Migrant Centre Firebombed

There should have been more engagement with businessmen like you, especially since you are far from being a die hard opponent of Labour. There was and is an assumption on the left that many people paying minimum wage for just a few hours here and there are part of a greedy boss exploiter class. That is clearly not your mindset and the party should have engaged with you more.

I agreed with the overall policy of banning zero hours contracts and other exploitative practices. But if you have students who only want to work weekends and you are willing to offer them hours at weekends, and it works for both I don't see why that should be a problem. Guaranteed hours though is not zero hours and it doesnt matter if they are flexible, ie you ask them with reasonable notice to work at specific times. There are and were plenty of business friendly Labour MPs, not to mention in other parties who would have addressed legitimate concerns from businessES such as yours during the legislative process. But giving workers who wanted and needed them decent contracts with sufficient hours should nevertheless rightly have been a priority.

As for full worker's rights from day one, I fully agree with that though in practice it need not have greatly hindered your ability to offload a duff employee who proved to be not up to the job. Many companies take on employees on temporary contracts which they keep extending and only after 6 months or so are they obliged to make someone permanent if they keep them. If you took someone on on a temporary contract for a duration period of your choice, any full employment rights would only cover them for that period. If they turned out to be crap you could simply let them go at the end of the period. I never after all heard Labour suggest banning temporary contracts.

As for the £10 an hour minimum wage, it is not far off that for most people anyway. I believe we need a minimum wage for all adults which is at the level of the living wage, but I also think that businesses who would struggle to afford that, particular many smaller ones, should receive help to afford it in the form of business rate cuts or cuts to employers NI contributions, paid for out of the welfare savings and increased tax receipts that would result

Good points Pacifico. I would add that workers rights already supersede contractual ones anyway. I read to rights from day one as being the removal of the right to make someone redundant within the first two years of employment without reason or recourse. 
Whilst I would accept this could be adjusted, there was just not enough detail in Corbyn's manifesto for me to trust it would be fair and not weighted towards the idea that every worker is the salt of the earth and every boss an evil tyrant hiring and firing with glee. 

I am afraid that the minimum wage has made a big difference to me and many others I have known since its inception. Some of the pay on offer before that was shockingly shit. And it is a good thing that a minimum exists below which hourly pay would be illegally low. Because you can bet your life that many would pay less if they could. The Tories in fact have in recent years increased the minimum wage by much more substantial amounts than Labour did with very little discernible impact in terms of unemployment rising or overall numbers of jobs being lost. I maintain my belief that the minimum wage for all should be increased to the level of a living wage, with help for smaller businesses to pay for it.

Certainly in my locale, before the minimum wage, pay for job offers was often pathetically low. Such employers often moaned to high heaven that no one wanted to work because they couldn't get anyone when in fact the reason was the pittance they were offering. There was a lot of downward pressure on wages in some sectors due to competitors undercutting them by hiring cheap labour on lower pay. This in turn often meant employers who wanted to pay well couldn't afford to.

I saw the above happening all the time in the landscape gardening and grounds maintenance sector I used to work in, and later in the retail sector. A minimum wage provides a floor below which rivals cannot undercut decent businesses by paying pitiful levels of pay. It makes social sense in my view to increase the minimum for all to a level of a living wage, and to think of ways to make this affordable. Companies who can afford to are still free to offer more to attract the best staff if they wish,

I don't buy into this canard beloved of low paying employers that a mimimum wage keeps pay low.

In recent years my own hourly rate has until now shot up well above inflation. It is not quite doing so now because inflation is so high, but is still going up this year by 8.5%. What has been driving this is a desire by my employer to maintain pay rates above the so-called living wage level, which has risen a lot in recent years, and to remain competitive in the pay market. It has struggled to retain staff so feels the need to offer a higher rate than the minimum many smaller outlets offer. If that minimum increases, our pay tends to be increased too

I have no stats ready to hand and was largely talking from personal experience both of myself and those all around me. But in my experience the minimum wage has certainly had a positive effect in low paid sectors, along with such things as the working time directive.

