Agency wage slavery

“ Martin” works at the Jacob’s biscuit factory in Liverpool, although he’s not employed by the firm. Instead, he works for Prime Time Recruitment, one of Britain’s biggest suppliers of contract labour. He does the same work as Jacob’s own staff, and often substitutes for their absences – but is on the minimum wage; they get paid over £2 an hour more. They’re on a rota, while he has to wait by his phone for each shift. His holiday and sick-pay entitlements are much worse, too. Jacob’s staff enjoy access to a workplace gym and medical centre; when Martin had an accident with a forklift truck, the medical centre turned him away, telling him to find his own doctor.

Martin never knows when he will be working: just last week, he was rung up in the morning to be told he had 45 minutes to his next shift. Nor does he know where he will be working: his agency regularly offers him work in a factory in Blackpool. As Prime Time pointed out, that’s within a contractual 25-mile radius as the crow flies. But as Martin demonstrates on Google Maps, it’s over 50 miles by road, and the travel costs mean that a six-hour shift would only earn him just over £3 an hour. When he turns down such impossible jobs, the agency then uses a legal loophole to chalk him up as unavailable for work and pays him nothing.

Prime Time, has more control over his life than he does. What makes this different from zero-hours work is Martin isn’t directly employed by his workplace. But the effect is almost the same: the workers and their families are burdened with all the insecurity and powerlessness, while their employers enjoy the flexibility of labour on tap. Add the estimated 1.2 million agency workers to the 600,000 on zero-hours contracts, and you have a shadow workforce of about 1.8 million unpeople, enjoying none of the security that should come with employment in a rich country. Thanks to official neglect, so much about these unpeople is unknown. We don’t even know how many employment agencies there are, let alone how many names they have on their books. But we can say some things about such workers. They are never going to be helped by prime ministerial exhortations for a pay rise. As such, they form part of the answer to one of the major conundrums in Britain: what’s gone wrong in our labour market. he shadow workforce tells us that all this is bunk. Its growth points the way to a new world in which big employers draw upon a pool of casual labour, stripped of most of their rights and bargaining power. It’s a pool that’s been growing fast since the banking crisis. Particularly heavy users of agency workers are logistics companies of the kind that deliver our online Christmas orders, and food manufacturers such as Jacob’s, which disclosed last year that at any one time up to 250 of the 900 staff at its Aintree factory could be agency. (Today the firm estimated the agency number at 70.) Last year, the company marked its centenary of operations in Liverpool. Generations of locals would have passed through there, and the royal seal still hangs over the door. But those social ties now count for nothing; the factory is becoming a hub in an extractive labour market.

The shadow workforce is spreading especially fast in those economies that never recovered from Thatcher’s great industrial wipeout. Much of the former steel town of Corby is now just agency land. And in Martin’s home of Liverpool, the city council found that of the 13,771 vacancies advertised in Merseyside, nearly half – 6,600 – were for temporary agency work. Its report, published last autumn, in effect punctures all the smug forecasts that the jobs market will soon turn a corner. What it tells you is that for people like Martin, in hollowed-out economies like his suburb of Liverpool, the market isn’t suddenly going to right itself. And until that happens – as Barry Kushner, a Labour councillor, points out – the housing association will continue to rack up arrears, and the waiting list for advice at the local Citizens Advice bureau will grow.

As a middle-aged father, he’s borrowed to cover food and fuel bills, and “I’ve not known when I’ll be able to pay anything back”. Holidays? Forget it. He points at one of two toddlers messing around on the living-room floor: her first Christmas was “nearly ruined” for lack of money. What you need to know about agency workers, he says, is, “they don’t live, they get by”.

Sure, there are supply teachers enjoying the freedom that agency status brings. And one imagines that others do skip from temp job to fully fledged career. But elsewhere there are people like Martin, who have no choice. He’s holding out for a permanent staff position, yet can’t think of anyone who has made the leap. Nor can he sign on while looking for other work, because that would count as making himself voluntarily unemployed and lead to being deprived of jobseeker’s allowance. So he is stuck at the very bottom of the pile.

