It is true that there is nothing new in the speech. As this article written by me in response to the Conservatives welfare reforms almost a month ago indicates. Many of the points I made back then could be made against Cameron's speech to launch the local elections.
Foreigners: 'they're taking our crap jobs' - Chris Gilligan
Last Thursday (17th of February) the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Work and Pensions Minister, Iain Duncan Smith, launched the Welfare Reform Bill 2011. Iain Duncan Smith has been preparing the ground for this reform of welfare from even before the Conservatives came to power (1). The proposed reforms have been heavily criticised as an attack on the poor, a criticism which the Conservatives have been keen to deny.
David Cameron, in his speech which launched the reform Bill, noted that there are some who:
point the finger of blame at those who are on benefits... But I know this country and therefore refuse to believe that there are five million people who are inherently lazy and have no interest in bettering themselves and their families. What I want to argue is that the real fault lies with the system itself. The benefit system has created a benefit culture'
The Bill was presented as enabling rather than punitive. Rather than the system being milked by benefit scroungers, fraudsters, or the work shy, the picture that Cameron presented was of decent people who want to work being failed by the 'sheer complexity and the perverse incentives of the benefits system'.
This was no Thatcherite attack on the welfare state. Cameron talked about the birth of the welfare state in positive terms. He suggested that when the welfare state was established 'there was what we might call a collective culture of responsibility'. Which meant that welfare acted as a safety net for those 'people who needed that support, and not those who didn't, in part because fiddling the system would have brought not just public outcry but private shame'. In doing so he pointed to a cultural shift in society in the decades since the welfare state was established. A cultural shift in which individual and collective responsibility has been eroded. The Bill was presented as a contribution to promoting the Big Society. Is this a case of the not-so-Secret Millionaires helping the less well off to realise their dreams?
Attacking the poor
The Bill is an attack on the poor. Under the terms of the Bill the household income of some of the poorest people in society will be reduced. The unemployed will also be compelled to take up available work, whether they are willing to do the work or not, or lose their benefits. Cameron is saying that this attack is for the good of society, and for the good of the long-term unemployed. The reforms, he is arguing, will reinstate self-confidence amongst a section of society who have lost these, and encourage a sense of social responsibility in society more broadly.
Iain Duncan Smith, in an interview on Today, Radio 4's morning news programme, also presented the reforms as aimed at enabling people who are out of work to get into work. The 'universal credit' scheme would simplify the benefits system, people who are currently on benefits would be guaranteed their current level of income and a Work Programme would help the long-term unemployed, unemployed youth and people with drug problems 'to sort their problems out and get them work ready so that when the economy grows they can get into work'.
In motivating the change he pointed to what he called the conundrum that of the two million jobs that were created in the UK under New Labour more than half went to foreign workers, while at the same time the number of people who were permanently on benefits rose to more than four million. The Government needed to reform the benefit system now, in the context of rising unemployment, so that the changes were in place by the time that the economy picks up, and new jobs are created. If the reforms don't happen, he warned, we will be in the position 'that the taxpayer will have to fund people to stay out of work while foreign nationals have to come in to do the work that British people can't do. It makes no sense at all'.
Simple-minded reasoning
Cameron and Duncan Smith rhetorically ask why foreign workers have taken more than half of the new jobs which were created in the UK between 1997 and 2008, and their answer is that it is because the benefit system dis-incentivised British workers from taking these jobs. There are at least four problems with this simple-minded explanation. The first is that foreign workers did not take more than half of the new jobs which were created. The second is that many migrants took jobs that British workers were unable to do. The third is that it ignores the dependency culture of employers. The fourth is that it hopes to generate major social change through technical means.
The idea that foreign workers took half of the new jobs involves a simple equation. The UK workforce grew by two million people between 1997 and 2008, more than a million foreign born workers joined the workforce over the same period. Therefore those foreign workers took more than half the new jobs. Simple. But wrong. Between 1998 and 2007 more than three million people left Britain and moved abroad. Most of these were working people aged between 16 and 45 (2). When they left Britain, most of them left a vacant post behind them. Many of these existing posts – in nursing, financial services, catering and a range of other skilled and semi-skilled occupations – were filled by immigrants. An estimated one in ten of the British born population live abroad. They leave Britain because they are 'attracted by a better quality of life, better climate, better value for money and ... better career opportunities' (3). With the possible exception of the climate, all of these are reasons why immigrants come to Britain.
The second problem with Duncan Smith's conundrum is that it wilfully ignores the skills shortage in the UK. Many of the jobs in which foreign born workers are employed are skilled occupations that cannot be readily filled by British workers. The NHS would collapse if all of the foreign born nurses, doctors, dentists and surgeons left Britain. And it is not just in the health service where there is a severe skills shortage. From the time of the massive house building programmes after the Second World War up until the late 1970s employment in the UK construction industry was characterised by collective wage bargaining, skills recognition and training through apprenticeships. Under Thatcher employment in construction became increasingly fragmented as collective bargaining was eroded, 'self-employment' became the norm and skills and training were undermined. These changes also eroded employers' incentives 'to invest in long-term training. [and] As a consequence, vocational education provisions are inadequate for the sector' (4). The UK needs major investment to create a skilled workforce if it is to take advantage of any turnaround in the economy.
