Work: paid and unpaid – Part 1 (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of my working life was spent teaching in a university. I consider myself to have been reasonably well paid for the work I did. And the superannuation scheme I paid into has yielded a reasonable pension. The same applied to my workplace contemporaries, fellow wage-slaves who started and finished their careers at more or less the same time as me. But, if I look at them, they’ve not all had identical reactions to ending their paid employment.

‘Bored out of my skull’

Some of them have carried on with a particular aspect of the work they did before – their academic research – but independently. And even though they’re no longer paid for it, they seem reasonably content. Others have been less happy. They’ve found themselves at a loose end with no teaching or associated work, and see no point in carrying on with any research given that it’s no longer connected to a day job. They see working in isolated fashion as no longer affording them the recognition and approbation of their colleagues and of their wider academic community. I found an example of this when I ran into a former colleague some time ago, several months after he’d retired in his early 60s. I asked him how things were going. He seemed pretty miserable and replied: ‘I’m bored out of my skull’. He sounded and looked angry and frustrated. I didn’t know what to do other than wish him well.

Volunteering

So these are a couple of the kind of reactions that workers in what was my own line of work may have in response to no longer doing paid work. But there’s also a third category – those who, having finished their paid employment, feel they’ve been set free, and this has made them decide to involve themselves in activities which are usually unpaid and often quite different from the paid work they did. Sometimes it’s a continuation of things they devoted a certain amount of time and energy to in their spare time before, such as looking after family members, for example grandchildren, or involvement in political or social activity such as campaigning or charity work, or participation in a voluntary group of some kind. In my own case, for instance, I agreed to be recruited to a committee of volunteers who run my local Community Centre. Once there, I found that two of my former work colleagues, now retired like me, were also active there and in the community more widely. One of them was heavily involved in helping to organise a local food bank of the kind that has sprung up in increasing numbers in recent times. A common factor in this kind of activity is the obvious personal satisfaction people who engage in it derive from their new unpaid, ‘non-professional’ work. And it is of course a form of work, in that it involves expending mental or physical energy, even if many people wouldn’t necessarily think of it as such, since there’s no suggestion of any financial recompense from it. But, however they regard it, the motivation, rather, is the perception that they’re doing something useful, experiencing a sense of community, and also enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

As well as this, two other activities have absorbed my own time and energies in a practical and satisfying way since retirement. The first has been increased activity in the trade union that, though retired from work, I’m still a member of. With the forbearance of my former employer, I’m still able to handle personal cases or pension matters for members, as I did when I was employed. And I have more time to do this than those colleagues who also volunteer for union work but still have paid jobs. The second has been playing an increased part in Socialist Party activity – helping to organise my local branch, giving talks, going to events to try and spread the socialist message, writing columns, articles and book reviews for this journal.

Hierarchical work

Some of the reviews have actually been of books on the subject of work in its various different aspects. This seems, in fact, to be an area in which there’s a good deal of interest at present – interest stimulated by the fact that, in recent times, say over the last 30-40 years, the face of employment has changed in a number of noteworthy ways. In particular, it has become increasingly what may be called ‘hierarchised’. The ‘flat structures’ in the workplace that were being talked about and to a certain extent practised in the 1960s and 70s and seen as the way of the future began to fall out of favour and to give way to more rigid, authoritarian line management systems, so that most workers effectively had someone ‘higher up’ breathing down their necks, assessing them, judging their work or productivity – and sometimes intimidating them.

I saw that in my own field of employment, where it was accompanied by the invention of various terms, such as ‘lean production’ or ‘agile working’, to try and give a benign, softening impression to a more rigid form of workplace organisation. Critics of this new form of work discipline gave it other names such as management by stress or managerial feudalism (or even managerial fascism). The way American mathematician and political activist Eric Schechter characterises it in his video ‘Only Revolution Can Save Life on Earth’ is brutally simple: ‘workplaces are dictatorships’. Certainly, in many cases, the process consists of workers’ performance being subjected to close surveillance, with their efficiency or productivity judged on a regular basis via performance targets, sometimes referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). And this with the shadow of a possible ‘capability process’ hanging over them, which can potentially lead to dismissal.

An irony here of course is that the manager conducting the KPI operation is usually her or himself subject to the same process at the hands of the person who is their manager. It’s hard not to be reminded here of Oscar Wilde’s famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where he writes: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it and degrades those over whom it is exercised’.

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, authors of the book Wageless Life, are just as uncompromisingly critical. They describe work of whatever kind under capitalism as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’, describing it as ‘a war of profit against life on earth’, in which workers are denied the ability to control how they work and so suffer a disconnection that ‘separates them from the material conditions that allow humans to flourish’. Capitalism, they go on to say, fosters ‘the utter worship of paid work’ and in so doing ‘thrives on producing docile subjects who are alienated from their surroundings’. One of their conclusions is: ‘We live in a world sculpted by money but populated by the moneyless.’ Very much akin to this, if expressed in milder language, is Martin Luther King’s well-known maxim: ‘profit forces people to be more concerned with making a living than making a life.’ A similar more recent characterisation says: ‘the greatest prison has no bars, just a paycheck, a routine and weekends off’.

Not all ‘bullshit jobs’

While we would broadly endorse such an analysis, it is also necessary to point to the fact that not all paid work is equally dispiriting, unsatisfying and alienating. So while it’s surely true, for example, that, if they didn’t need a wage to survive, no man or woman would willingly choose to sit at the entrance to a supermarket all day looking at a screen to check if anyone is stealing or looks as though they might steal, at the same time there’s no doubt that some paid work, even if accompanied by conditions of insecurity or duress, can give significant pleasure or satisfaction to those who carry it out. And while that supermarket guard job is one of the many millions that exist across the planet in the system we live under (so-called ‘bullshit jobs’), constituting a colossal waste of talents, energies and resources, in some cases even the rigid and unforgiving employment practices already mentioned can be offset to an extent by an individual’s passionate interest in the work they are engaged in – maybe for example as a naturalist, a scientist, a computer programmer, or as a gardener or a builder.

It’s only fair to point out too that some challenges have arisen to the hierarchy and intensification of employment practice in recent years, and from some quarters there have also emerged striking (sometimes revolutionary) ideas and recommendations concerning work organisation. These are the areas that Part 2 of this article next month will discuss before going on to look at ways in which work might be organised in the different, non-coercive, moneyless production for need society that socialists campaign to see established.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone's 'Wageless Life. A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism' was reviewed in the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letter: A Campaign with Revolutionary Implications? (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

ALB’s review of Selma James's Marx and Feminism (Socialist Standard, December 1994) not only gives a misleading portrayal of a tradition which has made a valuable contribution to libertarian communist thought, but also displays the usual blind-spots present in much orthodox Marxist theorising (or lack of it) on the position of women under capitalism.