There are winners. The workfare company A4e, which sent Martin to the factory, gets a fee from the taxpayer for placing a warm body in a job. Jacob’s, an arm of a £2bn business, gets cheap labour with none of the pesky overheads or obligations. Middleman Prime Time, part of a group with a £500m annual turnover, takes its cut and was until last August getting government funding on top. The losers are Martin.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/jobs-agency-workers-britain-economy-insecure-low-paid-work

cut the working week

The workers' Mayday originated in the fight for the 40 hour week 5 day week and was finally achieved (more often honoured in the breach as in reality) in the US in 1938. Fifty years ago the American Federation of Labor called for a 30-hour work week (the U.S. Senate even passed a 30-hour law, though it was defeated in the House); in 1961 the head of the New York Central Labor Council urged unions to campaign for a 4-hour day. For decades the radical union the Industrial Workers of the World have had the demand for the 20 hour week - "4 hours work for 8 hours pay puts more workers on the job every day" but today the mainstream unions won't campaign even for a 35-hour week.

Now the New Economics Foundation have re-newed the call for a drastic cut in working hours. In a recent paper they argue for a 21-hour work week. The NEF says there is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered a "normal" 40-hour work week today. In its wake, many people are caught in a vicious cycle of work and consumption. They live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume things. Missing from that equation is an important fact that researchers have discovered about most material consumption in wealthy societies: so much of the pleasure and satisfaction we gain from buying is temporary, ephemeral, and mostly just relative to those around us (who strive to consume still more, in a self-perpetuating spiral). The NEF argues we need to achieve truly happy lives, we need to challenge social norms and reset the industrial clock ticking in our heads. It sees the 21-hour week as integral to this for two reasons: it will redistribute paid work, offering the hope of a more equal society (right now too many are overworked, or underemployed). At the same time, it would give us all time for the things we value but rarely have time to do well such as care for our family, travel, read or continue learning (as opposed to feeding consumerism).

To save the world by laying the foundations for a "steady-state" economy -- and to just make our personal lives better -- we will need to work less.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-case-for-a-21-hour-work-week.html

working hours

The fight to discipline peasants into proletarians is indeed interesting. One of capitalism's myths is that it has reduced human toil yet Bushmen work two-and-a-half days per week and on average the working day was less than five hours.

In the Middle Ages hours of work was tied to the seasons and the number of holidays and fairs were many. Work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner with also mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks. The medieval workday was probably not more than eight hours. Days off in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. In France they were guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain holidays totalled five months per year.

13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours
Calculated from Gregory Clark's estimate of 150 days per family, assumes 12 hours per day, 135 days per year for adult male ("Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture", mimeo, 1986)

14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours
Calculated from Nora Ritchie's estimate of 120 days per year. Assumes 12-hour day. ("Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II", in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, London: Edward Arnold, 1962).

Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hours
Juliet Schor's estime of average medieval laborer working two-thirds of the year at 9.5 hours per day

1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours
Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day ("Labour productivity and work psychology in the English mining industry, 1400-1600", Economic History Review 31, 23 (1978).

But for capitalism , there was a financial incentive to maximize the return on expensive machinery by having long hours, twelve to sixteen hours per day, six to seven days per week were practiced. Cottage handicraft workers learned to fear and hate factory work and its pace of work and degree of discipline. Clocks, not daylight or weather established work patterns. Workers often attempted to observed "Holy Monday" to lengthen the weekend

1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours
Based on 69-hour week; hours from W.S. Woytinsky, "Hours of labor," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1935). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year

1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours
Based on 70-hour week; hours from Joseph Zeisel, "The workweek in American industry, 1850-1956", Monthly Labor Review 81, 23-29 (1958). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year

Workers have simply recovered what they had four or five centuries ago and but who are now under threat once again of losing.

1987 - Average worker, U.S.: 1949 hours
From The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor, Table 2.4

1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
Calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Office of Productivity and Technology

From ://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html

Wasted Work

There are hundreds of occupations that would not exist in a society that had no need for money: they range from accountants, bank and insurance staff, salespeople, wages clerks to name only some of the more numerous occupations. Tangible products needed only in a money system include bank notes and coins, account books and invoices, meters, safes and many others. A high proportion of employment in capitalism consists of handling money in some way. They are inextricably bound up with the day to day operation of the market system but not intrinsically useful work.

