Who Are We Working For?
Craig Dalzell
Labour’s new plan to get sick people working again would look a lot better if they were doing it for us and not for their GDP Growth figures.
The new employment and unemployment figures for the UK have followed the same trend that has been emerging since the pandemic – that there is a persistent gap between the “employed” figures (the people who have a job – even if it’s insufficiently paid and they can’t adequately live on its earnings) and “unemployed” (the people who do not have a job but who are actively looking for one). If you actually look at the numbers you’ll realise that there’s a third almost missing group of people who are neither in work nor who are unemployed. In the latest report, 75% of working age adults (16-64) in the UK are employed, 4% are employed and 21.8% were classed as “economically inactive”. The size of the gap itself hasn’t actually changed much in the past half decade or so and, even despite the pandemic, nor have the reasons for folk not wanting to work or even to seek a job.
If you listen to the right-wing media, this entire group are portrayed as lazy, feckless shirkers who are possibly even faking illness to avoid doing a bit of honest graft but the actual reasons are quite well studied.
Of the 9.2 million people aged 16-64 who are not working and aren’t looking for work, around 27% are students (High School, College, University etc). Many students do work but many are able to focus on their studies (I worked weekends and full time most summers during Uni – it was exhausting), 18% are either homemakers, are looking after family or are carers (this category has seen the most precipitous drop over the years, perhaps as families are less able to survive without additional income – 86% of this group are also women, the largest gender disparity in the report), around 11.6% are retired (how many of those right-wing media outlets portray early retirement as a “good thing”, I wonder?). Only 0.4% of the list are classed as “discouraged workers” – people able to work but no longer willing to jump through the increasing restrictive hoops of trying to find a suitable job. Call them “feckless” if you like but I remember the humiliation of being in a job centre and when I was asked about my education level the staffer exclaimed to the whole office “A PhD? I don’t think I’ve had one of those here before!” before flatly telling me that their services just weren’t going to be able to help me find a job at my level. This was shortly before the Conservatives started sanctioning folk if they were late for their appointment though I managed to get a job before then but I could well have seen myself in that camp….trying to avoid sanctions to try to work a system that openly wasn’t working for me.
The section of “economically inactive” people who are being targeted now though is quite different. It’s the “long term sick” – currently 29% of the total number of inactive people.This number has gone up somewhat – from 25% or 2.1 million immediately before the pandemic to about 2.75 million now – but this might be masking a problem in the system that isn’t just (though it will partially be) the Long-Covid hangover from the pandemic. What is characterised as the post-pandemic surge in long term sickness shows signs of having started before the pandemic and therefore may have its roots elsewhere – likely the decade of Austerity, rising poverty and cuts to public services before that.
Which brings us to the Labour UK Government’s latest schemes to try to bring down those numbers. Wes Streeting announced this week that obese people would be given weight loss jags in order to get them back to work. This follows his similar announcement that folk who have mental health issues would be sent to work too – even if it means adopting previous Conservative policies of cutting benefits and starving people into compliance.
Note the phrasing in these policies. These are not policies being promoted for the direct health and wellbeing benefits of the people involved. At best, they’re being promoted as a means of reducing the “burden” of people on the NHS (sparking memories of the Yes Minister sketch about the hospital without any medical staff or patients). But mostly they seem to be about putting people in work to boost GDP. This is something we talked about in our book All of Our Futures where we stressed that improvements to health and wellbeing are important and can indeed help people work where otherwise they might not be able to but the focus must be on wellbeing, not squeezing a little more work out of people before finally casting them aside.
If that’s the priority, then it won’t succeed. The modern obesity epidemic isn’t an issue simply of underemployed people growing fat and lazy on the sofa or one that can be solved with an injection and a shove into a job centre. It’s a complex, multi-variable problem that even cutting edge medical science is only just starting to try to get a handle on. Even the idea that one just needs to “exercise more” to lose weight is one that is far too simple in the face of the emerging science of fat loss. It’s probably not even “just” a “calories in/calories out” issue either, with growing evidence that things like air pollution can impact body function (and gut flora health, so not even just the function of YOUR body within you) in ways that increase obesity – consider that, the next time the Government gives another bung to the fossil fuel sector or when someone blames obesity on a moral failing or a lack of “personal responsibility”. Poverty and chronic stress aren’t just horrific on the face of their problems but can basically dismantle your body on a cellular level.
New drugs like the ones being suggested here may well (and I say this with every caveat around not being a medical Doctor) open up new avenues of treatment around obesity but even if they do, it’s still just a tool being misapplied to that misguided underlying philosophy that your health and your wellbeing don’t matter as much as your contributing to a GDP line that overwhelmingly benefits someone else.
The Labour party was founded upon a motion written by a very different Keir from the one who currently leads it with the mission of “promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour” but we’re not seeing that in these new policies where the worker’s interest is not being pushed forward nearly as much as the interest of the capital who would use that worker’s labour.
We won’t fix health problems without fixing poverty problems and vice versa, but the solution to both is not a perpetually growing GDP propped up by forcing the sick and the poor to work or starve. It’s about realising that pushing that GDP growth has been the cause of – not the solution to – so much of that poverty because the extractive nature of the economy we have is based on preventing people from working themselves out of poverty. Policies that would actually fix the problems that the UK Government are talking about here would be actually pollution controls aimed first at the most deprived areas, better housing so that the lived environment can be improved, and a universal basic income to eradicate poverty at source and allow people to work out of desire than out of compelled need. None of these are being offered adequately by a party that increasing serves Capital instead of Labour. What we’re getting instead is a jag in the arm, and an order to go back and work to make someone rich enough to donate a few more suits to the new Keir who keeps trying to push that GDP line up.