The Socialist Party may dismiss Wages for Housework as "conservative" and reformist.but I believe that they, together with the Autonomist Marxist tradition with which they are connected. have made the following critical interventions which have revolutionary implications:

(a) Selma James, together with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, was among the first to show how capitalism is founded not only on the capital/wage labour relationship but also on a hierarchy between waged and unwaged within the working-class. Thus capital “hides behind" the unpaid labour of those, usually women and people of colour, who carry out activities such as care-giving, cooking, cleaning, and basic food production, upon which "free" wage labour depends. Where these activities are provided in return for a wage, this usually involves the "super-exploitation" of labour-power as in the case of the so-called Third World where many women and men are paid far less than the average cost of meeting their subsistence needs. The production and reproduction of the commodity "labour power" is central, therefore, to the ongoing process of capital accumulation.

(b) Present day capitalism can usefully be seen as a "social factory" in which class struggle has spread to virtually all areas of everyday life, even as. numerically speaking, "wage labourers" have come to constitute a small minority of the world’s working-class. (The German sociologist Claudia von Werlhof has estimated that only 10-20 percent of the world’s working class are wage labourers "free" to sell their labour-power in return for a wage or salary. The rest, made up of women, subsistence producers. peasants and other "marginalised" labourers appear to be the "norm" despite what Eurocentric forms of Marxism would have us believe.) Resistance to capitalist domination, therefore, occurs in sites far removed from factory-based industrial production and trade unions: from women fighting against the introduction of reproductive technologies to the resistance of indigenous peoples to the forced enclosure of common land. In this respect. James and Dalla Costa have stressed the importance of recognising the diversity of working-class experience as well as the commonalities. They and other feminists have exploded the myth of the white, male, unionised wage labourer as the subject of Marxist analysis and agent of revolutionary change.

(c) Wages for Housework and the Autonomist Marxist tradition has consistently stressed the futility of reformism, particularly as it is embodied in unionism, labour parties. Leninism, and the “left” in general. They have been critical of those leftists who see the way forward as more jobs/full employment, more rational control of capitalist production disguised as "workers control", a social democratic government, or a vanguard party leading the masses to revolution. Selma James castigates feminists who "don't aim to destroy the capitalist social relation but only to organize it more rationally" while Mariarosa Dalla Costa has argued that those "who advocate that the liberation of the working-class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink" (Dalla Costa & James The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. 1972. pp 2 and 33 respectively). The alternative this tradition poses is concurrent with other non-market communist traditions; the abolition of capitalist work (both waged and unwaged labour) and of the state, common ownership and production for human needs, and the encouragement of the fullest possible range of human creative activity unmediated by the capital class relationship.

(d) In arguing for the importance of the self-activity of the working-class. Wages for Housework argues against vanguardism and the centralised Party (with a capital "P") and for the development of autonomous organisations within the working-class. These have enabled women, for example, to challenge the sexism of male-dominated socialist organisations which have colluded, perhaps unintentionally, with capital and the state in rendering women's work socially invisible, "natural" and unproductive, and relegating to "side issues” any attempts by women to organise independently to challenge their exploitation. It is only by supporting the autonomy of various organisations throughout the circulation of struggles within the working class, that divisions can be overcome as a prerequisite for class unity and fundamental social change.

It is in the above respect that the campaign for Wages for Housework should be understood. not as just another single-issue reformist group. Rather than an end in itself, the campaign for a guaranteed income for women and men homeworkers is best looked at as a strategic intervention designed to expose patriarchal capitalism's dependence on the unpaid labour of women, and bring to the forefront some of the unique experiences and struggles faced by women as members of a divided working-class.

With their fixation on wage/salaried labour as the source of surplus value for the capitalist class, socialists (following Marx) have generally ignored the production and reproduction of labour-power and have historically accepted the false division between "private"/reproductive/unwaged work and "public"/productive/waged work imposed by capital on the working class. Furthermore the Socialist Party has always maintained that the only worthwhile vehicles for defending the living standards, wages, working conditions etc of the working class under capitalism are trade unions. The Socialist Standard continues to pay scant attention to forms of working-class struggle outside of unions, such as that waged by women in Wages for Housework. Such a monolithic class analysis does little to overcome the many divisions within the working class at the same time as it provides cannon fodder for those who feel that Marxism is now outmoded.

Feminists argue that the liberation of women entails more than simply the abolition of wage labour and the establishment of "free access" to wealth produced. It is quite possible, they argue, to conceive of a socialist society (as defined by the Socialist Party) where the wages system has been abolished yet an exploitative sexual division of labour continues to exist, where women continue to lack control over their bodies, sexuality, or reproductive rights, or where male violence continues on a substantial scale. We might, then, question ALB's assertion that "the energies of those who are. quite rightly, concerned about the economic dependence of women on men would be much better directed to campaigning for socialism”, and ask instead whether at least some of the energies of those socialists who are concerned about the liberation of women might be better employed listening to feminists. 

Julian Prior

Burnaby, Canada.

Reply:

The claim that the Wages for Housework Campaign is now a single-issue campaign for a reform within capitalism was based on the contents of the pamphlet Marx and Feminism itself and of the accompanying publicity material sent us by the publishers.

In the 1970s Selma James did talk about "class struggle”, "revolutionary action", “abolishing capitalism", etc (though not so much about abolishing wages, money and markets and instituting common ownership and production solely and directly to satisfy people’s needs) and she saw the launching of a campaign for "wages for housework" in this context.

We wouldn't deny — and weren’t concerned to deny — that James and others made some valid criticisms of the narrow definition of the working class (and so also of the agent of revolutionary change) held by Trotskyists, Leninists, Stalinists and other leftists. In defining the working class only as miners, dockers, factory workers, etc these excluded whole sections of the working class from being able to play a full role in the transformation of society and downgraded their problems and struggles to being marginal or secondary.

But this criticism didn't apply to us since we have always had a broad definition of the working class as all those excluded from the ownership and control of the means of production irrespective of the job they do (or don't do). OK. perhaps not so broad as to include "subsistence producers, peasants and indigenous peoples” but this issue has been discussed amongst our members.