240,000 private security guards
152,000 police officers to serve and protect the monopoly of private property system
91,000 prisoners the numbers fuelled by squalid social conditions, the absence of hope and the alienation of capitalist society.
44,000 prison staff, equally alienated , to guard the above

90,000 arms trade/manufacture. To see how the weapons industry can be transformed into producing medical equipment see http://libcom.org/history/articles/lucas-aerospace-fight
240,000 in the military forces with all the associated human resources being diverted to the cause of destruction and slaughter, rather than producing useful items such as houses, hospitals or schools.

100,0000 in the finance sector such banking insurance etc. All their work arising from the lending and borrowing of money for investment, purchasing and so on.
14,000 debt collecting
20,000 credit agencies
700,000 Advertising, marketing, pr, and sales managers, all encouraging us to go out and buy buy buy , shop until we drop.
73,000 working in gambling, providing the forlorn hope of quick escape from our mundane dreary lives.
All these functions are serviced by other workers. For example, carried to work by transport, they work in buildings which require maintenance and use equipment such as computers, they appropriate the most advanced technologies.

Finally, we have the industrial reserve army of the unemployed 2,400,000 and the 5,400,000 part timers seeking full time employment .What a cruel waste of human talent and potential.

Inside a socialist societry there will be no need to buy food from anyone—it is common property. There are no rent or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to all of us. There is no need to buy anything from any other person.
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Bosses 'live longer than their workers'

A new UK study has revealed that working class men are more than twice as likely to die earlier than their bosses.
The Office for National Statistics suggests that scaffolders, farm workers, bus drivers, labourers and cleaners are at more than double the risk of early death than workers including local and national government officials, civil engineers, doctors, teachers, social workers or nurses.

The gap between managers and manual workers has widened. In 2001, a worker in a routine or manual occupation was twice as likely to die before the age of 65 than his manager. But in 2008 that ratio had risen to 2.3 times as likely.

post-traumatic embitterment disorder

There is now a new condition called post-traumatic embitterment disorder.Workers who whinge about their job or their boss and spread vicious gossip while doing as little work as possible may have fallen victim to it. Those with the disorder are usually people who do not have a good work-life balance and who derived too much of their self-esteem from their job. People who are passed over for a promotion, who have been humiliated in front of colleagues or who feel their true worth is not recognised are most likely to develop the condition. It affects their performance at work and at home and traps them in a vicious circle of underperformance and despair. They feel down-hearted and helpless but can also be aggressive. They are also more likely to throw "sickies" to avoid going to work.In the most serious cases, people can suffer nightmares and phobias relating to their job. They feel unable ever to return to work and may even become suicidal (the researchers found that those affected by the condition can sometimes raise a smile - especially when contemplating revenge.)

Soon they will be medicalising strikes.

dirty work

Work should not really be equated with employment. Employment is wage labour and the ability to work is a commodity the workers are forced to sell . As such it has alienating factors associated with it; e.g. Monday to Friday , 9 -5 , is “their” time, whilst the weekend is "our" time, where we can enjoy working in the garden or painting. Employment is based on the division of labour. The upshot being workers are tied to one job for years on end, instead of being people able to do all kinds of things, which socialist society – run by conscious decisions instead of blind forces – will allow. (Of course it is a moot point as to how far the division of labour can be removed from socialism; not every one can have the steady hand and requisite knowledge of a surgeon.)

One of the strangest objections to socialism is “who will do the dirty work?”. Imagine such doom-sayers arguing “I don't want to live in a world without want and hunger , and where my needs are satisfied, if it means I have to do dirty work once a week.”

Who will do the dirty work? Machinery will do it, said Oscar Wilde. (And, of course, machinery is enormously more developed now than it was in Wilde's day and can do many more jobs which people do not wish to do manually.) "All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery". This will release each individual to help the community in his or her own way by doing service or producing things which will satisfy each person's need to be active, to contribute and to help. Wilde summed it up: "The community by means of organization of machinery will supply the useful things, and . . . the beautiful things will be made by the individual". Work will be an essential part of life in socialism; it will be a part of the individual's personal development , a necessary, healthy expenditure of energy and a social bond with co-workers .

