At the time of writing about 2½ million workers are officially registered as jobless. Accompanying the monthly tilt of a full Wembley Stadium of workers on to the scrap heap, has been a sharp rise in alcoholism, violent crime, family breakdowns and admission to mental hospitals. While millions of people over the world slowly die for want of food, resources lie untouched and men hankering for work walk past empty padlocked factories having been told their services are no longer required. Fierce blame for this madness is levelled at a variety of people, politicians and policies. The problem of unemployment is not peculiar to Britain, for there are presently about 30 million registered unemployed in America and Europe.
Mr. Slick is a company manager whose career is developing nicely, along with his ulcer. He blames unemployment on the British disease, laziness. “Most of them are too idle to get a job, there are plenty advertised in the papers and Job Centres. They should move to where the work is, any employment is better than scrounging..
Were workers falling to laziness at the rate of 3,000 a day during November 1980, for that was the rate of unemployment? Every week there is news of thousands more who are to be told that they will shortly not be used anymore. Although last December there were two and a quarter million out of work, government figures put the number of job vacancies at 83,517. When 2,900 men were made redundant from the steel works at Consett last year there were already over 2,000 jobless in that region and only 31 jobs available to any of the ousted steel workers.
Is a worker obliged to leave home and family and trek around the country, from one high unemployment area to the next in search of work? To move with your family you may need to sell your house and nowadays there isn’t exactly a queue to settle in an area like Consett. Incidentally, Mr. Slick, if you believe that any employment is better than being a parasite why not tell that to the Royals, the Aristocracy and the Company owners, for whom you “manage”?
Perhaps you have a serious think about the society in which you live. Redundancy can come as a painful illusion-shatterer to anyone who believes him or herself in the mythical middle-class. The grooming company, THinc Consulting Group, even panders to the snob terminology of the executive (where jobs are “appointments” and wages are “salaries”) by describing the job-finding service as “executive outplacement”, although trying to sell yourself to someone is humiliating whatever you’re calling the exercise. Executives made redundant from private and nationalised industries can buy similar services from British grooming companies, although the fees are high and many shame-faced salary-seekers have to make do with sidling to the Job Centre to sign on with the Professional and Executive Register. It’s goodbye to dreams of power, cocky business talk and the company car. Then there’s the small matter of the hefty mortgage commitment and the children’s school fees. If you are one of the 90 per cent who do not own industrial concerns, land or have control of financial capital then consider the degree of harsh reckoning over our lifestyle which is exercised by those who do own those sceptres and who operate them remorselessly to profit from our work, when they give it to us.
Terry Dolt is in the National Front — or has he joined the British Movement? He wants to protect his England which he claims is something more than his rooms in that high-rise council block, although what more he’s not sure. Perhaps it’s his English culture, you know, tea (from India or China), the monarchy (from Germany) and so on. Unemployment? That is caused by immigration. No, not immigration from Canada or South Africa, but black immigration and jewish conspiracies.
When unemployment reached the level of three million in Britain in 1932, so little black immigration had there been that a single asian or negro was regarded as a curiosity walking through a British city, and as for the jews being responsible, far from masterminding the mass redundancies of that racial conglomeration described as “British”, they were living in dreadful poverty-remember the condition of Cable Street? The locations of today’s highest unemployment levels — Scotland and Northern Ireland — are areas where there has been virtually no black immigration. It is a sad irony that in the recessions of capitalism it is immigrant labour which generally finds it most difficult to get employment. Racial discrimination has arisen, and been fomented by politicians, as a scapegoat for the problems produced by the real culprit — capitalism.
In the 18-month period up to May 1975 unemployment rose by 65 percent for the general population and 182 per cent for young West Indians (Department of Employment Statistics). There has been no NF or British Movement regime in Britain, but we can point to the racist Labour government of 1964-70 to show the failure of immigration control to solve unemployment. The Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962 was a piece of racist Tory legislation described by the contemporary Labour leader Gaitskell as a law which “. . . will be regarded very largely throughout the world as the imposition of a colour bar over here . . The retention of this law was part of the 1964 Labour manifesto but the non-colour-blind immigration controls operated throughout 1964-1970 did not stop the number of jobless from almost doubling.
Mr. Grimace is a Tory. The discipline of his public school and the army has made him the questioning, independent thinker he now is. His main concern with unemployment is not entirely to do with the enormity of working class suffering it leaves in its wake, but more to do with its damaging effect on the economy. By this he means withdrawal of investment, loss of profits, falling share prices — damage, in short, to the interests of the parasites. Mr. Grimace supports Thatcher.
If capitalism is left to run freely with minimum government intervention, says Grimace, the unemployment level will be greatly reduced if not solved altogether. We are told that if the government stops inflation and greatly reduces public expenditure it will be able to make big cuts in taxation which will allow employers to retain more of their profits. With this extra margin of profit, we’re told, further investment will be made in industry, creating more jobs. This is fallacious. Between 1820 and 1913 there was no inflation and yet government expenditure gauged against the total national income — of less than one quarter of what this government is spending. Yet these conditions for which Thatcher is striving did nothing to prevent continuous unemployment and the agonies of the Great Depression. The mistake is to believe that employers are motivated by a need to create jobs. Even given a larger margin of profit, by reduced taxation, capitalists will not re-invest it in industry to create more jobs if the goods, were they to be produced, would not be sold at a profit.