Or perhaps what Duncan Smith has in mind is that those who are currently unemployed can be enticed by an extra little bit of cash to work in unskilled occupations – like cleaning or care work – that are currently undertaken by foreign workers. Migrant workers currently account for an estimated two thirds of the care assistants in London. This occupation involves 'low wages and poor working conditions. The work is physically and emotionally demanding and often undertaken in unsocial hours. It also has very low status' (5). Ideal work for those who already have a low social status, perhaps? If this is what Duncan Smith has in mind then it seems to be a case of 'immigrants are coming over here and taking our crap jobs'. The long-term unemployed may not have the right mindset to hold down a job, but I don't see how being compelled to clean toilets and wipe bums, or lose your benefits, is going to inspire change in this mindset.
The third problem with the proposed welfare reform is that it one-sidedly focuses on claimants, and ignores the dependency culture of employers. A dynamic economy raises everyone's standard of living. In a dynamic economy the unemployed would be drawn into the labour market. The British economy is in a chronic state. And the recovery, when it comes, will not be dynamic. There may be some niches of the economy in which there is vigorous growth, but these will not have the capacity to reinvigorate the whole of the economy. The trend in the British labour market, towards low-wage, casualised work will continue. The proposed reforms will facilitate this trend. The proposed reforms will allow people on benefits to top-up their benefits through low paid work. This is presented as enabling the long-term unemployed. The other side of this measure is that it would act as a subsidy to employers. Rather than pay a living wage, employers will be able to pay low wages for part-time flexible work, because the government is effectively guaranteeing the subsistence portion of the wage. The proposed reforms are an indication of the dependence of the economy on the state, not a way of releasing workers from state dependency.
The fourth problem with the proposed reform is that it continues the New Labour approach of thinking that a technical change in administration will affect social change in society. Cameron declared that 'This Bill is not an exercise in accounting. It's about changing our culture'. Judging by the public pronouncements of Cameron and Duncan Smith they think that the chronically unemployed lack a work ethic because the benefits system has demotivated them. The numbers on long-term benefits, such as unemployment and incapacity benefits, did rise dramatically under New Labour. The seeds of this rise were, however, sown under Conservative administrations.
Attitudes towards work, and the experience of the workplace, have been transformed in the UK over the last few decades. The assault on organised labour in the 1970s under Labour, and sustained in the 1980s under the Conservatives, broke the collective bonds that made the workplace an arena in which workers gained a sense of their power and their identity. People took pride in their work, in part, because they felt as though they had some control over it. The labour movement was defeated, and the workforce has become individualised and insecure. As the number of working days lost to strikes plummeted through the 1980s and 1990s, the number of working days lost to work-related sickness rocketed. The increase in people on incapacity benefit is only a symptom of a wider malaise. People in work today rarely approach workplace relations in the collective terms of bosses and workers. Today workplace relations are largely approached in individualised, and often medicalised, terms. The language of stress, rather than strikes. Work-life balance, rather than workers control.
It is not just employer-employee relations that have become individualised. Many who worked in the public sector saw themselves as working in the service of the public. The idea of 'the public' has been undermined by successive governments. Through, for example, turning the public into customers, rather than fellow citizens, or even fellow human-beings. The idea of service has been undermined by the managerialism of the workplace, in which the emphasis is on ticking the right boxes, rather than exercising judgement. And there are a whole range of other ways in which British culture denigrates work culture. Changing the benefit system, without tackling these broader aspects of British culture, will fail to achieve the cultural shift that Cameron and Duncan Smith claim to want to achieve. They are not, however, going to accept responsibility for this failure. The most likely outcome is that they will end up blaming the unemployed for their own condition.
Migrants as an inspiration, not a problem
Numerous studies have found that employers who take on migrant workers do so because they have a better 'work ethic' than many British workers. It is worth asking why migrant workers have a better work ethic than many Brits. One of the reasons is the different work culture that many foreigners have grown up with. Another is that their approach to work is informed by a larger sense of what they are trying to achieve. Many migrant workers are highly skilled, but are employed in jobs that require a low level of skills. The reason that they are prepared to make this personal sacrifice is because they see a longer-term gain. Most commonly this is not a personal, individual, gain, but a gain for their family and extended family. This might involve forgoing luxuries and saving money while working in Britain, in order to buy a plot of land, build a house, or pay for their children's education, back home. Long-term thinking, a vision of a better life, and a plan for how to achieve this, inform their approach to work in the present. None of these things – long-term thinking, a vision of a better life, or a plan of how to achieve this – are being offered in the proposed welfare reforms.
Many migrants can put up with lack of control in the workplace because they are only in Britain for a few years. They can make personal sacrifices and then escape. This is not an option for most people in the low-wage economy. Instead of accepting the pitting of the unemployed against foreign workers we should see migrant workers sense of the long-term goal, and their preparedness to make personal sacrifices to achieve this, as a source of inspiration. Our vision of a better life can involve taking back control in the workplace. Instead of scapegoating the unemployed we should challenge the demeaning of work. The government and employers will be enemies in this process, not allies.
Notes
1) The key elements in the Bill were contained in the Report Dynamic Benefits: Towards Welfare That Works published by the Centre for Social Justice in September 2009.
2) Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Population Trends, No. 135, Spring 2009.
3) Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah & Catherine Drew, (2006), Brits Abroad, IPPR.
4) Briget Anderson & Martin Ruhs, 'The Price of Cheap Labour', The Guardian, 7th October 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/07/cost-of-cheap-migrant-labour
5) Briget Anderson & Martin Ruhs, 'The Price of Cheap Labour', The Guardian, 7th October 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/07/cost-of-cheap-migrant-labour
6) See e.g.: Ci Research (2008) 'The Role of Migrant Workers in the Food and Drink Manufacturing Industry', http://www.improve-skills.co.uk/downloads/campaigns/Migrant-Workers-Summary.pdf
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