The hours needed to work will be considerably reduced as unemployment will no longer exist , and from the additional extra labour being made available from no longer required capitalist occupations which will not exist in the moneyless, free access society of socialism. There will simply be many more hands to do the unpleasant but necessary stuff. Socialism will entail new applications of technology and the abolition of unnecessary routine work.

Socialism can do lots of things, but it can't make shit smell of roses - that is one little fact of life we'll just have to put up with.

Dirty Work

Who will do the dirty work? Socialism will not be a Utopia where all the problems of existence have vanished. Unpleasant work will still have to be done.
Machinery will do it, said Oscar Wilde. “All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery”.This will release each individual to help the community in his or her own way by doing service or producing things which will satisfy each person’s need to be active, to contribute and to help. Wilde summed it up: “The community by means of organization of machinery will supply the useful things, and . . . the beautiful things will be made by the individual”.
Unappealing dirty work can probably be taken care of by utilising labour-saving machines. But where it is impossible and where dirty work will have to be done in socialist society we can be quite sure of two things: Firstly, it will NOT be done by the same people ALL the time . All able members of society will take turns at such work . And also not to be forgotten is that it will be carried out by socially conscious men and women who appreciate that society belongs to them and therefore its less pleasant tasks must be performed by them. In the knowledge that we own and control the earth, and all that is in and on it, it is unlikely i think that human beings will refuse to attend to the dirty work within socialism.

The fact is that most jobs under capitalism are either completely or partially unnecessary. Many of those that are necessary are performed by people working long hard hours while others suffer poverty of low wages and low status . Elimination of all jobs required only within a capitalist system would reduce necessary tasks to such a trivial level that they could easily be taken care of voluntarily and cooperatively, eliminating the need for the whole apparatus of economic incentives and state enforcement.

As for the lazy greedy shirkers if one who contributes less takes more, why should this be a problem in a society which is based on the satisfaction of needs? Those people living in a socialist society who are too idle to work will not be a drain on society’s resources for very long, for if they lie in bed for long enough they will die—of boredom, if not of inertia.
Unlike Parecon , many socialists caution against the creation of blueprints ( “recipes for the cook-shops of tomorrow” as Marx called them ) . There is no point in drawing up in advance the sort of detailed blueprint of industrial organisation that the old IWW and the Syndicalists or the Guild Socialists used to do and what Parecon now does . For a small group of socialists , as we are now , to do so would be undemocratic. It would also be dumb. Socialists don’t have crystal balls to determine what the conditions will be when socialism is established. As the socialist majority grows, when socialism is within the grasp of the working class, then will be the proper time for making such important decisions. It is imprudent for today’s socialist minority to be telling people how to administer a socialist society. When a majority of people understand what socialism means, the suggestions for socialist administration will solidify into an appropriate plan. It will be based upon the conditions existing at that time, not today.
We also recognise that there may not be one single way of doing things, and precise details and ways of doing things might vary from one part of the world to another, even between neighbouring communities. Of course, we can reach some generalised conclusions based on basic premises – that socialism will be necessarily democratic, for example – and can outline broad principles or options that could be applied. That is, we do not have to draw up a plan for socialism, but simply and broadly demonstrate that it is possible and therefore refute the label of “utopianism” .
We look to the real world to see how it is, and how it could be. Socialist society is not starting from a blank sheet and we are inheriting an already existing economic system . Workers with all their skills and experience of co-operating to run capitalism in the interests of the capitalists could begin to run society in their own interest. We do not need to build the new society in the womb of the old, that is here already.

If people didn’t work then society would obviously fall apart. To establish socialism the vast majority must consciously decide that they want socialism and that they are prepared to work in socialist society. The establishment of socialism presupposes the existence of a mass socialist movement and a profound change in social outlook. It is simply not reasonable to suppose that the desire for socialism on such a large scale, and the conscious understanding of what it entails on the part of all concerned, would not influence the way people behaved in socialism and towards each other. Would they want to jeopardise the new society they had helped create? I think not.

