Tag Archives: wage

You’re £11,000 worse-off than in 2008 due to wage stagnation – but the billionaires aren’t!

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Cash money: if you haven’t seen even this much in a while, it’s because – thanks to Tory policies – billionaires have vacuumed it all up.

Here’s a painful piece of information I found on the social media:

I did a bit of digging (not very much!) and it turns out that Mr Burgon isn’t wrong:

Workers are £11,000 worse off per year due to 15 years of wage stagnation, according to the Resolution Foundation.

In new figures shared with BBC Panorama, the think tank calculated that, had wages continued to grow at the pace seen before the 2008 financial crash, the average worker would make £11,000 more per year than they do now, taking rising prices into account.

Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told the BBC the wage stagnation of the past 15 years is “almost completely unprecedented”.

Unprecedented it may be, but you can bet it was entirely planned by the Tories who slithered into government in 2010.

“This is definitely not what normal looks like. This is what failure looks like.”

Not as far as those Tories were concerned. For them, it was success. They funnelled the cash away from the majority of UK citizens, away from the Treasury, and into the hands and offshore bank accounts of the tiniest minority of the super-rich.

As for the billionaires… here‘s Statista:

The UK’s top ten richest people are wealthier than the group has ever been, according to The Sunday Times, who recently released their annual Rich List. Their data finds that the cumulative wealth of the top ten billionaires in the UK has grown from £47.77 billion in 2009 to £182 billion in 2022 – an increase of 281 percent.

As this chart shows, following the 2008 crash, the UK’s billionaires have seen a steady, and fairly steep, incline in their wealth. The upward trend continued despite the pandemic, which saw the UK’s economy shrink by 20.4 percent in the second quarter of 2020, as most industries suffered, and 30.5 million people in Europe were expected to be pushed into poverty. This is a stark contrast to the UK’s 250 ultra wealthy, who saw their collective wealth surge to a record high of £653 billion in 2022.

And Jeremy Hunt’s Budget predicted slower growth than we expected after the disastrous Liz Truss was ousted from Downing Street last year.

And the Tories are starting to bounce back in the opinion polls.

Who are the people going back to them? Are they masochists?

Source: Workers £11,000 worse off a year due to stagnant wages – Resolution Foundation

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Globalisation and privatisation are pushing UK families into poverty

Need a miracle: this is YOU, the day after tomorrow.

Here’s a terrifying article by Brett Christophers (who?) originally in The Guardian.

The author examines the reasons rent, food and energy prices aren’t coming down, if household incomes are.

His answers can be summed up in two words: globalisation and privatisation.

He tells us:

Profits have reached record levels… [but] the cost of living crisis reflects the combination of higher prices for essentials with household incomes that are at best standing still.

Part of the reason that UK companies are generating record profits is precisely because they are successfully keeping wage costs down.

It has long been understood that across an economy at large, companies cannot simply drive down wages and expect profits to hold up in the medium or long term. After all, workers are also consumers. Lower wages mean a lower capacity to consume.

Then he hits us with the reason the big UK firms have managed to avoid this threat to their profits:

Much more than is the case in other countries, such firms tend to be distinguished by one of two key features, both of which insulate the companies in question from the potentially negative impact of UK wage stagnation.

The first is their geography. Companies in the FTSE 100 index derive less than a quarter of their revenues from the UK – a remarkably small share. In other words, domestic demand conditions are largely irrelevant to their fortunes.

That this is true of the UK’s big oil and gas companies, BP and Shell, whose profits are at all-time highs, is well known. But it is no less true of profit heavyweights in other sectors such as AstraZeneca, BAE Systems, British American Tobacco (BAT) and Unilever.

That’s globalisation – these firms operate in other countries where wages are higher and can therefore charge what they like. If UK households default on their energy bills, their lights will go out and the energy firms’ bosses won’t think twice about it.

The second key feature of many leading UK firms is less often discussed. This is the non-discretionary nature of the expenditure that households incur in consuming their services: expenditure such as loan payments, housing rent and utility bills.

Many of these companies have been in the news for their profits, too – companies such as HSBC, Centrica, Thames Water and Annington Homes. Their household customers, many (and, in some cases, all) of whom are located in the UK, are essentially captive: they must make payments, whether wages are rising or not.

