Letter to the Editors from the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard
Ex-entrepreneurs Unite!
Dear Editors
I'm so glad that someone has at last spoken up for the unemployed "business-people". I thought no-one wanted to know us. Especially since I've "failed" and slipped back into the under-class. Worse off than ever having spent up savings from when I was last employed. With your MSC folder — "You've got the Enterprise, we've got the Allowance" — you go from being a despised unknown to being much sought after by sellers of advertising space and organisers of trade fairs and such like after your precious fortune of forty pounds a week. Suddenly complete strangers know your name. You are flattered and famous! This tells the "ex" claimant a lot about a society where your worth is based on your material wealth and potential for increasing other people's wealth. Your value as a human being just doesn't come into it.
But personal sour grapes apart, I am very worried about the implications of all this lonely (it is pushed as mostly sole-trader) enterprise. Obviously the government sees it as yet another way of hiding real unemployment figures. There isn't sufficient support such as low-rent premises and adequate financial assistance for it to seriously create new jobs. After all. they think when most of last year's entrepreneurs have gone bump, there's this year's batch to take off the register, and last year's failures can then be hassled to take low-paid jobs on Restart
Also there is the question of self-exploitation. Life isn't exactly a bed of roses for the employed worker, but while on the scheme I was told that 80 hours a week is necessary to succeed in business. And if you can't cope with an 80-hour week? If you fail? How convenient; no longer do you blame the capitalist — you blame yourself What better way to break our solidarity.
Paula Dibb
Accrington
Lancashire
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