Keith Joseph’s latest gem is that unemployment could be alleviated if workers threatened with redundancy were to accept lower wages than the going rate in their particular line of work. This is called “pricing yourself into a job’’ and means that a company paying £70 to eight men could employ ten men for the same outlay if each was only paid £56. This cut in wages, reduced even more in real terms by inflation, would mean a severe retrenchment in the already base living conditions for most workers. Why? Simply to maintain the profit level of those who we allow to own industry. As a substantial shareholder in Premier Investment Trust, Drayton and the building company Bovis, Joseph must find his job of devising such profit-protecting policies quite engaging. His scheme however will not lower unemployment. The ten men in the example above might produce more than the eight men. If the company managed to capture more of the market it would be at the expense of a rival firm which would in turn be forced to lay off some of its workers. Do you remember all that moronic melodrama from Saatchi & Saatchi in Thatcher’s election campaign? The ever-lengthening dole queues were with us, we were told, not courtesy of capitalism, but because Labour wasn’t working. Since the Tories have been in office with all the power they asked for to solve the problems, the number out of work has soared by over a million.
Ms Policy is an ardent member of the Labour Party. She’s not proud of Labour’s six-government record of not met promises on Housing, Inflation, Unemployment and so on. In fact, she’s not proud of Labour’s record full stop. But at least, she’ll tell you, it’s better than the Tories. One more chance for a Labour regime with Foot as overlord is bound to reduce unemployment to a “tolerable level”, if not solve the problem. Not so. Another Labour government as a proposed answer to unemployment is a non-starter.
Today the production of wealth in all industrialised countries, including state-capitalist Russia, is chaotic. Regardless of human need things are only produced if sales are predicted. Rival national and international companies churn out goods to compete in the bedlam of bidding for markets. Periodically markets become flooded with goods. With disappearing prospects of profits, enterprises slacken or stop production and workers are thrown out of work. In the West the tiny minority who make these gravely consequential decisions are Boards of Directors, shareholders and the Boards of the nationalised industries. In the misnamed Communist Russia there are industrial managers. “They are promoted and given bonuses like their capitalist counterparts when they increase production and profits. They are dismissed and humiliated if they fail in this task. They differ from their counterparts in that they are fellow workers of the State with the lowliest worker in the plant they manage, but they are remote from him physically and spiritually. They live in more attractive, spacious and isolated quarters than the bench workmen and they do not share fully his concerns, in spite of numerous efforts to bring the two together.” (The Soviet Legal System 3rd Ed. Hazard, Butler and Maggs). These are the Mr. Slicks of the Eastern block.
Important industrial decisions, however, like whether production of a certain good is to be stopped are made by the top officials of the Communist Party (apparatchiks) — a ruling elite — who actually hire and fire the industrial managers. In times of slackened production, the Russians who would be in the dole queue in western style capitalism are “allocated” jobs in the police and armed forces. Hence we are told there is no unemployment in Russia.
Constant unemployment, periodically escalating when markets become glutted, is a characteristic of capitalism which no Labour government can remove. In November 1980 at an unemployment rally in Liverpool Michael Foot inveighed against Tory policies and bewailed the catastrophe of jobs being lost at the rate of one every 15 seconds. What was he offering as an alternative? During the 1974-79 Labour government, for part of which Michael Foot was actually Minister of Employment, jobs were lost at the rate of one every 3 minutes 35 seconds — something Foot forgot to brag about at the Liverpool rally.
The 1945 Labour government’s promise of “jobs for all” seemed to be almost kept as unemployment remained very low throughout its office but this was not because the Labour cabinet was controlling capitalism. There was a great deal of work to be done after 1945 reconstructing industry after the war and British industry’s potential rivals — the industries of Germany and Japan for instance — were not to be in full swing again, winning markets from British companies, until the seventies. And again, during Labour’s 1964-70 management of the economy, the dole queue nearly doubled its length.
The Keynesian formula is basically that governments can solve unemployment with an “expansionist” policy: as the Labour Party put it in 1945, “if bad trade and general unemployment threaten . . . we should give people more money and not less to spend”. But each note of the “more money” that the workers were receiving became worth less and less. In 1938 there were £500 million worth of notes in circulation but by 1976 the notes in circulation amounted to £6,000 million. The consequence was a vast increase in prices. Having used inflationary policy to reduce unemployment, the Labour Party found itself in the rather awkward position, in 1976, of attacking inflation as the cause of unemployment and trying to crack the problem with wage-restraints. In that year the government set itself the target of reducing unemployment to 700,000 by 1979, and yet by April 1979 the number of unemployed had risen to 1,340,595. It is not only Miss Policy and her friends who end up supporting the prolongation of the profit-system. The revolutionary proclamations of the SWP dwindle at election time when they urge us to “Vote Labour with no illusions” in the absence of a SWP candidate.
The places where we work — factories, farms, offices, trains, docks, mines — are the property of a small minority. We go to these places to be employed. When we are of no use to the owners we are shut out. If these places belonged to society at large they would be operated to provide goods and services for people to enjoy, not to be sold to those who could afford them. We would not subserviently have to seek employment. We would have free and equal access both to work, chosen in line with talent and interest, and to the results of our labour. The possibility of such a society is no more a fanciful daydream than the agonies of today’s society are an illusory nightmare. But the transformation of society from the profit-system to socialism is clearly not one of these on-a-plate remedies promised by politicians and left-wing leaders. The depriving money-system can only be wound up once a majority have thought seriously about the choice we have, and have decided to act co-operatively for fundamental change. The option is open and you know what decision the capitalists would like you to make. Consider the rest of your life under the yoke of wage-slavery. What do you think?
Gary Jay
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