In the case of the disproportionate prominence of firms earning revenue in the form of non-discretionary household expenditure, the explanation is … : privatisation. In the 1980s and 1990s, both Conservative and New Labour administrations went about privatising publicly owned assets that occasioned regular household payments – principally housing and utilities – with a gusto and comprehensiveness unparalleled elsewhere in the global north.

So successive Tory and New Labour governments have created a situation in which working households are now being held hostage by the corporations that have effective monopolies on the goods and services we need, simply to be able to live.

I lived through the period when Margaret Thatcher was privatising everything in sight, and when globalisation was the buzzword for the economy. I knew it would end badly for people like myself – and that’s exactly what is happening.

But far too many of my fellow citizens were taken in by the weasel words of Thatcher, Major, Blair and all their fellow-travellers; people who subsequently became extremely rich by forcing us to struggle.

And now, future generations will pay. And pay. And pay…

But if you ask young people today what they think, most of them will say they aren’t interested in politics and it has nothing to do with them.

Source: If UK wages are going down, why aren’t rent, food and energy prices coming down too?

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Struggling to afford food? Work longer hours, says Tory Coffey. Does she work at all?

Let them eat overtime: this is because working people can’t have any fruit and veg under a Tory government.

Here is your regular reminder that Therese Coffey is rubbish.

It’s from last week but got lost among all the other rubbish the Environment Secretary threw at us then:

Here’s a video clip of her actually saying it:

Meanwhile, let’s have an update on the fruit and vegetable shortages her government has caused:

And how about a reminder that the Tory Brexiters were adamant that we wouldn’t suffer any shortages at all?

And what is her plan to end the food shortages?

Apparently, it is to choke on her own words:

If you noticed that Luke Pollard asked if Coffey wanted to go down as the Secretary of State for Sewage, you may welcome this update on the pollution of our rivers:

All the fish dead because the Tory government couldn’t be bothered to properly regulate the water and sewage firms it created by privatising a national utility and asset.

It should be a criminal offence and these people should be locked up – and forced to eat and drink the produce their incompetence has polluted.*

*I know that’s a death sentence but it will never be carried out, even though it would be poetic justice.

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Meeting strikers’ demands WON’T cost £1,000 per household. Sunak is LYING

Rishi Sunak (right) with his wife Akshata Murty: they live in the richest household in the United Kingdom and as such would pay more than most of us if striking public sector workers were to get the wage deal they want.

So much for his claim to be bringing integrity to the UK’s government.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the UK’s prime minister is lying to the people, but we should certainly question why anybody so economically illiterate was ever invited to be Chancellor of the Exchequer!

Rishi Sunak is actually trying to protect the richest people in the UK – those whose incomes have increased the most during the nation’s recent economic upheavals – from paying their fair share towards resolving the problems he and his colleagues have caused.

(Let’s not go too far into the argument about tax paying for anything at all. By now, everybody should know that the government creates money – or rather, orders the Bank of England to do so – and spends it into the economy; tax is a mechanism to prevent inflation by ensuring the amount of money washing around the economy is limited. That is exactly why taxes would be raised in this case.)

You see, tax is paid on a sliding scale; the lowest-earning households in the UK don’t pay any at all, while those with the highest incomes – unless they are involved in tax avoidance schemes (and many are, because Sunak insists on allowing them to continue) – pay considerably more than the average.

Sunak himself lives in the richest household in the country. You need to understand that he has a personal interest in this.

So he has sent out his spokespeople with a silly lie that he hopes that, if it is repeated enough, you will believe.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic to explain further:

Who do you believe? Sunak – or Stefanovic and me?

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Why will the Tories pay pharma firms 24x the usual price of their pills, but won’t give nurses a pay rise?

Pharmaceutical firms have hiked the price of medication for Strep A – the disease that is currently killing UK children – from 80p to £19 per packet.

The government is happy to pay that amount.

We know this because a government minister said so in a response to Labour Lord Prem Sikka, who wanted to know whether the government would start up its own pharma firm to manufacture this medicine for a fair price.

Here’s a commentary on what happened:

So the government is happy to pay the cost of particular medicines, even if the companies supplying them hike the price to 23.75 times its normal level – because that’s “the market price”.

Nurses are telling government ministers “the market price” of their labour should be 1.2 times its current level – and the government has refused to pay.

The latter group is looking for a fair price for an honest day’s work; the former is engaging in bare-faced profiteering.

And the Tories are supporting the profiteers. Think about it.