You do make very valid points re the rise in automation, and this could be a growing problem with the rise of AI. Ever more people ever higher up the skills chain could see their jobs disappearing and this is a potentially massive economic problem in the years to come. For one thing our economic model depends utterly on consumer spending to be effective, so workers need to be able to afford to be consumers too. But with ever fewer well paid jobs - and likely fewer man hours in the economy - consumer spending will at some point collapse and is only being maintained now by ever higher levels of debt which is only storing up even bigger problems for the future. In my view solving this problem will require radical thinking, with much shorter working weeks becoming the norm so the hours of labour required are spread out fairly, with the reduced overall pay this entails being made good by some form of universal basic income. Certainly the current economic model is on a course likely to be both unsustainable and disastrous in the long run.

As for well paid jobs in well paid sectors coming down to minimum wage levels, I have seen this happening. I used to work in construction myself when young and it was very well paid at the time, even for unskilled or semi-skilled labourers. Now it is much closer to being minimum wage, the construction workers I know much less well paid in real terms than I was back in the day. But in blaming the minimum wage for that you are blaming the wrong target. Because the real mechanism that drove down pay in this sector was the sudden readily available pool of cheap skilled labour available in Eastern Europe, which employers exploited to drive down pay. I saw this happening all around and could give example upon example. Far from causing the pay decline in this sector, the minimum wage provided a floor, without which pay might well have been driven lower still.

I saw the same thing happening in the taxi industry which my father used to work in.

The working classes who saw themselves being economically disadvantaged by this of course complained about it, but their gripe was about economic exploitation of cheap labour from elsewhere to drive down pay in their sectors and not based upon racism in most cases. They were nevertheless mistaken for racists by much of the Labour party who failed to understand where they were coming from. Studies and stats were repeatedly reeled out to prove that what we could clearly see happening all around us wasn't actually happening at all, by people who had no intention of emerging from their ivory towers to see for themselves.

It was this which drove so many working class people into the arms of Brexit, one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds this country has ever made.

Instead of dismissing the working class as collectively racist, what Labour should have done is recognise the way cheap foreign labour was being used to undercut them, and focussed upon ways to minimise such exploitation to help foreign and indigenous workers alike. Perhaps by mandating minimum pay in the construction sector substantially higher than the minimum wage for example. Building more houses or capping rents so that landlords could not so easily exploit the extra numbers to drive up rents might also have been a help.

There are some interesting stats here....


ifs.org.uk/news/labour-market-inequalities-show-need-boost-wage-growth-middle-earners-and-low-earners-non

Well you can make workers rights legislation as tight as you want. 

I suspect that you approve of the French system where, due to their workers rights legislation it is very difficult to fire workers for anything. Of course every action has a reaction and in the case of France it has led to companies doing everything they can to not take on permanent workers - they do this by investing in technology to drive up the productivity of the workers they do have.  Now raising productivity is a great idea (and something that the UK desperately needs), but as usual, there is a reaction - and that reaction is higher unemployment with France now having double the unemployment rate of the UK.

Now you may feel that higher unemployment rate is a price worth paying for higher productivity and increased workers rights - but speaking as someone who lived through the 1980's when it was suggested that unemployment was a price worth paying to crush inflation I doubt whether there will be widespread support for that view.

As with everything its a balancing act and nothing comes without a cost -  it's a personal judgement whether the costs involved with more stringent employment legislation are worth paying. Personally I can see the argument that higher unemployment is a price worth paying for higher productivity (I'm not convinced it's worth paying simply for more workers rights) - but then thats easy for me to say as I'm not in the jobs market.

I'll start off by agreeing that none of the things you raise above can be separated from the overall problem. 
I will point out an obvious one that you have missed which I feel is key. If automation is allowing the same amount of goods to be made by considerably less people there can only be one of two outcomes. Either an ever smaller number of people get much richer or prices are driven down by lowered costs and competition. 
What we actually see is both. 
This ought to be self levelling to a degree, but for taxation. We are often reminded what percentage of tax is paid by the rich, but we are never given what percentage of earnings is taken by the rich, so we can compare. If the rich are paying 70% of the tax that sounds harsh, but if you add in that they are taking 90% of the earnings then not so much. 
That's the first circle to square. 
But I think we will as you say need at some point to introduce a basic income not linked to work. 
I'll answer your other point separately.