Nor is it accurate to say that we have "always maintained that the only worthwhile vehicles for defending the living standards. wages. working conditions, etc of the working class under capitalism are trade unions". We may see trade unions as the main vehicles for doing this, but we don't exclude other organisations like tenants associations, claimants unions, student unions — or some women’s organisations such as those advising women of their legal rights or refuges for battered women. The Wages for Housework Campaign. however, does not enter into this category. It is a politically-motivated reformist group.

James came from an ex-Trotskyist tradition, but one which had not got rid of all the assumptions and methods of Trotskyism, in particular the so-called "transitional demand". This is a demand put forward by militants for discontented workers to struggle for but which the militants know full well is not achievable under capitalism: their hope is that when, as a result of their unsuccessful struggle, the discontented workers realise this they will turn against capitalism and become revolutionaries.

James's disagreement with the Trotskyists was not over whether or not to put forward "transitional demands" but over what these demands should be and at who they should be aimed. They favoured demands of a trade union-type like “indexisation of wages to prices". “35-hour week", "workers' control". She rejected this on the grounds that these demands could only be attractive to unionised, mainly male, factory workers and left out unwaged women doing housework as “the slave of a wage slave". The alternative she proposed was "wages for housework" as a transitional demand to mobilise women as an autonomous movement. independent of (and even opposed to) the Trade Union and Labour Movement.

We always rejected "transitional demands". As far as we are concerned they were just reforms. while the Socialist Party had been founded on the principle that a socialist organisation should not advocate reforms; this was not because we were against all reforms but because we recognise that reformism cannot solve the problems of the working class within capitalism and because of the effect we felt that campaigning for reforms would have on the socialist nature of the organisation. We argued that for it to campaign for reforms would attract the support of people who wanted reforms not socialism and that this would eventually lead to it becoming a reformist organisation.

The fate of the Wages for Housework Campaign which James helped set up over twenty years ago illustrates this perfectly.

Whatever might have been her original intention (and there is no reason to doubt that she then wanted to get rid of capitalism with its privileges for the few and exploitation and oppression for the many), the WFH Campaign has become a single-issue reformist pressure group.

The publicity material accompanying the review consisted of an interview of Selma James and Margaret Prescod in the Los Angeles Times of 7 May 1987, a news item from the same paper headlined “Bill Would Make Housework Count in Calculation of GNP" (12 December 1991), and an article on Selma James from the London Times of 19 February 1992.

All these articles have a common theme: that the payment by the state of money to women for doing housework is a demand that should, and can, be achieved within capitalism, and is in fact on the way to being realised thanks to successful lobbying by James and others of the United Nations, the European Parliament and the US House of Representatives. James is quoted as follows:

"There are. she says, two questions. women always ask when confronted by the concept of wages for housework. "Who will pay for it?" and "Will we ever get it?' Her answers are "Trident" — she would siphon off the entire military budget to pay for unremunerated labour — and "Yes'. 

Her optimism springs from existing welfare provisions. "Child benefit and income support are forms of recognition that women working in the home have an entitlement to wages, even though it is not enough. Those benefits are creeping wages for housework and after you creep you walk, after you walk you run." (Times, 19 February 1992)

.

A far cry from what she was saying in the 1970s. Now it’s the inevitability of gradualism. We once heard somebody (not a member of the Socialist Party) describe "wages for housework" as a “crap demand". His point was that if you were going to make such a demand on the state you might as well demand a basic state income for everybody. We said you might as well establish socialism, at least that was achievable.

There are feminists and feminists. Some (most, these days?) feminists wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you mentioned "the abolition of the wages system" and "free access": they are concerned with getting women an equal chance to compete in the rat-race that capitalism is and to scramble to the top of the heap if they can. Or, in a language they wouldn't understand. to turn women from unequal wage slaves and from “slaves to wage slaves" into "equal wage slaves” with men.

Other feminists may well be able to conceive of a socialist society in which discrimination and oppression of women continued. Well, we can't and we're socialists and they're not. Socialism involves people voluntarily co-operating to produce and distribute wealth and to run their common affairs on a democratic basis, with free access for all to the things they need to live and enjoy life. Under these circumstances there would be no economic pressures on women to put up with discriminatory or oppressive practices: women could simply walk away from them and still have free access to what they needed. So there’d be no basis for their continued existence. In fact the feminist — and indeed socialist aim — of women’s equality is only going to be fully realised in a socialist society.

Editors.

Progress perverted (2024)

Book Review from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Work. A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. By Helen Hester & Nick Srnicek. Verso, 2023. 282pp.

A key concept in this book is ‘social reproduction’. What the authors mean by this is work in areas such as healthcare, education, catering and social services, as well as the essential, ‘unpaid’ work people do outside of the workplace and largely at home (cooking, caring, cleaning, etc.). They examine the contribution of this kind of work to keeping human society operating across the whole range of other work taking place in the production and distribution of goods and services. Their approach to this is to trace the evolving history of that social reproduction, in particular as it has operated in the domestic sphere over the last century and a half, the influence on it of advancing technology (eg electricity, gas, sewerage, running water, waste removal), and the changes in attitudes and expectations this has brought about. Referring to themselves as ‘socialist republicans’, they devote the final chapter of their book to examining what the future might hold for social reproduction and the home generally, especially in an imagined new social context referred to variously as ‘post-work’, ‘post-capitalism’ or ‘post-scarcity’.

This is a detailed many-faceted exposition which draws upon multiple sources and studies. They point to how capitalism forces many workers ‘to waste precious hours of their lives on work that is neither stimulating, creative nor productive’, how much of the ‘free time’ spent at home is taken up with unsatisfying chores, especially for women, and how wasteful (‘a colossal squandering of human time, effort and labour’) is the organisation of people into atomised individual housing units which makes each person or family continually repeat activities such as cooking, laundering, washing up and cleaning rather than save energy, time and trouble by making communal activities of them. In their analysis of how the organisation of work and home in capitalist society presents obstacles to activity that satisfies individuals’ needs and talents, they also point tellingly to how, in ways we will all recognise, technology, ‘rather than reducing the amount of time spent on work …more often than not … seems to lead to more work’, while, if the social conditions were different, that same technology could ‘serve as an ally in the quest for temporal autonomy and for the recognition, redistribution and reduction of reproductive labour’.

It is in their final chapter, entitled ‘After Work’, that they put the most detailed flesh on what they consider could, given the right social conditions, constitute truly fulfilling non-coercive progress for human society. After offering a thoroughly recognisable picture of work under capitalism (eg, ‘the majority of us must give up forty hours or more per week in exchange for survival, typically selecting from a narrow range of possible jobs where decisions over what we do on a daily basis ultimately lie outside of our hands’), they talk about how ‘real freedom requires the absence of domination’, which currently workers are subject to both from their bosses and from impersonal market forces, while what is needed is for work to become ‘the focus of more freely chosen commitments’. What do they envisage? While not claiming to offer a ‘sketch’ rather than a blueprint, they look, for example, to ‘a free time infrastructure’ where ‘people have opportunities to develop their capacities and pursue collective projects’ with ‘infinite possibilities for human interaction’. They look to provision of ‘non-nuclear living arrangements’ with ‘more experimental models of early years care’. They look to communities being ‘turned from passive recipients of technologies into networks of active creators’. And, commendably, all this is envisaged as being within a framework of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.

There is, however, is a key criticism to be made of the way this ‘imaginary’ (a word frequently used by the authors) is presented, in that it all seems to be seen as doable within the framework of the current society of money and wages, buying and selling and government control – in other words within the market system which the book has previously and quite rightly condemned as drastically limiting personal and social freedoms. So, for example: it expresses support for ‘government policies’ aiming ‘to provide support for public and community-based systems of care; ’it talks of ‘a free time infrastructure’ that provides ‘free museums’ and ‘free school meals and breakfast clubs’ for children’ – implying of course the continuation of overall social transactions via money; and, even more explicitly, it advocates ‘decent wages and better conditions for domestic workers’. In other words everything it commends is envisaged as happening via government action within the money system and without – or at least prior to — the establishment of the society of voluntary work, democratic control and free access to all goods and services that is the very essence of socialism. This seems to indicate a failure on the part of the authors, despite their obviously positive intentions and explicit aspiration for the ‘construction of a better world’, to accept that, so long as we have a system of governments overseeing the money and wages system, that system itself will not allow well intentioned reforms to come to fruition willy-nilly and any reforms that do get enacted can just as easily be reversed if those ‘impersonal market forces’ they refer to dictate it.

So, while there is much to reflect on here in terms of the kind of life that might be possible if workers were set free from ‘the realm of necessity’ that capitalism imposes, a good deal of that will only be feasible once workers in a majority take the necessary political action – ideally via the ballot box – to do away with governments and with money, wages and profit and cooperatively organise society. The Socialist Party is sometimes – unfairly — called ‘utopian’ for advocating this, but the true utopianism lies in trying to somehow see as possible true freedom in work and association within the framework of a social and economic system that by definition cannot allow it.

Howard Moss

So They Say: Rogues All (1975)

The So They Say Column from the August 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rogues All

In the great search for the source of inflation, politicians and economists have felt at liberty to express all sorts of fanciful conclusions. How refreshing then that Harold Wilson has applied himself to the task. After careful examination he appears to have identified a hitherto rare specimen — the capitalist who pays too much and it is the antics of this benevolent creature which, he thinks, are at the source of the trouble.

We reject, as we have always rejected, the idea of statutory policies based on criminal sanctions against workers who, misguidedly, perhaps short-sightedly, perhaps acting out of fear, went on strike for higher wages than the nation could afford. The Government might need to take reserve powers. It will take the form of a power directed against a recalcitrant employer, a rogue elephant who sought to wreck the policy of the whole community.

Times 7th July ’75

The roguery being that these unspecified capitalists may be prepared to pay greater wage increases than the £6 a week Government limit.

It is a pity indeed that these fabulous benefactors have to be checked in this way from gaily distributing their wealth on application; they would say no doubt — as several Labour MPs have recently been saying concerning their own pay increases — that any increase would only represent the “rate for the job.” The catch being that however high the rate for the job, the capitalist assesses it against another rate, the rate of his profit.

Official Swindle

The idea that all mankind can co-operate in producing and distributing the means of life is regarded by some as an unreal proposition. We disagree, but point out that it is not the only “staggering proposal” in existence. The British Medical Association’s Junior Hospital Doctors’ Council had an emergency meeting recently in Leeds to discuss the new 40-hour contract which the doctors have been offered by the Department of Health and Social Security. Their chairman, Dr. David Bell, described the contract as “vicious.” Dr. Angus Ford, chairman of their negotiating committee pin-pointed their objections more precisely when saying:

The Department had introduced the staggering concept that the first units of medical time after 40 hours should not count for payment. From 40 to 56 hours we should, they say, work for nothing.

Times 10th July ’75

Now here is an unethical approach to things, surely? Trying to have doctors working for nothing — this really is pulling a fast one. Imagine if this sort of concept was spread even further afield, why — the entire working class would be working some of the time for free, for no-one’s benefit but the employers’. Truly a staggering proposal — but one which makes capitalism tick.

Pay Disparities

Coal miners in the capitalist system which is misleadingly termed “socialism” have recently been in disagreement with one another over the amount of wages each man should receive for his work:

A veteran engineer said that young miners sometimes resented the higher pay given to older men although they did less work. But an older worker said that this was an aspect of socialism and anyway, the senior men were needed for their greater experience.

Times 15th July ’75

The newspaper refers to the moves for equalization of pay as “an informal debate going on among the miners.” The disparities in earnings “vary from the equivalent of £8 to £30 a month.” We point out that these figures relate to the total earnings of miners — not to the amounts of difference between them. Recalling the recent push from members of the NUM for the “£100 per week miner” readers may suspect a misprint but this is not the case. The miners referred to, live in that other “socialist” country, China.

All responsible officials insist that the campaign is still at the stage of discussion and no changes in the wage scales are envisaged for the immediate future. There is no extra pay for overtime, but there is strong moral pressure on young workers to do labour voluntarily in their spare time as well as attend political study classes two or three times a week.

The Labour Party must be casting an envious eye at such an apparently well-oiled process of exploitation.

With Planners Like These . . .

We were treated to the Sunday Times Economics Editor, Mr. Malcolm Crawford, revealing “new moves to allow better economic forecasting” on 20th July. The measures proposed arose from dissatisfaction at the “sharp stops and goes, the blind lurches of policy, of past years,” and are aimed at removing them. Towards this elusive end several MPs have tabled three amendments to the Industry Bill (two of which have been accepted by the Treasury) calling upon the Treasury to reveal more details of its method for forecasting capitalism. It is hoped that this could lead to a better understanding of how to control production, unemployment, government spending, etc.

The proposal is that the Treasury prepare a “macro model” for the future, and the Government together with certain firms will draw up their own “sub-models” to fit within the larger framework. The result of this happy alliance would be that capitalism could at last run smoothly. Not only firms with Government agreements are permitted to join this brotherhood:

This clause also requires the Treasury to provide its model to outside users, on a fee charging basis, so that they can make forecasts based on assumptions of their own, which may be different from the Treasury’s.

It may sound a bit like the horoscope fan who — not approving of his Stars for the Day in the Mail — buys a copy of the Mirror instead, but it isn’t, this is official. We leave for the moment the fact that the needs of capital have not been controlled in the past by models — Macro or Sub — on the contrary, Capital has roared and its would-be-tamers have jumped. Instead we observe more closely the business-like approach of the forecasters. One amendment requests that the Treasury

must also publish a retrospective analysis of its forecasting errors . . . to extract an estimate of the error due to mis-forecasting, after separating out the effects of changes in policy and external factors. It also requires estimated margins of expected error to be published. The trouble here is that figures of this kind which could be understood by more than a few specialists would be meaningless, and perhaps misleading. It is however important to establish the principle that errors are to be expected.

This all sounds somewhat confusing. What use, for instance, are estimates of errors separated from external factors? Come to that on what basis will estimated future error be forecast — even if only to produce figures which are meaningless and misleading. We do however, readily accept the principle that “errors are to be expected.”

. . . Who Needs Problems ?

We move on to the “most radical” of the three proposed amendments. This, Crawford forewarns, “I daresay only about a dozen people understand” (the Treasury itself is opposed) and we are appropriately grateful that he has felt it timely to invite us into this knowledgeable clique:

It means that the Chancellor should adopt a new economic discipline called Optimal Control or Policy Optimisation. Much research has been devoted to this in the US and, apparently in the Soviet Union. The Treasury has someone studying it at present.

The new “economic discipline” is also being intensively researched at Queen Mary and Imperial Colleges. Obviously it is worthy of careful attention, but what actually is it?

The basic premise of Optimal Control is that something is always bound to go wrong. Moreover when it does, we will surely move from that mess into some neighbouring mess: so contingency plans of a highly sophisticated kind should always be at hand to steer us into the least bad mess.

After this eloquently worded proposition has been considered, the working man or woman will soon see that things are always best left to the economic experts.

A minor point of inaccuracy in the report occurs when Crawford comments that more research is required before Optimal Control may be used on any more than a trial basis. We were under the impression that the sort of planning (?) he had outlined above was the only kind possible under capitalism.

Alan D'Arcy

Gaspers (1967)

From the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

“We are confident we will be able to convince the Ministry of Labour that the productivity will be far in excess of anything we are likely to get from railway management” (N.U.R. Secretary, Sidney Greene, on a bonus agreement with British Rail. 4.4.67).

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“Her Majesty is quite safe with the Labour Party.” (Emanuel Shinwell, Daily Telegraph report 10.4.67).

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“Just as in the Stage of Leninism one could not be a Marxist if he were not a Leninist, so today one cannot be called a Marxist-Leninist if he does not master the thought of Mao-Tse-Tung." (Italian Journal — quoted in The Marxist).

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“We have suggested £5 might be a reasonable figure. We know that when elderly people have to go into homes or hospitals it costs a great deal more than £5 a week to keep them”. (Labour M.P. Hamling, on payment to single women with dependent relatives, 13.3.67).

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“The Government's decision to pay high salaries to the managers of the nationalised steel industry is sensible, and was probably inevitable too”. (Guardian editorial 16.3.67).

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“There is no way to my mind of identifying the lowest paid” (£15,000 a year P.I.B. Chairman, Aubrey Jones, 16.3.67).

The Knowledge (2011)

Book Review from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘So You Think You Know about Britain?’ By Danny Dorling. (Constable £8.99)

 

It is often argued that there are too many old people or too many immigrants in Britain, or simply too many people. In this informative and enlightening book, Danny Dorling subjects these and many other commonly-held beliefs to a thorough examination, with frequently-surprising conclusions.

 

The north–south divide has been moving gradually southwards, with more and more areas being categorised as part of the less well-off ‘north’; the dividing line in fact runs diagonally from the Humber to the Severn estuary. On average, if you live on the London side of the line your life expectancy is two years greater than otherwise. Life expectancy is also influenced by many other factors (extra years likely if your father worked in a non-manual occupation, if you have never smoked, if you eat fruit daily, if you have sex at least twice a week, for instance). The north–south divide is now wider than at any time since the 1920s, and is most graphically illustrated by the difference between how long a child born in the most affluent part of London is likely to live as opposed to one born in the poorest part of Glasgow (86.7 versus 74.3 years).

 

Women on average live longer than men, which is why Eastbourne, a popular retirement destination, has 87 men for every 100 women. In other cases, such as Glasgow, a comparable imbalance is caused by men either leaving the area or else dying before they reach retirement age. But women in their late twenties are the most likely to get into debt. And a recession leads to both an increase in emigration and a drop in birth rates, as people are less willing to start a family. 

 

Inequality has increased in various ways, with the incomes of the richest fifth of the population having grown at eight times the rate of the bottom fifth. By 2005, 27 percent of households could be classified as poor, living below the breadline. This poverty is largely geographically-based, but there are no ghettos, in the sense of districts almost exclusively the preserve of one ethnic or cultural group. Yet in England most children who live above the fourth floor in tower blocks are black or Asian.

 

Dorling is well aware that measuring things in terms of profit is not always sensible:

 “British roads, pavements and railway carriages could be far more comfortable places to travel on (and in) if we did not so often judge an activity as worthy only if it makes a profit. We don’t always do this, we don’t always seek only profit, otherwise none of us would have children.”

 This is reinforced by the discovery of the large numbers of unpaid carers, who ‘often visited others’ homes simply to help, for no monetary reward, and often for reasons other than family ties’. There are more carers in places with more people in need of care. So the view, often put forward by supporters of capitalism, that people will not work without being paid in return, is simply untrue. This book not only shows that many beliefs about Britain are wrong – it also discredits a common argument against socialism. 

Paul Bennett

Letter: Women's freedom (1972)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sir,

While there is a local branch of your party here, one finds the movement a little impersonal. It is easier for local people to get elected to the council than for any of them to discuss Socialism in the true sense. This town, a potential beauty spot, has had to become a "workers paradise” of cars and motorway systems, and for whose benefit I cannot find out, having little need of a private vehicle, yet travelling about a good deal.

It would be futile to ask whether you have yet successfully sponsored women advocating to serve the community on local councils, for this attitude seems to attract tremendous opposition from the working class. So if there is seen lo be a need for a non-monetary society, there is also a greater need for a non-discriminatory society. The laws discriminate so powerfully against women that it is only because their husbands keep them in absolute comfort that prevents them from standing up to be elected onto councils. The distress in wives who finally must take their freedom from the marriage bond, is actually measured in cash terms. If misery were money, most ex-wives would be tremendously rich from the experience.

So what do you do towards relieving women of their onerous position as carrier of the family burdens, but reaper of no rewards for it?

Yours faithfully,

H. Ibrahim, 

Stevenage.

Herts.

Reply:

H. Ibrahim is concerned about local issues—motorways etc.—and wants us to sponsor “women ... to serve the community on local councils”.

We do not sponsor candidates to help run capitalism at national or local level. This is a task for a reformist party, like Labour, not for The Socialist Party of Great Britain. All the problems facing local councillors and MP’s derive from the nature of capitalism—a society where motorways and cars pollute the land and endanger the people, not because this is the best means of transport, but because it suits a system of production for profit.

It would be wasted labour for Socialists to exhaust themselves mending the scars of a profit-seeking society and healing its self-inflicted wounds. Our job is to abolish it, and our candidates both men and women, stand for world Socialism, not a better bypass.

H. Ibrahim is particularly distressed by the position of women in capitalist society. There is, indeed, legal and financial discrimination against women of the working class, 97 per cent of women. (We will leave out the Jackie Kennedys from this discussion as the wealthy do not suffer hardships of this sort.)

Marriage is a bondage. The wife is “tied” to the kitchen sink and the drudgery of daily chores. Going out to work simply means two jobs, not one, as she still has the chores to do. The housewife has no fixed hours of leisure, no holidays and no prospect of retirement. She often does not get a dinner break and usually works overtime unpaid.

Yet work in the home is not counted as work. A recent BBC discussion led off with the remark that “At present around 25 million people are at work” — this on a Monday morning! The 25 million or so housewives then engaged in laundry, cleaning up after the weekend and getting dinner for the kids; their work was not paid so did not count. In capitalism people are supposed to work only for rewards — wages.

However, even under capitalism, the family is still organised in a socially co-operative way. No one, male or female, expects to get paid for helping in their own home. The family functions almost on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”—the same principle which will operate in Socialist society.

Only when we have a society without wages, only then will women cease to demand “rewards”. Only then will they and their husbands feel secure enough to break up a bad relationship, without worrying over the mortgage and probable hardship for the children. Only then will men be relieved of money worry. Only then will love be free and marriage ceases to be a bond.

The emancipation of the workers will involve, necessarily, “the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex”—and this does include women.

Editorial Committee.

Life and Times: The Charity Shop Manager (2022)

The Life and Times column from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have a friend who volunteers in a local charity shop. Its purpose is to support the district hospice and my friend tells me that the volunteers she works with are ‘to a tee’ dedicated individuals happy to give their time and energy to help an institution they see as a social asset. The fly in the ointment for a long time, however, was that the paid employee appointed to manage the shop was what could only be called a tyrant.

She spent a lot of the time barking orders to the volunteers, criticising them for supposed mistakes and being unpleasant to customers coming in to look around and buy things. Not infrequently customers walked out when they were spoken to sharply by the manager or made to feel uncomfortable and one might imagine that, under such conditions, the volunteers too would vote with their feet. But that is not what happened. The volunteers, though doing unpaid work and finding themselves harassed for their trouble, didn’t walk out but stuck at it because they considered the contribution they were making to what they considered a worthy cause overrode their own comfort and convenience.

What Was To Be Done?

But clearly this could not go on indefinitely and, eventually, my friend told me, when the hospice organisers invited all staff to attend a meeting to discuss potential changes and improvements to the shop, the volunteers saw an opportunity to bring things into the open. They wrote a letter outlining what had been happening and at the meeting put it to the organisers that the shop was not working as well as it could since everyone was having to bear the brunt of what seemed to be the manager’s own unhappiness with her existence. The manager herself was at the meeting and remained silent, even though the hospice organisers seemed keen to defend and excuse her. The volunteers were discouraged, but then suddenly the manager was gone. She had left apparently and everyone agreed that the new manager who then came in was a breath of fresh air. She treated all, volunteers and customers alike, in a friendly, polite way and everyone said how much they enjoyed coming to work in the shop.

Human Nature

When I told this story to another friend, her first response was the ‘human nature’ one. She said that many people behave badly when they are ‘in charge’ and that’s the way things are naturally. But when I replied that the new manager was not behaving like that and that, given half a chance, most people, whether in charge or not, will actually behave in decent cooperative fashion towards those they come into contact with, she relented somewhat and said that the very fact that so many people volunteer to do things to help others without payment of any kind shows that human nature is actually a ‘mixed bag’. And she was right. People’s behaviour towards others is largely dependent on the situation they find themselves in and the state of mind that arises from that. In fact given the damaged lives of so many people in the society we live in and the pressures caused by work, want or insecurity, we might reasonably expect less decent, less cordial, less empathetic behaviour than we actually find. Yet the reality is that, given even half the chance, most people most of the time will behave decently towards others in most circumstances.

The Lesson?

What lesson to draw from the charity shop story? Here was a band of people prepared to give up their time and energy without any kind of payment to help less fortunate fellow human beings but being stymied in this by one individual whose own troubled life drove her in an uncooperative direction. The hierarchically organised nature of work in the society we live is a fertile breeding ground for such situations. But it is clearly not the way of organising things that the vast majority of people, given freedom of choice, would want. Of course, such freedom of choice is rarely available in the current society of production for profit with its imperative of ‘making a living’. But, in a different kind of society, it could be. That different kind of society is one based on cooperation instead of competition, on free access to all goods and services instead of buying and selling. As many studies have shown, the human race has survived not because humans wish to compete with one another or to do one another down, but because they cooperate, as the title of one book on the subject, The Survival of the Friendliest, has it. So, as socialists maintain, in a future society of production for use not profit human beings will be eminently capable of cooperating as free and equal men and women to run a social system in which mutual help and support for the satisfaction of social needs is their guiding principle. Just, in fact, as those charity shop volunteers, assisted by an empathetic manager, are doing now in their own small way – though, it must be said that charity, while an inevitable feature of today’s society, will disappear in all its forms in the society of voluntary cooperation and free access on which socialism will be based. It will simply not be necessary.

Howard Moss

No Way Out (2022)

Book Review from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism. Amelia Horgan, Pluto £9.99.

As the author points out, Marx’s critique of capitalism extended to work, which was more than just dangerous and badly-paid. In Horgan’s description of his views, ‘under capitalism, work takes something human and turns it into something monstrous’. Her book provides a convincing account of many aspects of employment under capitalism, but sadly goes little further than that.

One example of the way that employers exercise power is seen in car washes. The mechanical ones involved machines that were expensive to purchase and maintain, and most have now been replaced by hand car washes, where the pay is abysmal and many workers are victims of human trafficking. More generally, the number of supposedly fulfilling and secure jobs is dwindling, as work becomes polarised, with a minority of relatively well-paid occupations and a mass of poorly-paid ones, often part-time. As an illustration of the extent of the resulting poverty, one third of households would be unable to pay the next month’s rent if the main earner lost their job, and unemployment benefits are much reduced. According to one survey, a quarter of UK adults are forced to have a second job.

Capitalist work can have a seriously detrimental effect on worker’s health, especially workload pressure. Burnout involves energy depletion, feelings of negativity and a sense of ineffectiveness, and is, according to the WHO, an ‘occupational phenomenon’. Lack of control over a person’s work or their use of their time is a big problem, especially for the lower-paid or those in more mundane roles. One study found that the significant difference in death rates among civil servants depended on whether they were of junior or senior rank.

Even under capitalism, not all work is employment. The work of social reproduction, for instance, has historically been primarily carried out by women. Things have changed somewhat over time, but in a 2005 survey in the UK, women spent more than twice as much time on housework as men. Migrant workers are often employed at very low rates as domestic cleaners or nannies. Some social reproduction work has in effect been outsourced to takeaways, but much work (care for the elderly, for instance) is still usually seen as ‘women’s work’.

As for escaping capitalism, as mentioned in the subtitle, there is virtually nothing on this. Horgan sees a ‘transformation in ownership’ (worker-owned businesses, presumably) as the heart of the solution, linked to a shorter working week, universal basic income and so on. But doing away with the whole concept of employment, wage labour and exploitation for the sake of profit gets no mention here.

Paul Bennett

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

MEXICO CITY (AFP) – A 19-year-old Mexican woman was in the ninth day of a hunger strike in front of the British embassy, demanding an invitation to the wedding of Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton, she told AFP:

(Dead Link)

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An American couple who have sailed the world with a yacht full of Bibles were hijacked by Somali pirates, and the U.S. said Saturday it is assessing possible options:

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A record 5.26 million people worked unpaid overtime last year, clocking up an average of more than seven hours a week without pay, according to a new study. The TUC said workers were missing out on almost £5,500 a year, worth £29bn to the economy. One in five employees regularly put in extra unpaid hours last year, with public-sector workers most likely to work unpaid overtime, said the TUC:

(Link)

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21-year-old Sacha Hall is facing trial for allegedly helping herself to food that had been thrown out and was awaiting disposal:

(Dead Link)

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“We must be prudent. We know what our political line is: We don’t support invasions, or massacres, or anything like that no matter who does it. A campaign of lies is being spun together regarding Libya,” said Chavez, in a televised speech. “I’m not going to condemn him (Gadaffi),” he said.“I’d be a coward to condemn someone who has been my friend”:

(Dead Link)

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Joseph Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School wrote in The New Republic in 2007 that Muammar Qaddafi was interested in discussing “direct democracy.” Anthony Giddens of the London School of Economics wrote in the Guardian the same year that Libya under Qaddafi could become “the Norway of North Africa.” Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University wrote in the Washington Post, also in 2007, that Libya under Gaddafi could become “the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government.” Great minds think alike? Actually, no: all were being paid by Libyan money, under a $3 million per year contract with a consulting group which promised to “enhance the profile of Libya and Muammar Gaddaffi” in Britain and the US:

(Link)

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Death threats from Muslim fundamentalists have forced a British Imam to retract his claim that Islam is compatible with Darwin’s theory of evolution.

(Dead Link)

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‘This week a report by government advisor Lord Hutton stating that public sector workers should work for ten years longer, for less pay, was released on the same day as the Forbes Rich list, which showed  that the number of billionaires in the world has risen from 1011 to 1210 in one year. If you plotted a graph of the wealth of the richest people in the world it would be shooting off the charts, with loads of fat cats looking on, toasting each other and chuffing on cigars:

(Dead Link)

Voice From The Back: Youth Unemployment (2012)

The  Voice From The Back column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Youth Unemployment 

The economist Paul Krugman paints a frightening picture about youth unemployment. “In Spain, the unemployment rate among workers under 25 is more than 50 percent. In Ireland almost a third of the young are unemployed. Here in America, youth unemployment is “only” 16.5 percent, which is still terrible — but things could be worse” (New York Times, 29 April). Supporters of capitalism often laud its “efficiency” but it is difficult to think of anything more wasteful than debarring young workers from taking part in the production and distribution of wealth. Half of all young Spanish workers on the dole? Some efficiency!


The Plight Of The Elderly

It is only one case amongst thousands of how elderly men and women of the working class are treated, but it highlights the daily experience of workers everywhere. “A health board has been ordered to apologise to the family of an elderly man sent home from hospital in winter in his shirt, trousers, dressing gown and one slipper. David Spelman, 85, had hip replacement surgery at the Southern General in Glasgow after a fall in February 2011. Days after being discharged he fell again and died shortly afterwards” (BBC News, 8 May). An apology from the health board may satisfy some jobsworthy official.


The Pay Rises That Aren’t

One of the illusions beloved by supporters of capitalism is that while the system isn’t perfect at least there is a steady improvement of conditions. The Income Data Services has come up with figures that prove that is complete nonsense. “Of Britain’s 29.1 million-strong workforce around 80 per cent, or 23.1 million, work in the private sector. The vast majority of these received a pay rise which failed to keep pace with inflation, said the report by pay experts, Incomes Data Services (IDS). It said the average pay rise between January and March was 3 per cent, compared with inflation at 3.5 per cent. And 8 per cent of workers, typically those working in the manufacturing, construction or not-for-profit sectors, saw pay frozen” (Daily Mail, 8 May).


The Uncaring Society

As the government looks for more and more ways to cut support for the sick, the elderly and the disabled, recent figures show how it is affecting voluntary carers. “Almost six in 10 admitted that taking care of vulnerable family members had put them under so much stress and strain it caused depression, anxiety and nervous breakdowns. The same number said their caring responsibilities had harmed their careers, research by the newly-formed Carers Trust found. There are about six million unpaid carers in Britain looking after older parents or disabled children” (Daily Express, 8 May). Capitalism always seeks to cut overheads to increase profits and caring is just not one of its priorities.


Another Cunning Plan

In the BBC TV comedy series Blackadder one of the characters keeps coming up with a “cunning plan” that always turns out to be completely useless. The present government has a cunning plan to deal with the economic crisis. Cut the workers’ wages, increase their pension contributions, slash their pension’s benefits and increase the pension age to sixty-eight. This has led to hundreds of thousands of public sector workers taking part in a 24-hour, UK-wide strike in a dispute with the government over pension changes. “Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude said pension talks will not be reopened and “nothing further will be achieved through strike action”. Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union – which estimates that an “overwhelming majority” of its 250,000 public sector members are on strike – said the UK would have “the highest pension age of any European country” (BBC News, 10 May). The truth is that inside capitalism slumps and booms are part and parcel of the system and there is no cunning way to plan it despite the efforts of Baldric or Francis Maude.


A Rare Flash Of Truth

Occasionally politicians have been known to tell the truth. This is such a rare occurrence that we feel we have to record it for posterity. “Education Secretary Michael Gove has attacked Britain’s class divide between rich and poor children, branding the split ‘morally indefensible’. In a speech at private-school, Brighton College, Mr Gove told teachers and pupils that Britain ‘has failed to tackle’ the widening parameters between the country’s social classes” (Daily Express, 11 May). “Morally indefensible” it may well be but as an out-and-out supporter of capitalism, an Old Etonian and a Conservative MP he has aided the day-to-day running of this “morally indefensible” social system.


Piety And Poker

It should come as no shock to socialists to learn that outwardly religious devotees are often dreadful hypocrites. We have, after all, had plenty of evidence of the Vatican covering up child abuse cases. The following news item nevertheless is an extreme example of religious hypocrisy. “Six leaders of South Korea’s largest Buddhist order have been forced to resign after being caught on video drinking, smoking and playing high-stakes poker at a memorial event for a dead Zen master” (Independent, 12 May). Well, at least they didn’t interfere with young children and unlike the priests they did resign.


National Ill-Health Service

Capitalism rewards the exploiting class and victimises the working class. A case in point is the treatment of the sick and the infirm. “Patients are being left lying on trolleys for up to 24 hours because hospitals are alarmingly short of beds, the union representing Britain’s nurses has claimed. Pressure on beds is so great that some people end up being treated in corridors, especially in A&E departments, according to a survey of 1,246 UK nurses and healthcare assistants belonging to the Royal College of Nursing who look after some of the sickest patients” (Observer, 13 May). This treatment only applies to the working class; if you can afford it you will get the most expert care quickly and efficiently.

Cooking the Books: Unpaid Work (2018)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘British people do more than £1tn of housework each year – unpaid’, read the headline in the Guardian (3 October) reporting on a study by the Office for National Statistics, and went on: ‘Unpaid household work, such as looking after children, doing laundry and cooking, is worth £1.24tn per year.’

Many, including socialists, have pointed out that, in only measuring paid work, GDP omits whole swathes of work as the exercise of mental and physical energy. Not all work is employment.

The ONS arrived at its figure by calculating what people would have to pay if they got someone to do the work, not just of looking after the children, cooking and doing the laundry, but also of cleaning, repairing and maintaining the home (and garden), caring for an adult at home, and driving to and from work, the supermarket and school. Also included was voluntary activity outside the home.

To make the figures more understandable to the general public, the ONS divided the total figure of £1.24 trillion by the total UK population of some 65.7 million, to arrive at the figure of £18,932 literally per every person including children. This can be broken down by activity. Perhaps surprisingly the largest is transport at £5459 (29 percent). Next is child care at £5358 (28 percent). housing services (cleaning, etc) is £3037 (16 percent); food preparation £2400 (13 percent), laundering £1355 (7 percent), adult care £898 and voluntary activity £365.

The Times reported the survey under the headline ‘Washing Up? That’ll be £12,000, darling’, with this as what a ‘stay-at-home spouse’ could claim for household chores. But it is not just women who do this unpaid work as is obvious in the case of people living on their own; all the work will be done by them, whether a man or a woman.

Apart from adult care and voluntary activity outside the home, the work covered by the ONS survey is work in connection with recreating the mental and physical energies people sell to their employer and with bringing up a future generation of wage workers. This means that, strictly speaking, it is not really unpaid. The work itself is unpaid, but not what the person doing the work has to consume to be in a position to do it. This has to be paid for, and is out of wages or state payments such as child benefit and carer’s allowance. This is most obvious in the case of the stay-at-home partner; the food, clothes, etc they consume has to be paid for out of the wage of the working partner. The same applies to everyone carrying out the unpaid work, including those in paid work. Provision for them to create the mental and physical energy to carry out the unpaid work is included in wages.

This brings out the fallacy of the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign. If the Times’ £12,000 were paid to the stay-at-home partner then the working partner’s wage would come to be reduced by the same amount. In fact if all this work were paid then wages would tend towards 16.2 percent of their current level as the percentage of consumer spending that the ONS says ‘was spent on direct costs for providing unpaid work services, mainly spent on fuel, renting and food.’ This means that in the ONS’s figure there’s double-counting with the greater part of people’s income from work and state payments. This does not make the statistics invalid or useless. They are interesting in revealing what goes into recreating labour-power – which when used by capitalist employers provides them with the unpaid labour that is the source of their profits.

Lazy workers?

Cross-posted from the Socialist Courier blog

A defense of capitalism often heard by socialists is that socialism would be impossible because without the goad of the wages system workers would be too lazy to work, but recent statistics seem to contradict that argument:

"A record 5.26 million people worked unpaid overtime last year, clocking up an average of more than seven hours a week without pay, according to a new study. The TUC said workers were missing out on almost £5,500 a year, worth £29bn to the economy. One in five employees regularly put in extra unpaid hours last year, with public-sector workers most likely to work unpaid overtime,said the TUC. The number of workers doing unpaid overtime was the highest since records began in 1992, the research found, with 5.26 million people clocking up an average of seven hours 12 minutes unpaid overtime every week." (Independent, 25 February)

RD