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Controversy grows around Truss chief-of-staff Mark Fullbrook

The man Liz Truss chose to be her chief of staff has already been interviewed by the US FBI in relation to vote-rigging in Puerto Rico.

Now it transpires that he is not being paid directly by the government for his government role, but by a private firm, for which he works (or has worked). So the government has been privatised. Is there a tax dodge involved here?

It’s a lobbying firm, which means this company seeks contact with the government in order to influence it.

Worse still, it’s alleged that Truss persuaded Fullbrook to take the role in return for running the Conservatives’ next general election campaign.

This has really upset Tory MPs.

Here’s why…:

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Eddie Dempsey explains why UK living standards are so low – and rinses Truss’s cabinet

Eddie Dempsey.

The assistant general secretary of the RMT union dropped a salvo of truth bombs in his speech at the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow last week.

Profits are high because wages are low – and wages are low because the market says so.

And who is “the market”? According to Mr Dempsey, it is people titled “CEO”.

He made the point that, without working people, the bosses taking all the money would have no wealth – but without them, the UK could be a country fit to live in.

And he pointed out that, with shareholders taking hundreds of billions of pounds worth of profit out of the UK, it is not credible to say there is not enough money available to give working people a living wage.

The only reason wages don’t rise is because profits would then come down, and the greedy CEOs who run “the market” would rather feather their nests than safeguard the people who make their money for them.

It’s a hell of a speech:

Mr Dempsey went on to absolutely humiliate Liz Truss and her new market-ruled cabinet in this interview, when he admitted: “I’ve no idea who any of them are”:

Based on this evidence, it is easy to see why unions like the RMT are enjoying a huge surge in popularity.

While Labour stagnates under Keir Starmer, people like Mr Dempsey are standing up for the hard-working people of the UK – and helping us to stand up for ourselves.

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Can you swallow this pathetic excuse for the latest enormous MP pay rise?

Rolling in it: MP pay has increased by nearly one-third since 2010, while the rest of us have become thousands of pounds worse-off, in real terms, because of austerity restrictions imposed by Boris Johnson and Tory prime ministers before him.

We’ve had some daft excuses for MPs’ pay rises before now but this one takes the biscuit: they’ll have £2,212 extra from the beginning of April because their responsibilities are said to have “dramatically increased”!

What utter dribble.

MPs’ pay will increase to £84,144 (for backbenchers) – a rise of almost £20,000 from the £65,738 they were getting when the Tories slithered into office by the back door in 2010.

The rise is being represented by the so-called Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), which was established in 2009 after that year’s infamous scandal over the expenses claimed by MPs.

In 2015, IPSA recommended a massive 10.9 per cent salary hike for MPs – to £74,000, justifying it by saying it would be offset by new tougher rules on parliamentary expenses, higher pensions contributions and the end of pay-offs to MPs who retire or voluntarily step down.

David Cameron was prime minister at the time. He said it was “simply unacceptable” – right up until his backbenchers decided they wanted to grab as much cash as they possibly could and threatened to rebel.

Amid public outcry, 69 MPs later said they would give the amount of their pay rise to charity – but research by The Sun (of all places) subsequently revealed that only 26 actually did so. The other two-thirds, it seems, only paid lip-service to the idea.

In April 2016 IPSA lined up a 1.3 per cent pay rise for MPs – more than three times the national average – to £74,962.

The following year saw an increase of 1.4 per cent to £76,011. The reason in both cases was said to be the annual change in average weekly earnings across the public sector.

How odd, when most public sector workers had been subjected to austerity restrictions since 2010 and hadn’t had a pay increase at all!

And, of course, the comparison would have required parity between MPs’ working conditions and those of public sector workers, meaning nurses, teachers and so on could enjoy the same rules on working hours, the same workers’ rights and make the same kind of expenses claims.

They don’t, so the claim is impossible to justify. But MPs had their £1000+ pay rise all the same.

In 2018, the pay rise had increased to 1.8 per cent, meaning MP salaries rose by £1,368 to £77,369. Again, there was no parity with the pay and conditions of other public sector workers, despite the rise being linked to any rise in their earnings.

By 2020, MPs’ pay was being increased by an inflation-busting 3.8 per cent to £81,932. I commented at the time that this was after the Tory government had created a massive increase in in-work poverty for the rest of us; eight million working-age people, 60 per cent of whom had jobs.

