Could you live on £53 a week?

That is the challenge for many people who are unable to find work in this recession. £53 is nothing really when you have to pay the b ills for gas, water and electricity not mentioning feeding yourself and heating your home. There is simply no way you can live on this alone. Yet Iain Duncan Smith is telling those who can’t find jobs that £53 a week is a cushty lifestyle and they should be grateful for even this. Putting it into perspective at how generous this really is JSA in the UK is 18% of average wage, compared to Germany's 35%, France's 47% & Sweden's 68% This is simply not a lifestyle you would choose if you had the choice. An incredibly fast growing petition has been set up by someone who thought they’d challenge IDS to live on £53 a week the link to this is below http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/iain-duncan-smith-iain-duncan-smith-to-live-on-53-a-week Those who are on JSA take it as a way of getting by and getting by is all it gives you an existence not a life. You cannot live the life of luxury like the Tories seem to think. But then when you’re so disengaged from reality of life in poverty and have never had to struggle in your life then no wonder you’d think benefits are generous. It is a clear out and out contempt for the poor. This is blatant class warfare where we need the labour movement to answer this in a robust fashion drawing the links and common ground between that in work and out of work. Over 60% of those on benefits are actually in work according to the DWP taking tax credits to top up crap pay. We wouldn’t need working tax credits if we all had a proper decent lovable wage not just a living wage of a tiny bit more than minimum wage. But IDS people will not take this laying down the uptake in this petition now touching quarter of a million signatures shows the strength of feeling against the Tories and their attacks on the poor. Let’s not just call for IDS to try living on £53 a week let’s get rid of him and his government of millionaires once and for all!

We can’t work any harder!

News today of William Hague telling us that we all need to work harder is quite frankly an insult to all working people. To all those who are working very long working days already 10 or 12 hours at minimum wage . Who does he think he is?

What a disgrace I know people who have 2 or 3 jobs and still struggle to make ends meet and yet this old tory wants us all to work harder.

The Tories as has been known for some time are completely out of touch. With big business sitting on an estimated 750 billion pounds refusing to invest as they do not see a profitable outlet is keeping 2.6 million people on the scrap heap.

The government claim there is nothing they can do but it’s down to the private sector to get us out of this recession. This has not and will not happen as the capitalist system has reached a point of saturation where the possibilities of investment seem very few and far between from a capitalist’s perspective. But this is the reason the government are trying to privatise a large part of the public sector as such as the NHS could be very lucrative for private business to get their teeth in to exploit.

But the outrageous claim that we all need to work harder is an absolute disgrace while the rich sit back and rake in the profits for doing sod all is just not right.

I would suggest the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy and taking these big business’s into public ownership run by the workers for the benefit of the many not just the few. Relaying on entrepreneurs and the like to get us out of this is folly we need a mass creation of socially useful jobs with an emphasis on public works for the benefit of us all not just a minority of very rich people at the top.

Have world governments given up on full employment

Full employment seems to be a mystery to many and a fantasy for others. Did we ever have full employment in the United Kingdom and will we ever see this again ?
In todays Britain we currently have 2.6 million unemployed people at present with over a million of those being
16-24 without a job. or in any form of training

But has there ever been full employment? That depends, like a lot of economics, on one's definition of the term.

"Full employment never meant zero unemployment," says Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

As long as most people were in work it was seen by the majority of people that it didn't matter if rather a lot of other people, albeit a minority, were not. So unemployment lost its profile as an issue”
End Quote
Historian David Kynaston
Instead there is what the free market capitalist economist Milton Friedman termed a "natural rate" of unemployment, where nobody stays out of work for long, unemployment fluctuates between 5% and 6% with jobless workers quickly being hired in growth sectors of the economy.

Other economists argue this is too high. William Beveridge, the man who inspired Britain's post-war welfare state, said full employment meant a figure of under 3%.

Before the world became industrialised, nearly everyone outside the ruling rich elite would have had to work to survive, usually in the fields. After industrialisation all that changed. Mechanisation offered people work in the factories but also brought huge spikes in employment and an intensification of economic boom and bust which is built into capitalism like night and day. Due to its various contradictions which i have detailed in the past on this blog.

Pissarides argues that full employment was a reality in the US in the 1990s under Bill Clinton and from 1997-2007 in Britain, and in modern day China.

Other economists say it's not fair to compare democracies with autocratic societies. Children learn in history lessons about the mass mobilisation of men in Hitler's Germany for armaments production and public works programmes. "Conscripting people over the barrel of the gun in totalitarian societies is not full employment as economists understand the term," says economic historian Tim Leunig.

In 1955 unemployment was very low indeed So has genuine full employment ever been achieved in the post industrial world? "Of course we've had it," says the economist Lord Skidelsky. "Between 1950 and 1973 unemployment averaged 2% and was always well under one million."

This was the golden age for jobs in Britain. Also the biggest period of growth for capitalism ever. The high point came in July 1955 - shortly after Anthony Eden had taken over from Winston Churchill as prime minister - when unemployment reached a post-war low of 215,800, a mere 1% unthinkable today.

So what happened to full employment? Ian Brinkley, director of think tank the Work Foundation, says the term went out of fashion in the 1970s as unemployment passed one million.
This is the period which the ruling class gave up on the idea of full employment and focused far more on growth and making profits in other ways.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher pursued a different approach, which economists characterised as the prioritising of tackling inflation. The concept of full employment was dead, says Brinkley.

Unemployment climbed above the symbolically important three million figure, and stayed relatively high even still today.

So will full employment ever be achieved again ?

I dont think so under capitalism this will ever happen. As Karl Marx wonderfully explained the ruling class in their desire to divide and rule discovered the idea of keeping a army of reserve workers as Marx put it which enabled the ruling class and the boss's to hold wages down with the threat of unemployed workers coming in to do their job for the same or for less if a worker demanded more wages.

Today this is one of the capitalists most powerful weapons the threat of unemployment hangs over many of us still today as the ruling class looks to make the workers pay for the mistakes of a ecnomic system they have no say in running.

The only way i feel we will see full employment again allowing for the debate if it ever was will be a socialist ordering of society. Where the blind drive for profit will have gone and people can and will i'm sure want to work for society. Working for the needs of society and for others will bring out workers full potential. For many people this will be the first time they may enjoy work when they are not having to work for their boss's profits but for their own society, based on human needs.