Work

Posted in the comments here

Socialism is almost globally misunderstood and misrepresented.Socialism will be a basic structural change to society, and many of the things that most people take for granted, as “just the way things have to be”, can and must be changed to establish socialism. People tend to accept as true the things they hear over and over again. But repetition doesn’t make things true. Because the truth and the facts often contradict “common knowledge”, socialists have to show that “common knowledge” is wrong. The task of capitalist ideology is to maintain the veil which keeps people from seeing that their own activities reproduce the form of their daily life , the task of socialism is to unveil the activities of daily life, to render them transparent.

Capitalist ideology treats land, capital , and the products of labor, as things which have the power to produce, to create value, to work for their owners, to transform the world. This is what Marx called the fetishism which characterizes people’s everyday conceptions, and which is raised to the level of dogma by Economics. For the economist, living people are things – factors of production -, and things live money – works, Capital – produces .When men refuse to sell their labour, money cannot perform even the simplest tasks, because money does not ” work “. The notion of the “productivity of capital,” are inventions of the “science” of Economics.

The majority of the population is not engaged in productive work. The greater part of the non-producers is employed in the buying and selling plus all the related occupations . Any system by which the buying and selling system is retained means the employment of vast sections of the population in unproductive work. It leaves the productive work to be done by one portion of the people whilst the other portion is spending its energies in keeping shop, banking, and all the other various developments of commerce which employ probably more than two-thirds of the people today. It is the elimination of such activities and institutions , essential though they may be to a functioning market economy but unproductive in themselves from the standpoint of producing use values or meeting human needs, that constitutes perhaps the most important productive advantage that a socialist economy would have over a capitalist economy. The elimination of this structural waste intrinsic to capitalism will free up a vast amount of labour and materials for socially useful production in socialism.

In socialist society productive activity would take the form of freely chosen activity undertaken by human beings with a view to producing the things they needed to live and enjoy life. The necessary productive work of society would not be done by a class of hired wage workers but by all members of society, each according to their particular skills and abilities, cooperating to produce the things required to satisfy their needs both as individuals and as communities. Work in socialist society could only be voluntary since there would be no group or organ in a position to force people to work against their will.

“… in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” -Marx ,
And it was Marx who said in communism it will be society’s free (disposable) time and no longer labor time that becomes the true measure of society’s wealth.

Nor should we forget his son-in-law Larfargue who wrote “The Right to be Lazy” . Lafargue’s approach to work in a socialist society – that it should be minimised , reducing the working day to 2 or 3 hours.- is only one of two possible socialist approaches to the question.
William Morris was in contrast arguing that what workers should be demanding was what might be called the “Right to Attractive Work”. The two different approaches suggest two different policies that might be pursued in a socialist society: maximum automatisation so as to minimise working time or making as much work as possible attractive and personally rewarding.

Morris regarded work as a basic, natural human need. His main criticism of capitalism was that it denied the vast majority of humans satisfying and enjoyable work. Under capitalism work, instead of being the enjoyable activity of creating or doing something useful, became a boring and often unhealthy and dangerous burden imposed on those who were forced to get a living by selling their mental and physical energies for a wage Morris’s concept of “art”. Which he defined, not as some specialised activity engaged in by some fringe group of “artists”, but as ”the expression of a person’s joy in their work”; people who enjoyed their work would produce beautiful things. And when he realised that the nature of capitalism meant that most producers were denied any enjoyment in their work – or, put another way, that it meant the “death of art”

Work should not really be equated with employment. Work will be an essential part of life in socialism; it will be a part of the individual’s development and a necessary, healthy expenditure of energy. Employment is wage labour . As such it has alienating factors associated with it; e.g. Monday to Fridays ,9 to 5 is “their” time, whilst the weekend is “our” time, where we can enjoy working in the garden or painting. Employment is based on the division of labour. The upshot being that workers are tied to one job for years on end, instead of being people able to do all kinds of things, which socialist society will allow. In a socialist society the distinction between work and leisure will diminish—perhaps even disappear. People will have an opportunity to use their hobbies and enthusiasms for the social good: to enjoy being useful.
Most of us want to work. What we hate is employment. We want to work for ourselves, our families and friends, our community, not some thieving parasite !