style systems in continental Europe.
In short, Britain’s persistently and deliberately low system of benefits – roughly half the average OECD replacement rate – was not and is not the reason for poor UK productivity, slow economic growth or unemployment. Jobseekers Allowance was far below any plausible “life-style” choice and studies showed no evidence of a long-term "culture of worklessness”. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation investigated the “three generations who have never worked” myth and found zero evidence it existed.
The reality is that the UK’s capitalist model relies on low wages and low productivity: wages are deliberately suppressed, skills training is minimalised, and long term investment in modern plant and technology is sacrificed in favour of short term profits rather than the long term health of the British economy.
The evidence strongly suggests that welfare payments, rather than being too high, are in fact some of the lowest in the OECD and therefore do not encourage worklessness. On the contrary, it is workers on pitifully low wages that are the majority of welfare claimants because their income is insufficient to keep pace with cost of living increases.
The third argument used by the right to explain away economic stagnation is “sick-note culture”. What they mean by this is that too many people are off sick, with people exaggerating their illnesses, and GP’s handing out sick-notes too easily. This moral explanation for the failure of the economy - and by default the excuse given by employers and government for not paying higher wages – is as false as the claim that benefits are too high, thereby disincentivising the work ethic.
It has to be admitted that UK long-term illness is rising but for structural reasons not cultural ones. First NHS waiting lists have been rising. During Austerity, funding was held below demand, and severe pay restraint led to many NHS staff leaving the sector, creating a workforce crisis. Rising waiting lists mean people are suffering ill health for longer, and are therefore unable to work.
Far from suffering a “sick-note culture”, data shows that UK workers take fewer days off than most European countries. Eurostat and OECD data consistently show UK workers take fewer sick days than workers in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. UK sickness absence is below the EU average, and if anything, the UK has a presenteeism culture - people working while ill. One reason for this is because benefits for the unemployed are so low!
As for the claim that GP’s are issuing sick note like confetti – it simply isn’t true. The UK is almost unique in its use of GP’s as the sole certifiers of almost all work absences. In Europe, they have planned back to work schemes for employees returning to work after an illness. No such flexibility exists in the UK. The UK has weak occupational health schemes compare to other countries in Europe, while Britain has much higher numbers of genuine sickness.
Across almost every major health metric, the UK under performs and this has the inevitable consequence that we ARE a sicker country. Life expectancy is lower in the UK than in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, and is falling.
Britain has fewer doctors per capita, (UK – 2.8 per 1000 vs EU average of 3.9) Unsurprisingly, with fewer doctors we have the longest waiting times for health treatment in Western Europe. The NHS has a backlog of 7.5 million treatment delays, thereby keeping many people off work for longer. A shortage of GP’s means delays in being diagnosed and long hospital waiting lists means delays in treatment.
The UK has the highest anti-depressant use in Western Europe suggesting British people genuinely are feeling more depressed and anxious than in other countries. Workplace stress is significantly higher due to long hours, low job control, low pay, higher job insecurity and weaker employment protection laws.
Ironically, the right-wing claim it is the existence of excessive employment protection laws that is one of the major causes of our low productivity and economic demise.
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