From UK unemployment stats to the Greek goddess Hera: what’s the link?
Here are three verifiable and widely accepted sets of UK employment stats, from which the part vs full-time overview has been extracted:
From the end of fiscal 2012 to the end of fiscal 2013, UK job vacancies rose by 8%, but part-time vacancies rose by 18%.
http://www.reed.co.uk/career-advice/blog/2013/april/is-part-time-the-new-full-time
http://www.reed.co.uk/career-advice/blog/2013/april/is-part-time-the-new-full-time
In the period 2008-14, a miniscule 2.25% of all UK jobs created were full time – that’s 1 in 40.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/12/one-40-jobs-created-recession-full-time-employee-tuc-employment
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/12/one-40-jobs-created-recession-full-time-employee-tuc-employment
From New Labour’s accession in 1997 until near the end of the Cameron coalition, those people working a full week of 45 hours fell from 26% to 19%. Comparatively speaking, that represents over a quarter fewer full-time jobs in just 17 years.
http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/factsheets/working-hours-time-off-work.aspx
http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/factsheets/working-hours-time-off-work.aspx
There are no political points being scored here, because this is no longer a political issue. I would say that any politician who denies these realities is a liar, but the point is socio-economic: the neoliberal emphasis on shareholder returns first and foremost ensures that costs will be cut, jobs moved offshore to lower-cost labour regions, and automation employed to eradicate labour costs completely over time.
These factors seen together point conclusively at one indisputable (in truth, obvious) fact: until Britain moves away from its adherence to the financial neoliberal form of globalist capitalism, the number of people in full-time, contractual, adequately rewarded employment will continue to decline as a percentage of the workforce in total.
If one accepts this – as most sane citizens accept that the planet is a sphere and has just the one moon – then the preferred economic system of the Western half of that planet (also being adopted to a frightening degree by emergent nations in the other parts of it) is doomed to failure. The reason is just as obvious as the economic modus operandum of neoliberal economics: shareholder returns and consequently infinite stock market share price ascent need persistent repurchase cycles fuelled by unaffordable personal credit in order to be maintained.
The biggest problem on the planet already is unaffordable debt at the commercial, sovereign and consumer levels. And as long as real disposable consumer income is shrinking, growth through either replacement or novelty cannot mathematically be delivered: it is quite simply impossible.
The system has only survived this long via using Zirp + QE to provide cheap money – that banks can make a margin upon, and multinationals can push to the bottom line. Suffering as they are from declining export sales (as incomes shrink) Western sovereigns have done two things: first, borrow excessively from their own citizens, Asian tigers and even their own government institutions; and second in the more recent term, cut the costs of defence and welfare provision for their citizens.
The other remaining options open to the Western elites are higher taxes (which only reduce consumption ability further) and theft of fiat currency using the laughable concept of ‘bail ins’. Variously across the developed world, both these routes are clearly on the table….with all the legislation required to steal and tax ready and waiting to be used. At the end of that process, we are again however left asking, “So who does the consuming vital for neoliberal economics to function?”
The socio-cultural ramifications of these inevitabilities do not bear thinking about: a foul combination of self-obsessed media programming, hitech gadgets and workless lives has already destroyed most of the community mutuality of the West… and multinational retail giants like Walmart and Tesco have accelerated the process. Add a workless life to those elements, and crime, clinical depression, drug usage, and yes even welfare costs must rise: for there is no difference at all between two million unemployed getting £25 a week, and four million unemployed getting £12.50 a week.
The Camerlot ploy in the UK is to shift unemployed people into poorly paid part-time jobs, but this too is a dead-end policy: as long as automation remains dynamic, free EU labour movement endemic, and the goal of Friedmanist growth, a bust at some point is inevitable: the goals and the realities are antithetical. As I’ve written before:
The aims of neoliberal economics require low wages at work at the same time as having high wages to consume
It’s a nonsense – an inescapable illogic. So why do I say this is not a political issue?
Well, in the government elites of the US, UK and EU, there is no challenge being overtly made against this form of capitalism: both representatives and functionaries in all those territories long ago decided to take the money from corporate rather than citizen sources. The history of Western Party donation shows very clearly how disenchantment with petty politics led to starvation of Party organisations in the 1966-96 period.
So our use of this crazy, dysfunctional system is not a political issue in the West: with the exception of some ClubMed countries who’ve been on the receiving end of its savagery in recent years, there is a consensus ie, there is no alternative.
Only Greece thus far has an elite giving the opposing view; Spain is perhaps on the verge of that…and look what a hammering they’re getting from the gargoyles.
In the UK, only the Greens oppose globalist neoliberalism…but they can hardly be called part of the elite. All the rest – Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and UKip – may talk a good game here and there with distractive pc laws, but their leaderships accept the system without question: not to do so, they feel, would render them unelectable.
Many in the Labour Party would dispute this among their membership, but I cannot see how they rationalise that: the Party is rock solid behind the EU, despite it being the worst free-speech bully on Earth. Labour too wants to build millions more houses, but says nothing about community failure in the Midlands and North, or how we can cut the trade deficit by being more self-sufficient. The Party’s senior figures talk about immigration as if it was to be welcomed on a multicultural basis: what is the matter with these people – do they have no mathematical, spatial or economic perspective at all?
Over the last ten days or so, I have been posting regularly about the cultural, the financial, the economic, the social, the civic and the Constitutional aspects of Britain’s blindness to its problems. Before and during the recent election fiasco, I tried to stress the essential need to cooperate against conservatism as expressed by Camerlot policy scams. But that time has passed.
The game has moved on to the survival of our citizen rights, and the protection of those infrastructures and communities that belong to us – not to fat bureacrats, political lounge lizards and rapacious Bourse-obsessed, tax-evading multinationals. We need a powerful but apolitical movement now to assert the Sovereignty of the People; and the first step, I would suggest, is to focus on getting a grown-up electoral system devoid of monied influence…. a system, dare I say it, that would bring the desperate and the disillusioned back to the polling booth.
Hera was the Greek Goddess of love, marriage, respect for women and community
Recent Slogposts relating to this question:
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/at-the-end-of-class-warfare/
The Slog 