Oh, and MPs were also awarded increased expenses, to rub our noses in it still further.

Now IPSA has announced that MPs are to receive £2,212 extra in the financial year starting in April. And, like all the other excuses, the current claim isn’t being swallowed by the general public:

Yes indeed, especially as MP pay has been linked with theirs so often!

Some have made light of it with humour…

… but it is time to accept that IPSA doesn’t work.

MPs can’t go back to proposing – and voting on – their own pay rises because there simply wouldn’t be enough money to keep the current crop of greedy money-grubbers in cocaine (or whatever else they may choose to buy with it).

Personally, This Writer thinks MPs should be given a very massive pay cut.

The average salary in January this year was £29,600.

If the rest of us have to cope on that (and many of us have to manage on much less) then there’s no reason MPs can’t – and we all have to deal with increased pressures that the Tories in government have heaped on us.

Maybe the Tories would think differently about heaping extra costs like the 10+ per cent rise in National Insurance contributions and massively increased energy bills if they themselves have to cope with them in the same way we do.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Embattled Tories kick down hard – they want to make benefit claimants suffer

Sanction centre: the Tories are giving unemployed Universal Credit claimants just four months to get a job in the sector they want before demanding that they take what they’re offered or face sanctions. But who will profit? The jobseeker – or the employer?

This Writer has never understood why working-class people vote for the Conservatives when the Tories always attack them.

This is especially true when the Tories are themselves under attack, so it should be no surprise to anybody that they are victimising benefit claimants again.

This time it is unemployed people on Universal Credit who are taking the brunt of the pain:

Unemployed workers will be forced to take up a job in any sector or face swift financial sanctions under a crackdown designed to fill hundreds of thousands of vacancies.

Claimants will be given just four weeks – down from three months – to find a job within their preferred sector. After that point, if they fail to make “reasonable efforts” to secure a job or turn down any offer, they will have part of their universal credit payment withdrawn.

The move, which is part of an initiative to get 500,000 people into work by June and fill 1.2m job vacancies nationally, comes as Boris Johnson seeks to reassert control over the political agenda amid the “partygate” crisis.

See? It’s a distraction tactic.

The important question is: how much do these jobs pay?

Unemployed people aren’t likely to care if they take a job in their preferred sector; the priority for anybody at times of hardship is to get one that pays the bills.

And this is the problem.

The Conservatives have spent nearly 12 years, since they slithered back into office in 2010, pushing wages down – so the average is now thousands of pounds less than it used to be (in real terms).

And people are struggling.

Do these 1.2 million new jobs pay a living wage?

Or will anybody taking them still be claiming Universal Credit, simply to survive?

That’s a government subsidy for employers, of course – not a benefit for the employee.

It’s not acceptable and, as the government, the Tories should be ensuring that it doesn’t happen.

But they won’t, because they haven’t bothered at any other time since May 2010.

The remarkable thing is that, knowing the Tories are victimising the electorate, voters still send them back to Parliament. In the name of all that’s sane, why?

Do middle-class voters really think that these punitive moves against vulnerable people are saving the rest of us from supporting scroungers, benefit cheats, and people who are just too lazy to work?

Do working-class voters – the ones this police attacks – really think a Tory government provides an opportunity for them to become billionaires, by hard work and struggle? Has it not occurred to them that they work much harder than those people and still get nowhere because the system is stacked against them?

People need to think about what Tory policies actually do – and ignore the propaganda. Then they need to vote accordingly.

Source: Universal credit claimants face tough sanctions in UK job crackdown | Benefits | The Guardian

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Teachers’ pay: Zahawi’s promises are a big Con – aren’t they?

Nadhim Zahawi: flag-waving is no substitute for straight-talking – and he’s talking nonsense gibberish.

Teachers! Confused about the Tory government’s plans to raise your pay?

YOU SHOULD BE!

The government has announced plans to increase starting pay for teachers to £30,000 per year, which is still lower than the national average.

But when is that going to happen?

First it was to be from April 2022, but then the Tories imposed a pay freeze instead.

Now, there’s a vague desire to bring it in by the end of the Parliament.

But to hear new Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi waffling about it, you’d be none the wiser.

Reading a transcript doesn’t help either.

Meanwhile – well, see for yourself:

So, after promising an increase in teachers’ pay…

… the Tories have actually cut it. Yeah – so much for “levelling up”.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

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If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
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The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook