Zero hours shows how capitalism works for the 1%

Job anyone? Yes? Good! Wait by the door with your cap in you hand and we’ll call you when we need you. If we call you we’ll pay you. Maybe. A bit. Not much though, times are hard. We’re all in it together.

Better than being on benefits, isn’t it. This way we’re not obliged to give you a cent, a penny, a dime. And we don’t have to worry about all that expensive red tape, bureaucracy. Things like sick pay, holiday pay.

Buckingham Palace, the National Trust, and the Tate Galleries use the same zero hours approach to employment as Mike Ashley billionaire owner of Sports Direct and Newcastle United.  

Some 90%  - 20,000 of the people employed by Sports Direct - are on these contracts. The remainder are in line for big bonuses, if they keep their noses clean and don’t upset the boss.

But if you DO upset the boss and get sacked there’s always the Employment Tribunal. Or at least there was. Now they’ve changed the rules so you have to pay a fat fee to even think about lodging an appeal. Good people in the Coalition.

The percentage of employers in the UK with more than 100 staff offering zero-hours contracts jumped from 11% to 23% between 2004 and 2011.  

They include most workers in the care industry, and a high proportion working for hotel, catering and leisure companies. No customers means no shifts, no hours and no pay.

Austerity programmes cutting spending in the public sector meant that NHS trusts began to issue zero-hours contracts to professional staff and make them fight it out for shifts.

Radiologists, psychiatrists and heart specialists found themselves in staff "banks" that trusts could draw on when demand peaked.

This trend is part of a universal, worldwide downward pressure on jobs and real incomes resulting from the 2007-8 crash.

You can see it behind the news that the number of jobless in the eurozone fell for the first time in more than two years in June, but the unemployment rate stayed at a record 12.1%. 

The total number of unemployed people in the wider EU fell by 32,000 to 26.42 million. But just like in the United States, part-time, and no-time jobs are increasing.

Even so, the youth unemployment rate is now at 58.7% in Greece and 56.1% in Spain.

The US Federal Reserve has just announced that it will continue adding to the $2 trillion dollars of credit it has pumped into the economy since the crash. Jobs are increasing by 200,000 a month as a result yet are failing to close the gap of 8.7 million lost as a result of the crash.

But, as Daniel Alpert, former merchant and investment banker, turned financial consultant points out, over 69% of the jobs created in April-June 2013 and over 57% of all the jobs created in the first half of 2013 were in the three lowest wage sub-sectors of the economy.

About half of the jobs created during the first half of 2013, and a large majority of the jobs created in April-June, appear to have been part-time jobs that offer employees as little as one hour of work per week, and up to 35 hours of work.

And the number of people saying they are working part time because they can’t find full time work crept back up to 8.2 million – double pre-recession levels.

Alpert now specialises in bankruptcy and restructuring – “thinking outside the box” to provide “novel and workable solutions to unique financial challenges”.

He’s got a new book out next month: The Age of Oversupply: Overcoming the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy.

Just can’t wait to find out what new ideas he has for the huge numbers of people made surplus to requirements by the crisis of capitalist production.

 

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

 

Young people need a future beyond capitalism

Britain is failing young people on every front and you have to wonder if the state has any concern for their future at all. From massive unemployment to deaths in prison, to the impact of the cuts – young people are victims of a massive onslaught.

One in five young people are unemployed and youth unemployment is rising faster here than in other European Union member states; only Greece and Spain have higher rates of joblessness among the new generation. For many, it’s a choice between workfare – modern-day slavery – or face losing meagre benefits.

Local councils in England and Wales on the look-out for ways to implement the cuts slashed spending on youth services by a quarter in the year to 2012, and in some places total destruction is on the cards. Southampton and Newcastle plan to cut 100% of council spending on youth services.

Derby Council is eliminating 83% of the grant that helps young people who have been in care or homeless to cope on their own. This support is being slashed across the country, though not everywhere so brutally as in Derby.

The number of homeless young people is rising. Figures collected in mid-2012 by the charity Broadway, showed the number of rough sleepers aged under 25 in London increased 158% in 12 months. There were 638 young people verified as rough sleeping in 2011/12, compared with 247 in 2010/11.

Many young homeless  people suffer from a treatable mental illness, A recent Cardiff University report found that 93% of young homeless on the streets showed signs of mental illness. Over 40% were suffering from clinical depression and 35.5% from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The UK locks up more young people than any EU country apart from Spain, and a recent report from the Howard League for Penal Reform reveals a shocking increase in deaths and self-harm in the criminal justice system.

Twenty-three children died last year, three of them in prison and 20 while being supervised by youth offending teams in the community. Two were murdered, the others either took their own lives or died in accidents.

Incidents of self-harm in youth prisons increased by 21%, to 1,700, that's almost 33 reports a week. Almost half of all children in custody have mental health problems and these are not being properly treated or taken into account, says the charity Young Minds.

It's a grim picture, but young people are clearly ready to fight back. There have been youth protests against cuts in Birmingham and Southampton. In Redbridge and Newcastle, the Youth Councils are organising opposition to cuts. Youth Councils are not exactly centres of radical action but they offer a voice and young people are using it.

The riots that shook cities across England in 2011 were another kind of resistance, caused by a deep sense of injustice at unfair treatment by police and growing anger at inequality and lack of opportunity.

You might think there's a million miles between the rioters and the well-spoken Youth Council members but young people share a great sense of solidarity with each other.  The student fees protests of 2011 brought together young people of all classes and all social and racial backgrounds.

We should campaign for and support the creation of local youth Assemblies that organise against cuts and unemployment but also set out to draw up a positive programme. Young people most of all need to see a future beyond capitalism, a future of without repressive prisons, and with jobs, housing and opportunities for all young people. Assemblies are the place to develop just such an horizon.

Penny Cole

Revealed: the harsh truth behind jobs figures

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have good news on jobs. Apparently. The real story is of people giving up the search for work and young people, in particular, facing a life on the dole.

Figures just out on the UK show unemployment falling by 82,000, and the number of people in full-time work increasing by 44,000 between May to July 2012 and August to October 2012.

In the US, Barack Obama and his administration are celebrating the drop in the unemployment rate from October’s 7.9% to 7.7% in November. At its peak, in October 2009, it was 10%.

Good news? Not for the majority of American or British or European workers.

Look a little closer and you find that the percentage of working-age Americans who are either employed or actively in search of a job was reported as 63.6% for November 2012, two points lower than the previous month and the worst the country has seen since 1978.

This more revealing measure has now been at or below 66.0% since the country entered a recession in late 2007 and it is getting worse. The number of Americans “not in the labour force” has grown by almost 8.5 million since the Obama administration began. Not much improvement there.

When jobs become scarce and benefits run out, millions of people just disappear off the radar to the evident delight of the government.

Alongside the loss of jobs the global recession is driving a worldwide assault on conditions of work - for those that still have it. Michigan yesterday became the 24th US State to pass ironically-named “right to work” legislation. This prevents unions for getting non-union workers to pay subs to benefit from pay awards.

An exhaustive study by economist Lonnie K. Stevans of Hofstra University shows that wages and personal income are lower in the states with so-called right-to-work laws than in those without, though employers’ incomes are higher. In short, the laws simply redistribute income from workers to owners.

  

The global contraction which has claimed millions of victims, wiping out the future for a generation of young people is set to get a whole lot worse.

The youth jobless rate has reached 58% in Greece, 55.8% in Spain, 39.1% in Portugal, 36.5% in Italy, 30.1% in Slovakia, and 25.5% in France as European governments push on with ever more punitive assaults under the guise of “austerity”. 

In the UK the current batch of statistics do nothing to hide the grim future as predicted by two studies. The Institute for Public Policy Research says that the outlook is especially bleak for young people and the long-term unemployed. The IPPR finds that hundreds of thousands are at risk of permanent “scarring” by having their “long-term outlook damaged by long periods of unemployment or by a difficult and patchy entry into the world of work.”

The IPPR analysis, based on the pattern of increase in 2011, shows that 86,000 more under-25s could become unemployed next year, taking the total to around 1.05m, while a further 32,000 people could become unemployed, reaching 926,000.

A separate study by The Jobs Economist consultancy warned that "sub-zero temperatures" would persist in the UK's jobs market as the number of people short of work hits 8 million.

The headline unemployment rate shows there are 2.56m unemployed people in Britain. But the consultancy report shows a further 3.05m are "under-employed" - desperate to find more work or longer hours but cannot - and a further 2.58m people are "economically inactive" but want a paid job.

The overall work shortage rate compared to the working age population is 23.8% - three times higher than the official unemployment rate.

This is no accidental by-product of attempts to rescue the global financial system, nor is it as many claim, the result of bad policy which could be replaced by an even more hefty dose of credit by pushing more money into the economy.

The wholesale elimination of productive capacity is a necessary consequence of the drive for profit. Like a monster, it is devouring its own in the shape of the unemployed and the under-employed. Surely it’s time to slay the capitalist dragon?

Gerry Gold

Economics editor